Filling the Ark: Animal Welfare in Disasters

Noah’s Task / 121

only vague, tentative, brief depictions. They gave precise reports
of how the best would involve straight A’s, lottery winnings, and
career success, whereas their reports of the worst amounted simply
to “getting sick,” “failure,” or “maybe death.” Cerulo documented
this “failure of imagination” in settings far beyond her classroom.^12
It characterizes a wide variety of individuals and groups. We avoid
thinking about death and aging, for example, preferring to believe
that science will discover cures for dreaded disease by the time we
need them. We take all kinds of risks, believing that the worst will
never happen to us. We drive while fatigued or while talking on a
cell phone, believing that serious accidents happen only to others.
Organizations, too, fall prey to the failure to envision the worst.
For example, the choice by offi cials at NASA to overlook reports of
O-ring malfunction resulted in the 1986 Challenger tragedy.^13
Clearly, the failure (or unwillingness) to acknowledge negative
information can have devastating consequences in disasters. For
example, four years before Hurricane Katrina, a report in Scientifi c
American had warned that the levees in New Orleans were inade-
quate.^14 In 2002, the Times-Picayune published a fi ve-part series on
the city’s vulnerability. One article said:

A flood from a powerful hurricane can get trapped for

weeks inside the levee system. Emergency offi cials concede

that many of the structures in the area, including newer

high-rise buildings, would not survive the winds of a major

storm.... The large size of the area at risk also makes it dif-

fi cult to evacuate the million or more people who live in the

area, putting tens of thousands of people at risk of dying

even with improved forecasting and warnings.^15

Another article in the series reported that “a large population of
low-income residents do not own cars and would have to depend
on an untested emergency public transportation system to evacuate
them.”^16 In 2004, the fi ve-day “Hurricane Pam” exercise predicted
the breaching of the levees, the stranding of numerous residents,
and the deaths of as many as sixty thousand people, mostly by