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Understanding Risk, Post-Katrina

FEMA's disastrous handling of Hurricane Katrina's aftermath was all the more galling because the scenario was long foreseen. So what catastrophe should DHS plan for next? We pick apart the risk equation.

When it comes to hurricanes, predictions abound—tangible, science-based predictions. Based on activity between 1944 and 1999, for instance, NOAA data shows that New Orleans has a 40 percent chance of getting hit by a hurricane or tropical storm in any given year. For Miami, and Cape Hatteras, N.C., two of the riskiest locations in the United States, the probability is 48 percent. If travelers want to know the probability of a hurricane striking during the week of their Florida time-share, an NOAA FAQ will help them do the math.

Floods, too, are predictable. That's why the Army Corps of Engineers creates detailed flood maps that delineate areas likely to flood every 100 years or every 500 years. (Although even those predictions, as Muir-Wood notes in "Three Not-to-Miss Risks," Page 33, may be called into question.) Flood modeling is why the New Orleans levees were built to certain heights. It's also why property owners in some areas have to purchase flood insurance to obtain financing.

Likewise, the spread of any given disease is relatively predictable. If experts know how transmissible a disease is and how people move around, they can model very effectively how quickly it will spread. If they also know the fatality rate of the disease, they can model the number of fatalities likely to occur amongst age groups. This is the kind of disease modeling that has scientists so alarmed about a scenario in which H5N1 avian influenza mutates and spreads easily from human to human.

It seems logical to presume that the Department of Homeland Security can and should plan mathematically for events of this type. But here's the rub: DHS has to simultaneously deal with natural disasters and domestic terrorism. And terrorism is an entirely different story. It's the old apples to oranges analogy. In fact, it's more like apples to, oh, snow tires.

"With things of a human origin, it's harder to objectively figure out the probabilities," says Baruch Fischhoff, professor of social and decision sciences at Carnegie Mellon University and current president of the Society for Risk Analysis. "To the best of my knowledge, people are not doing credible analysis on the risks facing this country, and if they were, who's to know that those are static probabilities?"

Terrorists learn and adapt. They can improve the probability that they will launch a successful attack in the United States through research and practice. Similarly, the United States can decrease the probability that a terrorist attack will occur—by shutting down air travel in the days after 9/11, for instance, or by creating a "no-fly" list that prohibits certain people from commercial flights. Given the range of human behavior, trying to pin down the resulting probability is next to impossible.