LEARNING FROM DISASTERS: LONDON’S GREAT FIRE AND KATRINA

By Rutherford H. Platt

To paraphrase Santayana, those who do not learn from disasters are condemned to repeat them.

With a million people displaced, a major city under water, and incalculable damage along the Gulf Coast, Hurricane Katrina is the nation’s worst natural disaster ever. As the wrenching process of counting the dead and helping the living continues, it is critical to conduct a prompt, rigorous, nonpolitical assessment of Katrina’s impacts and how the recovery process can make New Orleans and the region safer in the future.

There are many precedents for post-disaster investigations. For example, President Clinton established a special Interagency Floodplain Management Review Committee to review the causes and impacts of the 1993 Midwest Floods. The committee’s 1994 report helped to guide public policies on levees, wetlands restoration, and disaster assistance.

Perhaps the world’s most successful exercise in “learning from disaster” ensued from the Great Fire of London of 1666. London before the Fire was a medieval wooden labyrinth housing some 400,000 souls. In the previous year, 56,000 Londoners had succumbed to the plague––grim testimony to the crowded and unsanitary conditions of the city. After a prolonged drought and fanned by high winds, the Great Fire began on September 1, 1666. Over the next five days, most of the old city within the Roman walls burned, including St. Paul’s Cathedral, some eighty churches, many guildhalls, and warehouses, and countless dwellings. London’s terrified population fled to open fields outside the city. Dr. Samuel Pepys recorded in his Diary: “I saw a fire as one entire arch of fire above a mile long: it made me weep to see it. The churches and houses are all on fire and flaming at once, and a horrid noise the flames made . . .”

London was a disaster waiting to happen: private structures clogged and overhung the narrow lanes, encroached on market spaces, and blocked access to the Thames River. With no regulation of building size, location, and construction materials, the Fire was inevitable. And without access to water, it could not be halted.

At the urging of architect Christopher Wren and other leading citizens, Charles II issued an astounding proclamation a week after the disaster calling for restraint and foresight in the rebuilding process, pending a full investigation of the causes of the disaster. Like a modern chief executive, the King then appointed a Royal Commission, including Wren, to study the causes of the disaster and to draft a Parliamentary law to codify rules for rebuilding.

The resulting “Act for Rebuilding London,” adopted on February 8, 1667, was London's first modern building code. It regulated street widths and building heights, banned overhanging upper floors, required stone or brick facades, and opened up access to the Thames River and other water sources for firefighting. London’s West End, built under that law and its successors, would survive World War II without a total conflagration (in contrast to the firestorms that engulfed Dresden and Tokyo).

London’s Great Fire was the “Big One” of its day––an epic natural calamity compounded by human neglect. The 1667 Act addressed that neglect and applied the best thinking of the time to creating a safer and healthier London.

We must do the same for the Gulf Coast. A nonpolitical expert panel, in collaboration with community representatives, must examine the levee failures, the bungled evacuation, the communication break-down, inadequate care for those stranded in the city, public health, and, above all, how and where to rebuild more safely.

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The writer is a professor of geography at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and author of Disasters and Democracy: The Politics of Extreme Natural Events