Culture of safety

I caught a newscast the other night showing rescue work after the earthquake in the Visayas. There was a couple, one of them clutching a cell phone. Both husband and wife were agitated, having received a text from their daughter, who was buried under the rubble. The daughter was calling on her parents to hurry, saying she could already see the light from above the rubble and was hopeful it meant the rescue teams were getting through.

The next scene in the newscast showed a hysterical mother, wailing in anguish. The rescuers did get through, but it was too late for the daughter.

The parents were clearly simple folk, probably farmers, but they had cell phones, a reminder that this technology is now reaching many Filipinos, with unlimited potentials for keeping families and friends together, and for responding to crisis situations and disasters. Yet this last earthquake was glaring in exposing a paradoxical situation: the cell phones seemed almost useless for rescue work and, more painfully, wreaked greater havoc as pranksters spread rumors about a tsunami.

I want to be kind and think that the pranksters were trying to break the tension; after all, we crack jokes even at funerals. But I’m more inclined to believe that we have heartless people who seem to enjoy other people’s suffering.

The cruel reality is that the cell phone creates more suffering in times of disasters, rather than bringing people together and contributing to a culture of safety. I am borrowing that term “culture of safety” from Alfredo Mahar Lagmay, a geology professor at UP, who wrote a report “Learning from the Philippines’ Disasters.” In addition to the many technical recommendations on disaster preparedness and disaster response, Lagmay writes toward the end: “A society with a culture of safety invests heavily in knowledge and treats disasters not as rare events but rather as unresolved problems in developmental planning.”

Living off danger

We do not have a culture of safety; in fact, I’d dare say we seem to thrive on risks and dangers. Cell phone pranksters capitalize on this risk orientation, spreading misinformation to transform disasters into calamities.

We panic with misinformation, but go into denial when confronted with real danger. The willingness to live on the edge isn’t something in our genes but comes about, ironically, from centuries of disasters. Every time a disaster hits, we suffer great losses in lives and property and we grieve and we wail to the high heavens but after a few weeks, sometimes even a few days, we see people returning to live at the disaster sites, trying to pick up from where they left off.  To have survived is sufficient comfort for many, with thanks to particular saints and annual fiestas to beg for continuing protection.

I’m constantly being asked for an “anthropological viewpoint” to explain why we insist on living in harm’s way and I answer it’s because people have no other options. Living on that small piece of land on the slope of a volcano may seem suicidal but for a poor family of farmers, that land, no, that volcano, is their life, the most fertile land imaginable. How many times will a volcano erupt in one’s lifetime, the farmer will ask?

The risks do change with time. People living on the slopes of a volcano see only the fertile soil, forgetting that over the centuries, population pressures have eroded the soil so the dangers come not just with volcanic eruption but with typhoons triggering landslides, rock slides, or even mud flows from the volcano.

Fishing communities, urban informal settlers living by rivers and railroads and mountain slopes all face incalculable risks, but they stay on. There’s more to all this than the angle of economics and livelihood. No matter how miserable and dangerous their living conditions might be, it’s still a place people call home, a home that means life, rather than the death we associate with disasters.

When you think hard, all of us Filipinos take risks by simply living in the Philippines. We know, and accept, that we will run through the entire alphabet for names of typhoons. We live on a restless geological ring of fire, the earth constantly moving and volcanos simmering and seething. As if all that were not enough, we have human disasters, and I mean disasters created by humans and humans as walking disasters.

Information

We need to tap into the wonders of digital and instant communications to jump-start a culture of safety. If people don’t want to move away from danger zones, then organize the communities into disaster management teams that can identify and construct refuge areas and safety platforms and conduct practice drills for evacuation. When disaster does strike, the teams can use old technologies like church bells, and newer ones like cell phones, for early alert systems to help neighbors and friends and to contact local government officials who can, in turn, bring in the social workers, medical teams and natural scientists to work out relief, assistance and prevention of greater damage.

We can’t rely on a “911” system of people calling in; instead, when disaster strikes, government should be sending out several emergency phone numbers to call and Internet sites to visit. In this age of tablet computers and WiFi, people can access the Internet even if power supplies are cut off.  This need not be limited to the rich—local government units could be hubs for these information networks.

We’re still reactive today, mass media (including columnists) shaking their heads only after the damage of rumors has been inflicted. Government, working with mobile phone service providers, can prevent panic by mass broadcasting of texts to hundreds of thousands of people to counter the rumors being spread around, and giving sound advice on what to do.

A culture of safety must incorporate psychosocial considerations. We need to recruit psychiatrists like Dr. Lourdes Ignacio and psychologists like Dr. Honey Carandang to work with the cell phone companies and mass media channels (calling Radyo Inquirer) for these appropriate responses.

People believe the text rumors because there’s a vacuum of information, and because there’s so little trust in government. A culture of safety has to build on social trust, on consistent and constant messages that are serious, but with a touch of humor, perhaps endorsed by broadcast media’s celebrities.

The messages can remind people not to be uto-uto, gullible fools, even while invoking the sense of kapwa, of caring for others—that’s the central theme in Dr. Carandang’s work on disasters. Rumormongers must be labeled as lacking this sense of kapwa, and are therefore less than human.

The cell phone can become a channel to create more alarm, panic and suffering, or a channel for comfort and strength, and a culture of safety.

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Email: mtan@inquirer.com.ph