Disaster Preparedness

Bogost brought up a really solid point. While most simulations can model can model an enormous number of circumstances, what happens when you are unable to save everyone, and have to prioritize who to save? A simulation can model what way the disaster is going to move, but very few actually force you to choose who to save. In real-life situations in the past, priorities have been based on who could be saved fastest, or even for some people, unfortunately sometimes based off race or appearance.

Being prepared for a disaster is just incredibly important. Katrina was such a mess for a multitude of reasons. There were conflicting messages about whether people should leave or evacuate. The levees failed, which was pretty bad when most of New Orleans is actually below sea level. Additionally, there was an enormous amount of red tape with the situation. An old friend of mine is a sergeant in the Army's Engineering Corps, specializing in generators and power. He and the Corps members he was with were not allowed to enter the region because of the state police for some reason, who were acting on behalf of the governor and were told not to let anyone at all in. The disaster could have been prevented entirely if the forces that have been destroying the marshes in southern Louisiana had been stopped. Some of these are just pollution, as well as the levees themselves. By building levees to protect against hurricane and flood disasters, ignoring the environmental impact of them means that you lose nature's best defense against hurricanes to begin with, those marshes.

The enormous fires in San Francisco weren't too long ago, I'm sure a lot of people remember them. The magnitude of the fires was due to a very long dry spell, high winds, and way too much brush that had dried out. The problem with the fire prevention policy in the region was that it was extremely aggressive. Every time even a tiny fire started in the past, it was extinguished almost right away, rather than controlling it and allowing it to burn away the brush. As a result, brush kept accumulating, and it was one of the main reasons that the fires actually spread so quickly. There was also almost a complete lack of controlled fires during wetter times, when the brush was still burnable, but it wouldn't spread like crazy. This is partly due to a lack of funding, and just the prioritization of the resources for firefighting as well. Sadly, the budget for firefighting is usually one of the first things to be cut in hard times, or when you need to redistribute funding for new programs.

There is definitely a need for better disaster preparedness. Reports in the past about why things went wrong just focused on the failures, but hardly ever even mentioned possible solutions to fix the problem.