Was walking home with some cans of catfood ripping through a paper bag and thinking about Supertyphoon Haiyan/Yolanda when I realized I’d just missed its tenth anniversary.
The story of Haiyan/Yolanda is very much not mine to tell. I was not in it. But what I saw on the other side of the world, of how the US NGOs and the mapping industry responded, is still stamped on my psyche. It was a very radicalizing and occasionally encouraging experience.
I remember sitting in the headquarters of a large institution and watching the person next to me finish tiling a map, eject the thumb drive it was on, put it in a plastic bag, and toss that into a ULD container someone was wheeling through the room on its way to Manila.
I remember someone sitting next to me having to turn their laptop screen away because they had just got imagery before it hit the Hazards Data Distribution System but it was still classified so they weren’t allowed to do anything with it other than confirm that it would meet a humanitarian need. It wasn’t declassified for hours after that, and it was already late in the Philippines.
I remember e-mailing every civilian satellite operator, sometimes using Google Translate, to ask if they had imagery they could share. We got every kind of bad response you can imagine – patronizing ones, greedy ones, ones confused about extremely basic concepts, and so on. One company said the person who handled this kind of thing was on vacation and they would get back in a week or two. Another one gave us okay data but over sub-dialup download speeds.
The sort of thumbnail image for this whole experience in my memory is the sandbags spelling HELP in front of Our Mother of Perpetual Help in Tacloban: https://blog.maxar.com/leading-the-industry/2013/raisingawarenesstyphoonhaiyan
I saw some institutions completely fail to function – to do the thing they were founded to do. I saw others do exactly the right thing like it wasn’t a big deal. Some of those institutions were sibling departments under the same agency or company.
It did a lot to convince me that certain conversations we have about climate change, for example – about whether only large organizations with central power can address such problems, or whether we only have such giant and slippery problems because of those institutions, or both – are absolutely necessary and also probably have no satisfying answer.
I want to reiterate that I did not experience Haiyan/Yolanda. I saw some other thing that was, like, part of uhhh the same hyperobject I guess, but was not a storm; it did not hurt me or destroy my home. It did change how I think about organizations and leave me with a painful drive to help close some of the gaps I had seen in how the Earth observation ~*~community~*~ handled disaster response. That ended up flavoring my next five or ten years.
[Whispering:] But most of all, how we define them.
Anyway, I still can’t write up all my notes from 2013 because some of the people and organizations mentioned are still very much on the scene and will 100% send me e-mails about how confused they are that I would say such misleading things.
@vruba did the cat food bag make it home without spilling?
@migurski It was only three cans, and it was warm, so I ended up taking off my fleece and slinging them in it.
@vruba I would love to read a form of this article, maybe in a style for The Atlantic or something. Understand the sensitivities.
@vruba thank you for this thread. very interesting observations.
@vruba Whenever this comes up I always think back to this almost prophetic Twitter thread from @maxgladstone only a few years ago:
@kevinriggle @vruba you might also find interesting this piece I wrote on how disaster response can be a disaster in itself: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-04691-0_14 (can send you a copy if you want)
@older @kevinriggle Thanks – I’d appreciate a copy. My e-mail address is in my profile.
@vruba @older and *that* makes me think of Chelsea Clinton’s leaked report on the UN’s response to the earthquake in Haiti https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kyleblaine/chelsea-clinton-wrote-bill-and-hillary-about-being-profoundl
@kevinriggle @maxgladstone I only wish “The Retreat of the Elephants” made the point in a crisper, more quotable way.
@vruba is "our disasters diagnose our societies" yours? it's really really good.
@numist It’s not a conscious quotation, but it wouldn’t surprise me if others have said much the same thing.
During which I never shook – still have not shaken – the sense that our disasters diagnose our societies. How we anticipate them, behave in them, and remember them tells you who we are.