Warnings and catastrophes: the 1999 storm, a treacherous risk

There is a recurrent paradox: why do catastrophes always seem to be 'anticipated' ex post but never ex ante? This study of the warnings issued prior to the last major natural catastrophe experienced by France - the storm of 27 December 1999 - focuses on the organizational factors accountin...

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Published inSociologie du travail (Paris) Vol. 51; no. 3; pp. 379 - 401
Main Author Dedieu, F
Format Journal Article
LanguageFrench
Published 01.07.2009
Subjects
Civil Defense
Cognition
Disasters
Forecasts
France
Information Dissemination
Natural Disasters
Organizational analysis
Risk
Risk Assessment
Uncertainty
Valuation
Weather
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Summary:There is a recurrent paradox: why do catastrophes always seem to be 'anticipated' ex post but never ex ante? This study of the warnings issued prior to the last major natural catastrophe experienced by France - the storm of 27 December 1999 - focuses on the organizational factors accounting for the surprise occasioned by this event. Even though the French weather bureau had forecasted the storm, why did civil defense workers declare that the scale of the event came as a surprise to them? A multilevel qualitative analysis of the operation of the interorganizational weather-warning system shows that a combination of structural, contextual and individual factors turned the warnings into routine messages. The 1999 storm serves to describe an ideal type of a particular risk, namely the treacherous risk, which is clearly announced but disregarded because it seems so familiar. All rights reserved, Elsevier
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ISSN:0038-0296
DOI:10.1016/j.soctra.2009.06.001