Recommendation: This is interesting, but not as comprehensive as I might have liked from an expert as qualified as Kayyem
Where to read: Maybe middle of next year, assuming we get some daylight between “booms”
Read with: A nip of the Dublin Liberties Oak Devil whiskey
In brief: This is the sort of book that is useful, but should only be purchased if heavily discounted. Otherwise, borrow it from the library, make some notes for yourself and then enjoy talking about “left and right of boom” next time the family starts talking about bushfires.
The Devil Never Sleeps was on my must-read list from 2020 when I did was doing some study on disaster management. My desire to get my hands on it overrode my better judgment and I ended up purchasing it in hardback. This was a mistake, because I think I would have been less irritated had I paid paperback prices.
When I say irritated, I generally enjoyed this but it was not nearly as comprehensive as I was hoping for. This is, I freely acknowledge, not an entirely fair critique – the book is designed to be widely read and generally approachable and not some weighty scholarly tome. That said, there are other books that provide more substantive commentary on disaster management and mitigation than this while managing to cater to lay readers and I am not sure you would take much more from the book than from her various lectures on it.
There are, however, some points that are worth noting. The first is her overarching theme – rather than thinking of disasters as discrete and individualised, understand that disasters in all forms are a part of life and there are commonalities in the way we can mitigate and then manage them when they inevitably hit. This sort of thinking informs the “all hazards” approach which currently dominates disaster management and Kayyem’s use of “boom” as generic terminology for a relevant incident. It should also inform an openness to the possibility of a disaster occurring. Part of the history of the Challenger disaster, for example, was that the people making decisions could not imagine the disaster, and did not hear or did not want to hear people who were concerned about it.
A related idea is the emphasis on “failing safer”, acknowledging that disasters are going to happen and that preparation should focus not just on prevention but also on minimising damage as much as possible. This involves acknowledging the world as it is (the was a nuclear power plant at Fukushima despite a long history of tsunamis in that area, there are one-road-in, one-road-out towns in the middle of highly flammable forests) and dealing with that reality. She also focuses on the importance of accurately identifying the causes of a disaster – Kayyem gives the example of the Columbine shootings as an illustration of where this went wrong – and then taking the right lessons away from that work.
For those interested in the politics of it all, the most troubling point is the “preparedness paradox”. In essence, the more and better prepared you are, the less disastrous the disaster becomes and the more hysterical or exorbitant or wasteful governments and organisations appear. The primary example she gives of this is Y2K, which is now remembered as a joke because it was appropriately managed and therefore was a total fizzer. In Australia, one hopes that after COVID and bushfires and floods there will be political and public will to properly fund and support preparation and mitigation efforts and more willingness to see wins as wins. Given all the bitching about hazard reduction smoke in Sydney this winter, however, I am not optimistic…
Bookshelves & Bourbon 