Temporal vulnerability is motivated when the conditions for surprise increase. Early warning is an important way to reduce this type of vulnerability. Early warning encompasses the generation and effective use of advance information on impending risks and is an important way in which temporal vulnerability can be induced. The aim of people-centered early warning includes participatory approaches to both design and implementation. This video illustrates the importance of long-term residents in communicating and recognizing warning signs. In a small floodway neighborhood called Felton Grove in the town of Felton (Santa Cruz County California, U.S.A.) and located in the Santa Cruz Mountains, the geographic particularity of the landscape induces a flood which can come unpredictably fast. The video’s shows one of the few long-time residents who has taken leadership in coordinating early warning, serving as an neighborhood extension of the County early warning system. As the video and commetaries illustrate, temporal vulnerability is increased by high neighborhood turnover and newcomers lacking full appreciation of the meaning of early warning signs.
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The siren referred to in this video came in existence after a core group of concerned residents struggled for more then 15 years to realize their wish for a remotely operated siren. Their challenges including lack of funding, three bureaucracies impeding progress, and liability concerns from the County. A relatively fast flood event in the winter of 1998 lead to major failure of the early warning structure and reinvigorating the in 1989 locally expressed wish for a remotely accessed siren. Despite many hurdles, including a large residential turnover reducing the ability of residents to understand the need for the siren, a lack of County support as a result of liability and restrictions posed on FEMA funding, and bureaucratic hurdles, the residents prevailed. Will residents heed the warnings?
One of the technically inclined neighborhood volunteers managing the siren’s technology has set up a website on the siren here: http://www.floodsiren.org/
In German, this tourist films the incoming Tsunami wave on December 26, 2004. What is remarkable is how the filmer himself and most of the tourists on the beach have no clue what they are looking at, as evidence by their relative nonchalance. They are completely unprepared to understand what is going on. They never experienced a tsunami before. They have little understanding of the possibility of a tsunami in this area. The last major tsunami that hit this area was in 1883 when the Krakatoa erupted and collapses, killing 35,000 people (Pararas-Carayannis 2007). This temporal distance to the last historical analog suggest that the tourists and many of the local people killed in surprise were temporally vulnerable to the 2004 Tsunami.
The transmission of intergenerational memory buffered temporal vulnerability for various indigenous groups whose ancestors lived for millennia on islands very close to the the earthquake’s epicenter escaped. These include the Moken in Surin Islands in Thailand, the Ong and Jarawa in Andaman Islands in India and the Simeulue Island peoples in Indonesia. According to a UNESCO note, these populations came off relatively unscathed: “Community members could read the signs of an impending tsunami and knew how to respond in a rapid and coordinated manner.” (UNECSO 2007).
Reports from the media based on accounts from local fieldworkers and Anthropologists on one of those tribes, the Onge, suggests the intergenerational transmission a folklore tale which talks of “huge shaking of ground followed by high wall of water” (Voice of America 2004 ; BBC 2005 ). In the case of the Simeulue, Island folklore recounted an earthquake and tsunami in 1907, and the islanders fled to inland hills after the initial shaking yet before the tsunami struck (Campbell et al 2005).
It is a story which is sometimes mentioned as an interesting curiosity, aimed to startle and wake-up the early warning community. But the point is this: when it comes to early warning, the preservation of local, historical ecological knowledge is crucial.
Time and Space. It can not get more basic then that. Yet, in vulnerability research, attention goes mostly to space–and in particular social and physical space–but much less to to time. Vulnerability to hazards is the potential for loss. With the dramatic global increase of disasters, what is the role of time, or temporality, in the creation of vulnerable populations?
Social scientists and policy-makers interested in vulnerability increasingly recognize that there are temporal dimensions which affect how we understand and deal with vulnerability to natural disasters. This recognition is part of a larger theoretical movement which emphasizes that natural disasters are not the product of purely natural phenomena caused by external agents—as in nature acting out on culture—but instead an outcome of the hazard event in interaction with a social and historical process of locally produced vulnerability. This cultural attention to the history of vulnerability is encouraging.
Our knowledge about conditions in the past calibrate our expectations for the future. We implicitly use historical ecological knowledge and experience to evaluate current and future vulnerabilities to hazardous events. From an anthropological perspective, this brings up issues of history and memory. How does the way in which we remember past conditions influence social vulnerability to hazard events? Are there limitations inherent in the way we remember and reconstruct the past that influence population vulnerability? How do issues of power, trauma, and forgetting interact to provide a cultural influence on our vision of the past, and our expectation about the future?
The complex cultural relationship between vulnerability and human memory—our ‘being in time’—has only been scantily addressed. In the dominant engineering and planning paradigms influencing mitigation, preparedness, and disaster planning, the social construction of ‘vulnerability’ appears to still prioritize synchronic over diachronic approaches, space over time, and objective history over subjective, cultural memory.
This is what I address in my dissertation by focusing on temporal vulnerability as a domain for vulnerability research. Focusing on temporal referentiality, it is the eye itself which ties the past and the future together.
