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Speaker 1: Pushkin. We could have seen it coming. We really could.

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Speaker 1: For years, people had warned that New Orleans was vulnerable.

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Speaker 1: The Houston Chronicle reported that if a major hurricane struck,

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Speaker 1: two hundred and fifty thousand people would be stranded in

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Speaker 1: the low lying city, their homes underwater. A local emergency

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Speaker 1: management director told the newspaper, I don't even want to

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Speaker 1: think about the loss of life a huge hurricane would cause.

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Speaker 1: That's understandable, it's also part of the problem. The Houston

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Speaker 1: Chronicle wasn't the only newspaper to examine the risks. The

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Speaker 1: New Orleans Times Picayune published a five heart series, opening

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Speaker 1: with It's only a matter of time before South Louisiana

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Speaker 1: takes a direct hit from a major hurricane. They added

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Speaker 1: that the levees, the last line of defense, might not

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Speaker 1: be strong enough. Much of New Orleans lies below sea level,

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Speaker 1: some of the levees were in poor repair. The risk

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Speaker 1: of a levee failure was obvious. National Geographic vividly described

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Speaker 1: a scenario in which fifty thousand people drowned. The Red

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Speaker 1: Cross feared a similar death toll. Even FEMA, the Federal

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Speaker 1: Emergency Management Agency, was alert. In two thousand and one,

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Speaker 1: It had stated that a major hurricane hitting New Orleans

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Speaker 1: was one of the three likeliest catastrophes facing the United States.

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Speaker 1: So yes, we could have seen it coming, and now

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Speaker 1: the disaster scenario was becoming a reality. A four hundred

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Speaker 1: mile an hour hurricane was heading directly towards the city.

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Speaker 1: More than a million residents were warned to evacuate. USA

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Speaker 1: Today warned of a modern Atlantis. The newspaper explained that

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Speaker 1: the hurricane could overwhelm New Orleans with up to twenty

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Speaker 1: feet of filthy, chemical polluted water. The city's mayor, Ray Nagin,

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Speaker 1: begged people to get away. He was reluctant to make

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Speaker 1: evacuation mandatree because around a hundred thousand people had no

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Speaker 1: cars and no way of leaving. The roads out were

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Speaker 1: jammed anyway. It took ten or twelve hours just to

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Speaker 1: get out of Baton Rouge, only eighty miles away. Thousands

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Speaker 1: of visiting conference delegates were stranded. The airport had been closed.

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Speaker 1: There weren't enough emergency shelters. Nagin suggested using a local stadium,

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Speaker 1: the Louisiana Superdome, as a temporary refuge, but the Superdome

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Speaker 1: wasn't necessarily hurricane proof, and Nagan was warned that it

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Speaker 1: wasn't equipped to be a shelter. But then the storm

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Speaker 1: turned aside. The hurricane's name was not Katrina, it was

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Speaker 1: Hurricane Ivan. It was September two thousand and four, and

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Speaker 1: ne Orleans had been spared, and Hurricane Ivan had provided

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Speaker 1: the city and the nation with a vivid warning. I'm

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Speaker 1: Tim Harvard, and you were listening to cautionary tales. In

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Speaker 1: two thousand and three, the Harvard Business Review published an

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Speaker 1: article titled Predictable Surprises The Disasters You should have seen coming.

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Speaker 1: The author, Max Beseman and Michael Watkins are both business

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Speaker 1: school professors, and they followed up with a book, also

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Speaker 1: called Predictable Surprises. Baseman and Watkins argued that while the

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Speaker 1: world is an unpredictable place, unpredictability is often not the problem.

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Speaker 1: The problem is that even when we're faced with clear risks,

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Speaker 1: we still fail to act. Hurricane Katrina looming over New

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Speaker 1: Orleans was one of those clear risks. The near miss

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Speaker 1: of Hurricane Ivan had demonstrated the need to prepare urgently

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Speaker 1: and honor a dozen different fronts for the next hurricane,

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Speaker 1: but the authorities did not act swiftly or decisively enough.

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Speaker 1: Eleven months after Ivan Katrina drowned the city and hundreds

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Speaker 1: of its residents, has predicted, many tens of thousands of

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Speaker 1: citizens had been unable or unwilling to evacuate as predicted.

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Speaker 1: Levies had been breached in many places as predicted, the

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Speaker 1: Superdome had been an inadequate shelter. Surely, with such a

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Speaker 1: clear warning, New Orleans should have been better prepared to

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Speaker 1: withstand Hurricane Katrina. It's easily said, but look at how

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Speaker 1: the new coronavirus swept the globe, killing thousands every day

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Speaker 1: and driving us into economically devastating lockdowns. New Orleans isn't

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Speaker 1: the only place that didn't prepare for a predictable catastrophe.

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Speaker 1: It's not like pandemics or a new issue, after all.

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Speaker 1: Michael Watkins, author of Predictable Surprises, sent me over the

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Speaker 1: notes for a pandemic response exercise that he ran at

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Speaker 1: Harvard University. I've got it right here. The exercise begins

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Speaker 1: with this scenario. One week after four classes begin, five

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Speaker 1: students who just returned from a trip to Southern Africa

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Speaker 1: become very ill. One subsequently dies, throwing the student body

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Speaker 1: into turmoil. After a lull, significant numbers of new cases emerge,

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Speaker 1: signaling the beginning of an outbreak in the university and

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Speaker 1: the broader community. It's supposed to be a role playing

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Speaker 1: exercise for business school students, and in the exercise things

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Speaker 1: soon get worse. Rumors spread, people socially distance classes move

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Speaker 1: online that the date on the document is the twelfth

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Speaker 1: of October two thousand and two. We've been thinking about

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Speaker 1: pandemics for a long time, not just in business school

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Speaker 1: exercises either. What about Bill Gates's twenty fifteen TED talk

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Speaker 1: titled the Next Outbreak? We're not ready. If anything kills

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Speaker 1: over ten million people in the next few decades, it's

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Speaker 1: most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than

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Speaker 1: a war. Not missiles but microbs. Bill Gates, He's not

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Speaker 1: exactly a marginal figure, is he. I have friends at TED.

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Speaker 1: I called them to ask how many people watched the

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Speaker 1: talk before this year began, before it suddenly became so newsworthy.

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Speaker 1: They told me two and a half a million people.

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Speaker 1: That is a lot of people who at least saw them.

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Speaker 1: EMMO officialdom had also been sounding the alarm. The World

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Speaker 1: Health Organization and the World Bank had convened the Global

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Speaker 1: Preparedness Monitoring Board. In October last year, they published a

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Speaker 1: report calling for better preparation for managing the fallout of

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Speaker 1: a high impact respiratory pathogen. A high impact respiratory pathogen

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Speaker 1: was a risk who knew while the Global Preparedness Monitoring

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Speaker 1: Board knew, it seems and alongside these authoritative warnings were

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Speaker 1: the near misses the pandemic versions of Hurricane Ivan in

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Speaker 1: the last twenty years CSARS H five N one H

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Speaker 1: one N one ebola mers. Each deadly outbreak sparked brief

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Speaker 1: and justifiable alarm, followed by a collective shrug of the shoulders.

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Speaker 1: We were warned, both by the experts and by reality,

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Speaker 1: Yet on most fronts, who were still caught unprepared. Why

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Speaker 1: let's meet mere Patrick Turner a citizen of New Orleans,

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Speaker 1: a veteran of the Second World War. When Hurricane Ivan

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Speaker 1: bore down on the city, Turner was eighty four years old.

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Speaker 1: His family heeded the mayor's warning. They prepared to evacuate

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Speaker 1: to Austin, Texas that's five hundred miles. Turner was reluctant

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Speaker 1: to go. He had seen a lot of hurricanes just

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Speaker 1: miss New Orleans. The storms always make that turn to Pascagoula,

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Speaker 1: he would say, referring to the city a hundred miles

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Speaker 1: down the coast. But Turner's family insisted he evacuate, so

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Speaker 1: he squeezed himself into the crowded car. Remember how bad

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Speaker 1: the traffic was, how people were driving from dawn till

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Speaker 1: dusk just to cover the first eighty miles out of

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Speaker 1: New Orleans. It was a nightmarish journey for an old man,

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Speaker 1: and Hurricane Ivan made the turn to Pascagoula, just like

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Speaker 1: storms always did, well, almost always. Turner had experienced to

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Speaker 1: hurricane breaching the levees in New Orleans once before, but

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Speaker 1: that was nearly four decades earlier, and when Turner's family

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Speaker 1: told the story, what they remembered most was a stray cat.

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Speaker 1: The frightened feline had ducked under the skirting around the

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Speaker 1: outside of the Turner's house and was now penned under

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Speaker 1: their floorboards. By the high waters. They could hear it

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Speaker 1: plaintively mewing. Patrick Turner wasn't about to spend the next

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Speaker 1: week listening to the cat whimper for help as it starved.

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Speaker 1: His daughter, Sheila, told the tale to the writer Amanda

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Speaker 1: Ripley of how all of them crawled around on the

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Speaker 1: floor trying to figure out where the cat was. They

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Speaker 1: figured it was, of all places, under the washing machine.

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Speaker 1: So Sheila's dad moved the machine and sowed a cartoon

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Speaker 1: like circle in the wooden floor to see the cat

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Speaker 1: spring up to safety. That was mister Turner practical. Now

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Speaker 1: it was two thousand and five, Hurricane Katrina was heading

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Speaker 1: remorselessly towards the city. A local weatherman's cheerful demeanor cracked,

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Speaker 1: and he told his viewers, may God be with you.

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Speaker 1: Patrick Turner's family once again begged the old man to

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Speaker 1: evacuate with them, but this time he was in no

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Speaker 1: mood to listen. He was eighty five years old, a widower,

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Speaker 1: living alone, and anyway, the storms always make that turn

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Speaker 1: to Pascagoula, And so mister Turner told his children, I'm

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Speaker 1: not going. His daughter, Sheila, reminded him about the Hurricane

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Speaker 1: lad Weather forty years ago. Yes, yes, Dad, forget the cat.

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Speaker 1: Think about the tens of thousands of homes that flooded.

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Speaker 1: Think about the dozens of people who were killed. Remember

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Speaker 1: those poor souls who were trapped in their own attics

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Speaker 1: by the rising water. Stories still circulating New Orleans of

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Speaker 1: the claw marks they left as they tried to get out. No,

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Speaker 1: said old mister Turner. I listened to you last year,

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Speaker 1: and I was stuck in your damned calf for hours

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Speaker 1: on end. I'm staying. Sheila kept trying, so did his

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Speaker 1: other children. He got so tired of the calls that

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Speaker 1: he took the phone off the hook. Many others felt similarly,

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Speaker 1: not most by any means, eighty percent of the population

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Speaker 1: of New Orleans decided to evacuate. It's commonly assumed that

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Speaker 1: the people who stayed simply couldn't get out, but when

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Speaker 1: night Ridder newspapers investigated after the storm, they found that

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Speaker 1: those who died weren't disproportionately poor or black. Some people

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Speaker 1: were just stuck, of course, But many others weighed up

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Speaker 1: the risks, thought about the agonies of evacuating, remembered Hurricane Ivan,

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Speaker 1: and decided that things would be okay if they toughed

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Speaker 1: it out. For many people, Hurricane Ivan wasn't viewed as

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Speaker 1: a warning of how bad things could get. It was

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Speaker 1: viewed as yet another false alarm. Of course, it wasn't.

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Speaker 1: Patrick Turner was trapped by the rising water, just like

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Speaker 1: the cat he had rescued forty years before, But there

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Speaker 1: was nobody to rescue him, and the New Orleans Fire

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Speaker 1: Department only managed to reach him two weeks later. He

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Speaker 1: was dead, apparently of a heart attack. The devoted family

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Speaker 1: man had died made alone in his attic because this

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Speaker 1: storm didn't make that turn to Pascagoula. The appearance of

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Speaker 1: SARS in late two thousand and two should have been

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Speaker 1: a warning to us all SARS is deadly, considerably more

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Speaker 1: dangerous than COVID nineteen, but fortunately it proved easier to contain.

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Speaker 1: Several thousand people caught it, several hundred people died, and

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Speaker 1: the economies of China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan took

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Speaker 1: a pounding. For them, SARS wasn't a near miss. It

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Speaker 1: was a painful hit, and many of those countries took note,

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Speaker 1: investing in public health infrastructure and preparing for the next pandemic.

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Speaker 1: For most of the rest of US, however, SARS was

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Speaker 1: more like Hurricane Ivan, all out fuss, and in the

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Speaker 1: end it was fine. Instead of concluding that was a

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Speaker 1: close thing, we'd better prepare, we concluded the doommongers are

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Speaker 1: always giving us disaster scenarios and it's never as bad

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Speaker 1: as they say, the same with myrrs. The same in

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Speaker 1: two thousand and nine with H one N one, sometimes

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Speaker 1: called swine flu. Swine flu was the first time the

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Speaker 1: WHO declared a public health emergency of international concern. People

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Speaker 1: were really worried about swine flu, but in retrospect it

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Speaker 1: seems to have been quite similar to the seasonal flu

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Speaker 1: that hits us every year, which kills a few hundred

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Speaker 1: thousand people around the globe, but doesn't change our way

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Speaker 1: of life. Rosalind Baschelo could tell you all about H

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Speaker 1: one N one. She was the French health minister at

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Speaker 1: the time of the outbreak, and she took it seriously.

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Speaker 1: She stopped up on masks, She ordered ninety four million

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Speaker 1: doses of flu vaccine. She did everything we now complain

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Speaker 1: our leaders didn't do, and in the end swine flu

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Speaker 1: took that turn to Pascagoula. It didn't kill tens of

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Speaker 1: millions of people. Did the French public and media congratulate

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Speaker 1: Rosalind Bachelo for her sensible precaution. They did not. They

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Speaker 1: looked at how much public money she had spent on

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Speaker 1: masks and vaccines some four hundred million euros about half

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Speaker 1: a billion dollars, and they blamed her for it. Two

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Speaker 1: years later, a new governor of California took office after

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Speaker 1: a brutal recession. Jerry Brown started to look for ways

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Speaker 1: to save public money, and he alighted on an expensive

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Speaker 1: stockpile of medical supplies maintained by his predecessor, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

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Speaker 1: Arnie had spent hundreds of millions of dollars creating mobile

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Speaker 1: hospitals that emergency responders could use to deal with earthquakes, fires,

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Speaker 1: and yes, pandemics. According to the Los Angeles Times, the

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Speaker 1: stockpile included fifty million n ninety five respirators, two thousand,

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Speaker 1: four hundred portable ventilators, and kits to set up twenty

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Speaker 1: one thousand additional patient beds wherever they were needed. It's impressive,

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Speaker 1: but that stockpile is now nowhere to be found. When

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Speaker 1: Jerry Brown cut funding for the scheme, did voters howl

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Speaker 1: with protest? Did they make clear they wanted their scarce

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Speaker 1: tax dollars devoted to sensible preparedness? They did not. Politicians

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Speaker 1: have other priorities. Because we have other priorities. We voters

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Speaker 1: don't take kindly to those who spend our taxes preparing

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Speaker 1: for disasters that may never happen, and the near misses.

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Speaker 1: All too often, the near misses only make things worse.

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Speaker 1: Less than four years ago, my own country, the UK

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Speaker 1: ran a pandemic planning scenario dubbed Exercise Sickness. It sounds

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Speaker 1: like an awesome piece of forethought, but it doesn't seem

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Speaker 1: to have helped the country to prepare for COVID nineteen.

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Speaker 1: It might even have made it harder. Why The problem

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Speaker 1: was that Exercise sickness was about preparing for a dangerous

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Speaker 1: flu outbreak, but coronavirus is not the flu. The government

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Speaker 1: had learned some very specific lessons that they had to

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Speaker 1: painfully unlearn as the unusual features of COVID nineteen became apparent.

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Speaker 1: That's a problem with many predictable surprises. They're only predictable

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Speaker 1: in a general sort of way. The details aren't predictable

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Speaker 1: at all. Hurricanes in New Orleans should be among the

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Speaker 1: easiest disasters to prepare for. It's pretty clear what will

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Speaker 1: help strengthening levies, installing pumps, and it's a scot handle

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Speaker 1: that those things weren't done before Katrina hit. But in

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Speaker 1: other cases, even though the general shape of the risk

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Speaker 1: is clear, false alarms are going off all the time

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Speaker 1: and the exact problem cannot be predicted. Well, how then

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Speaker 1: are we to prepare? We need to think bigger. It's

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Speaker 1: impossible to prepare for every eventuality, But the next best

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Speaker 1: thing is a massive all purpose resilience that comes from

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Speaker 1: having plenty of spare capacity in everything. The British government

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Speaker 1: should have learned from Exercise sickness that it would have

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Speaker 1: been a good idea to have a stockpile of things

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Speaker 1: that would probably be useful in any kind of pandemic,

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Speaker 1: such as gowns, visors or swabs. They didn't. That's hard

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Speaker 1: to forgive, but it's depressingly easy to understand. It's the

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Speaker 1: same reasoning that led Jerry Brown to dismantle Arnold Schwarzenegger's

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Speaker 1: sensible stockpile. All purpose resilience tends to look wasteful right

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Speaker 1: up until the point at which you desperately needed. Early

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Speaker 1: in the COVID nineteen pandemic, I spoke with a friend

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Speaker 1: of mine, a senior physician at the time. He was

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Speaker 1: recovering from the disease himself he had contracted it. While

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Speaker 1: tending to his patients, he reminisced about a day in

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Speaker 1: early March when the writing should have been on the wall.

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Speaker 1: Italians had started to die in alarming numbers, and his

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Speaker 1: hospital made an announcement they would no longer be providing

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Speaker 1: coffee for staff meetings. If the coffee budget had been

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Speaker 1: diverted to stockpiling masks and gowns, that would be impressive.

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Speaker 1: But who were we kidding. They were simply trying to

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Speaker 1: save money whenever they could. Organizations that won't pay for

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Speaker 1: coffee won't pay for resilience either. After Hurricane Katrina, the

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Speaker 1: city of New Orleans installed new pumps. They were supposed

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Speaker 1: to be strong enough to protect the city for fifty years, but,

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Speaker 1: as Margaret Heffernan describes in her book Willful Blindness, the

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Speaker 1: pumps weren't fit for the job. One whistleblower, the US

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Speaker 1: Army Corps engineer Maria Guazzino, told Heffernan the pumping systems

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Speaker 1: fell apart. Each time we'd turned them on, they'd blow

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Speaker 1: their guts out. Eventually, the final tests were just canceled. Instead,

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Speaker 1: the policy had become hope for the best. Gazino complained

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Speaker 1: and complained, and was repeatedly brushed off. Finally, an independent

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Speaker 1: report concluded she'd been right. The job had been botched,

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Speaker 1: costing hundreds of millions of dollars. In the summer of

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Speaker 1: twenty seventeen, New Orleans was under water again. The pumps

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Speaker 1: were failing, undersupplied with power, and unable to cope with

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Speaker 1: several weeks of persistent rain. It does not inspire confidence

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Speaker 1: for what will happen if another Katrina strikes, but there

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Speaker 1: is one more warning that New Orleans offers the rest

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Speaker 1: of us. Robert Mayer, the co author of the Ostrich Paradox,

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Speaker 1: says preparing for another Hurricane Katrina might not be enough.

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Speaker 1: Katrina wasn't even close to being the worst case scenario

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Speaker 1: for New Orleans. He told me. That would be a

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Speaker 1: full Category five storm hitting just east of the city.

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Speaker 1: The same may be true of the pandemic. Because COVID

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Speaker 1: nineteen has spread much faster than HIV and is more

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Speaker 1: dangerous than the flu, it's easy to imagine that this

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Speaker 1: is as bad as it could possibly get. It isn't.

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Speaker 1: Perhaps this pandemic is a challenge that should be teaching

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Speaker 1: us to think about other dangers from bio terrorism to

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Speaker 1: climate change. Or perhaps the next threat really is a

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Speaker 1: perfectly predictable surprise, another virus just like this one, but worse.

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Speaker 1: Imagine an illness as contagious as measles and as virulent

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Speaker 1: as ebola. Imagine a disease that disproportionately kills children rather

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Speaker 1: than the elderly. What if we're thinking about this the

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Speaker 1: wrong way? What if instead of seeing CSARS as the

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Speaker 1: warning for COVID nineteen, we should see COVID nineteen itself

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Speaker 1: as the warning next time? Will we be better prepared

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Speaker 1: to tell this story? We drew on the Unthinkable by

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Speaker 1: Amanda Ripley, The Ostrich Paradox by Howard Conroyther and Robert Meyer,

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Speaker 1: and Willful Blindness by Margaret Heffernan. As always, a full

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Speaker 1: list of our stories is available in the shows on

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Speaker 1: Tim Harford dot com. This cautionary tale was written and

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Speaker 1: presented by me Tim Harford, with help from Andrew Wright.

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Speaker 1: The show was produced by Ryan Dilley with support from

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Speaker 1: Marilyn Rust. The music mixing and sound design other work

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Speaker 1: of Pascal Wise. The scripts were edited by Julia Bartum.

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Speaker 1: Special thanks to Mia LaBelle Carlie Miliori Heather Fane, Maya Kanig,

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Speaker 1: Jacob Weisberg, and Malcolm Bradwell. Cautionary Tales is a pushkin

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Speaker 1: industry's production