How Disaster Resilience Saves Lives: Derrick Tin (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of Dr Derrick Tin’s talk titled “How Disaster Resilience Saves Lives” at TEDxUniMelb 2020 conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

The Impact of Disasters

What goes through your mind when you hear about the latest earthquake devastating cities and killing thousands? Or about another heat wave or drought sweeping past our continent? Do you feel sadness and compassion, or perhaps a desire to help? Or perhaps you are fatigued from the constant bombardment of such devastating news.

But have you ever thought, “What if this happened to me?” I’m Derrick Tin, and today I’ll tell you how earthquakes are saving lives and how this talk might one day save yours. Now historically, when a disaster happened, the first thought we have is that we have wronged the gods. The wrath of the deities are upon us.

But science tells us otherwise, that in fact, we humans have a hand to play in the current climate crisis, which, of course, is leading to increasing frequency and intensity of climate events. Even if you were a climate skeptic, an earthquake here today will invariably affect a whole lot more people than the exact same earthquake in the exact same spot 100 years ago, by sheer virtue of population density increase. It is undeniable that disasters today are affecting more people than ever before.

Personal Experiences with Disaster Work

Now, I spent a good part of my career doing disaster work in the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific, doing maritime rescues and setting up disaster field hospitals. That’s me on one of the first appointments. In the bottom right corner is a little drawing a kid drew for us – a kid that we rescued – and that was part of his trauma and art therapy.

The work, as you can imagine, is extremely traumatic for those of us doing the rescues.

It is extremely traumatic for the ones we are trying to help, but it is also very traumatic for the communities that have to witness and sometimes be part of the ordeal. When I set out to be a doctor, I understood that I’ll see trauma, that I’ll see death.

This is part of the day-to-day recurrence in the emergency department I work in. And right before my first-ever deployment, I felt with ten years of emergency room experience under my belt, I felt ready for it. And yet I wasn’t.

Because no amount of education or training will ever prepare you for that moment when the person you just rescued pulls out a photo of their young daughter, asking you if you’ve seen her, knowing she is lost at sea. No amount of education or training will ever prepare you for that moment when you have to walk into a makeshift freezer morgue with corpses stacked to the ceiling, and your job is to unzip these body bags and have to identify the dead. These moments took me to dark places.

The Importance of Community Resilience

It had a powerful impact on me. And it really made me wonder if someone with my background and experience can be so deeply affected by this, “How would it affect you if you suddenly found yourself in a similar situation?” It made me wonder what makes an individual or community recover better or faster after such a traumatic event?

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And that’s what I really want you guys to take home today: the importance of community resilience. Resilience is the ability to absorb stress and bounce back from a traumatic event to create a new norm. Individual and community resilience have been shown to be the single most important factor at helping communities rebuild after an event.

It takes time, it takes effort, and the results are not obvious or measurable. But it’s also not that hard. It’s really just about having a plan B, having a good, local community support network, knowing your neighbors better, knowing your local resources and collaborating with public and private organizations to help you plan your plan B.

It’s about empowering you and your communities to take active responsibility in your own and each other’s well-being, safety and health. Now, in the aftermath of rescues, I had a chance to speak to some of the locals, and I was amazed at their resilience. They are chronically resource limited.

Rural Communities’ Resilience

They have patchy phone reception, nonexistent internet. Sometimes food deliveries can take weeks before it arrives. And yet they are extremely resourceful and self-reliant.

They have community business leaders, elderly leaders, youth groups, and they all intermingle together to form this very supportive network, and they’re constantly asking themselves about the what-if scenario. And this is typical of many rural towns in Australia, largely because they’ve had to develop these survival mechanisms to deal with the day-to-day challenges as well as the curve balls that nature throws at them – towns with floods, Victorian bushfires, double drought. All these lessons learnt and experienced in these regional disasters are helping those communities build better resilience for the future.

Lessons from Deployment

Now, whenever I come home from deployment – usually to some remote community that not many have heard of – I’m back home in Sydney, I switch on my phone, I think, “Great! Mobile internet on my phone! How incredible is that?” I don’t have to ration my favorite food anymore; I can just Uber Eats on demand. I can watch Netflix without watching the great buffer show. And I’m thinking to myself, “How on Earth did I survive all these weeks away without my technological luxuries?”

And I’ll tell you how. Instead of having mobile internet, everyday I stroll to the local cafe, where they set up a community Wi-Fi hotspot. Over the weeks, you start getting to know everyone. What they do, how long they’ve been there. You start to know who they’re emailing, what scores they’re checking, and you start this conversation with the local community. Instead of Uber Eats, every morning, I stroll past this community hall where the locals prepare and sell their own food.

You never know what you’re going to get, because it largely depends on what ingredients they could get a hold of the week before. I still remember the first time going there. It was such an eclectic mix of cuisine.

Building Resilience in Urban Areas

There’s a Malaysian roti, there was some pasta, some fried doughnuts! I thought, “OK, fried doughnuts for breakfast it is then!” And when you’re the new face in town, and especially if people find out you’re a healthcare professional, they really start taking a little bit more interest in what you do, why you’re there. “How long are you planning to stay?”

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So instead of being in my accommodation and watching Netflix, I get invited to all these amazing local community events, and I get to intermingle with them. And what I quickly realize, that all these moments and conversations were, in fact, the communities’ subconscious way of building resilience. And that is not something that happens in big cities.

85% of our population today live in urban areas. And whilst we may be economically a lot more resilient than our country counterparts, our environment of excess and technological adaptations coupled with this boom in population creates a very different risk profile, a risk profile that’s constantly changing and very difficult to predict. And what we’re learning is that we’re seeing familiar disasters surface in unfamiliar forms and unfamiliar disasters surface in forms not yet imagined.

Take the Tōhoku earthquakes in 2011 in Japan. One earthquake caused infrastructure damage but also triggered a tsunami, which then flooded the densely populated coastline. The dams that were supposed to protect us from floods and provide a constant source of water were damaged and were overwhelmed, leading to even more damage.

Australia’s Disaster Risk

The nuclear reactors that were supposed to provide a constant stream of energy went into meltdown, not only cutting off energy supply but actually creating a radiation risk as well. 15,000 people died as a result of this event. And this is Japan we’re talking about, one of the technologically most advanced countries in the world that’s been dealing with earthquakes since the beginning of time.

And yet they suffered one of the most devastating disasters in modern day history. Now, Australia is not traditionally an earthquake-prone continent, and we are very lucky that our disaster risk is relatively low and our resilience index is relatively high. But we do see cyclones and droughts and bushfires.

And let´s not forget the terrorist attacks or the diseases that know no borders. Remember SARS in 2003, the respiratory virus that swept through Southeast Asia? Or how about Ebola that the World Health Organization just declared as an emergency of global concern?

We’ve just had one of the deadliest flu seasons in the past decade here in Australia. So who’s to say something much more worse can’t suddenly surface and ravage through a densely populated city and overwhelm an already stressed-out healthcare system? Disasters are complex; resources are finite.

The Need for Self-Reliance

We may not be able to come and save you. So we really need to shift this “someone will come save me” attitude to one that focuses much more on self-reliance. What if help is not on its way? What is your plan B?

New Orleaners found out the hard way after Hurricane Katrina. Now, it is very hard for most of you to imagine a major incident happening where you live. And you’re right – it is rare. But rarity does not equate to a lesser impact. So let me scale down to something that perhaps you can imagine. How about a prolonged power cut?

How long do you think you can survive? I can probably go a couple of days, no issues. Then my phone powers off, my internet goes out, and I really have no way of summoning for help.

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The Importance of Knowing Your Neighbors

What if in the dark, you trip and fall and break your leg? What are you going to do now? A survey done in the US showed that 54% of the urban population have little to no trust in their neighbors.

And yet when a disaster hits, your neighbor might be your only lifeline. So ask yourself this, “How well do I know my neighbor? Well enough to say ‘hi’ to every morning?” “Sure. Maybe well enough to leave them a set of spare keys in case I get locked out?” But do you know them well enough to trust them with your life?

When a heat wave struck Chicago in 1995, Auburn and Englewood were two affected suburbs that were almost demographically identical. Yet there was a tenfold death rate in the suburb that did not have that same social cohesion than their counterpart. Eric Klinenberg, an American sociologist, wrote about this in his book and dubbed it a “social autopsy” of disaster in Chicago.

The “New Modern Plague”

It turns out, neighborhood conditions that isolate each other on a good day can be really lethal on a bad one. And it’s been getting worse since the ’90’s. Despite being more connected and despite being in an environment of excess, recent studies have deemed social isolation “the new modern plague.”

Now, one of the difficulties in being better prepared is actually convincing you that you need to spend the effort and time in preparing for an event that may never happen. Human behavior means that our focus is much more on the response and recovery phase rather than the pre-disaster phase. But what we know today is that the more we put into the prevention and preparation, the lesser the impact will be post-disaster.

The Importance of Pre-Disaster Planning

It is estimated that for every dollar we spend in risk mitigation, we save about six dollars down the line. And many would even argue that if more was done in the pre-disaster planning phases, man-made disasters, such as 9/11, could have been entirely prevented. And that tells us one thing, that we really need to shift this conversation, bring it right back to a community grassroot level and get you guys engaged into this topic.

The start of resilience building starts with you understanding its importance. The strength of a community comes from the individuals, and the strength of the individual is the community. It wasn’t raining when Noah built the ark. History has delivered its lessons, and we know the storm is coming.

But the question is, “Are you ready for it?” Thank you.