Your car gets a flat during rush hour. A cigarette cinder singes a favorite shirt. Neighborhood hooligans drape toilet paper from tree to shrub to tree, the family dachshund finally gives up the ghost, or, God forbid, an IRS audit notice arrives in the afternoon mail. Cripes! Disaster!
No. A fleck of inconvenience, maybe, or a passing unpleasantness. But an authentic disaster, as any of the specialists gathered in Indianapolis last month would tell you, entails grave injuries and, always, at least the possibility of wholesale death. The 600 men and women -- fire fighters and police, civil-defense officials, county sheriffs and physicians, scholars and sellers of all kinds of odd equipment -- came for four days of shoptalk at the first World Congress & Exposition for Disaster & Emergency Management. They came to chat about "pain management" and "grief work," about every kind of horror, about all the most public and spectacular ways to die.
There were knowing discussions of regular floods and flash floods, of death by lightning (Florida is No. 1, with an average of ten a year) and death by psychopathic sniping. Chemical leaks and chemical spills were the hottest topics. But earthquakes were not neglected, nor tornadoes and hurricanes, famine, terrorism, high-rise fires and wildfires, plane crashes, train derailments and explosions of all kinds. Fretting about an epidemic? A nearby volcano about to blow? A poisoned water supply or a building collapse or a < riot? You ought to have been in In- dianapolis. Professor E.L. Quarantelli, director of the University of Delaware's Disaster Research Center, has investigated more than 450 disasters ("One loses track") and expects his work load to grow. "The future will be worse than the past," he declared. "We should not be preparing for nuclear-plant accidents or chemical spills or earthquakes. We should be preparing for disasters, period."
When their guards were up, the experts in Indianapolis tended to talk in the void jargon of management science: proactive modes, assessment of capabilities, lethal-type substances impacting on the environment, mass- casualty situations. Of course, those in the catastrophe business have a better excuse than most for their tendency toward euphemism. "I have found," said the Rev. Fred Page, a Presbyterian minister from Ruston, La., "that using the word morgue with someone who has just lost a loved one may not be best."
When they got loose and interested, on the other hand, they swapped graphic war stories. "That's an exit wound there, by the way," said Ray Bray, a California police official, as he showed off a color picture of a victim from last summer's mass murder at a McDonald's.
Nervous humor was constant, like static. A small-town politician half boasted to a companion that "in our town we've had two derailments in the last five months." He chuckled. "Neither one was carrying hazardous chemicals," he said, chuckling again. "But I think our nine lives are up," he finished, chuckling still more heartily. The Rev. Mr. Page told a joke about the Johnstown flood more than once. James Stinson, a former Green Beret, now an antiterrorism consultant, pressed a button hooked to a slide projector. "I hope this doesn't detonate anything," he said.