In Indiana: Poised for Catastrophe

By KURT ANDERSEN

Your car gets a flat during rush hour. A cigarette cinder singes a favorite shirt. Neighborhood hooligans drape toilet paper from tree to shrub to tree, the family dachshund finally gives up the ghost, or, God forbid, an IRS audit notice arrives in the afternoon mail. Cripes! Disaster!

No. A fleck of inconvenience, maybe, or a passing unpleasantness. But an authentic disaster, as any of the specialists gathered in Indianapolis last month would tell you, entails grave injuries and, always, at least the possibility of wholesale death. The 600 men and women -- fire fighters and police, civil-defense officials, county sheriffs and physicians, scholars and sellers of all kinds of odd equipment -- came for four days of shoptalk at the first World Congress & Exposition for Disaster & Emergency Management. They came to chat about "pain management" and "grief work," about every kind of horror, about all the most public and spectacular ways to die.

There were knowing discussions of regular floods and flash floods, of death by lightning (Florida is No. 1, with an average of ten a year) and death by psychopathic sniping. Chemical leaks and chemical spills were the hottest topics. But earthquakes were not neglected, nor tornadoes and hurricanes, famine, terrorism, high-rise fires and wildfires, plane crashes, train derailments and explosions of all kinds. Fretting about an epidemic? A nearby volcano about to blow? A poisoned water supply or a building collapse or a < riot? You ought to have been in In- dianapolis. Professor E.L. Quarantelli, director of the University of Delaware's Disaster Research Center, has investigated more than 450 disasters ("One loses track") and expects his work load to grow. "The future will be worse than the past," he declared. "We should not be preparing for nuclear-plant accidents or chemical spills or earthquakes. We should be preparing for disasters, period."

When their guards were up, the experts in Indianapolis tended to talk in the void jargon of management science: proactive modes, assessment of capabilities, lethal-type substances impacting on the environment, mass- casualty situations. Of course, those in the catastrophe business have a better excuse than most for their tendency toward euphemism. "I have found," said the Rev. Fred Page, a Presbyterian minister from Ruston, La., "that using the word morgue with someone who has just lost a loved one may not be best."

When they got loose and interested, on the other hand, they swapped graphic war stories. "That's an exit wound there, by the way," said Ray Bray, a California police official, as he showed off a color picture of a victim from last summer's mass murder at a McDonald's.

Nervous humor was constant, like static. A small-town politician half boasted to a companion that "in our town we've had two derailments in the last five months." He chuckled. "Neither one was carrying hazardous chemicals," he said, chuckling again. "But I think our nine lives are up," he finished, chuckling still more heartily. The Rev. Mr. Page told a joke about the Johnstown flood more than once. James Stinson, a former Green Beret, now an antiterrorism consultant, pressed a button hooked to a slide projector. "I hope this doesn't detonate anything," he said.

Mainly, though, the tone was neither blithe nor grim, but rather strikingly matter-of-fact. Tom Reutershan, a U.S. Public Health Service official, described his job as planning for "megadisasters." Reutershan's highest priority is the great California earthquake -- the, he said, not a -- which he hopes will produce no more than 100,000 injuries. "Our National Disaster Medical System can cope with 100,000 casualties, tops," he said. Amtrak trains might be commandeered to ferry some of those victims east -- assuming Amtrak has survived federal budget cuts and the megadisaster in question.

Fast-food restaurants, suggested Tom Fairris, a retired Army antiterrorism / official, may be imperiled. "McDonald's and Wendy's are possible terrorist targets," he said, since the burger joints "represent our ways of doing things, the American way of life." Everyone seemed fond of statistics, but the counterterrorism experts were especially profligate with numbers. How much does it cost to field one European terrorist for a year? Fifteen thousand dollars, said Fairris. How many West Germans are under surveillance for their suspected links to terrorist groups? Precisely 679, said West German Lieut. Colonel Jurgen Reimann. How many terrorist incidents in all were there last year? Stinson, the former Green Beret, purported to know with incredible accuracy: 2,679 attacks were committed by 126 of the world's 174 existing terrorist groups.

In the exhibition hall, there were HEATPAC (a charcoal-fueled body heater), AudioPack (a body-mounted loudspeaker) and Med-Equip Pak 1 (a $285 first-aid kit). OK Safety Supply offered barricade tape, beard guards, butt snuffers (wall-hung ashtrays), toe guards and wasp killer (an aerosol insect spray), as well as a line of protective suits. John Weinel peddled all kinds of rescue equipment, including a shotgun that shoots a line 550 ft. and a switchblade disguised as a credit card. Auto Syringe, a microprocessor- controlled syringe pump, can be loaded with morphine and plugged into a doomed disaster victim. "People who are in their last days," explained Felix Mendigutia of Auto Syringe, "it makes it easier for them to die."

But it was prosaic, even homespun disaster advice that filled the days. Weinel, for instance, explained how to free people trapped underground. "I run with the National Cave Rescue Commission," he said. "There are 500 of us. I get a call about somebody trapped, I pack up and run. It's a lot of fun." Mostly. "I don't really like mines." How come? "They explode." Mike Hildebrand of the American Petroleum Institute dispensed advice about "haz- mat" -- hazardous materials. "Polyester shirts," he said, "are a hazardous material." But leaks and spills are the real dangers. "When the juice gets out of the can," went one hint from Hildebrand, "have your spill- control some distance from the problem so you don't get caught in a gas cloud or something."

Curiously, the real thing, nuclear war, was mentioned hardly at all. Federal Signal Corp. did push its big civil-defense sirens ("The wavering sound," explained Salesman Jerry Koster, "is when there's an actual attack"), but / only Walter Murphey came to Indianapolis eager to talk about war. Murphey, 73, is executive director of the American Civil Defense Association, an 800-member group that agitates, without much success, for federally funded bomb shelters. "That's our hang-up," he said. "Our reason for being is nuclear attack." Despite a voice just like Jimmy Stewart's and an utterly genial manner, Murphey sat alone in his exhibition booth almost the whole time he was there. "People aren't too interested," he admitted. "If we could just harness some of the enthusiasm that these folks show for natural disasters for civil defense . . ."

But no. "We have no capacity whatsoever to deal with nuclear war," said Reutershan of the Public Health Service, sounding offended by a chaos that beggared his means to cope. Indeed, for prac- tically everyone in the convention hall, nuclear war would be the ultimate professional frustration, not the ultimate challenge: With suffering and death so vast, whom to rescue and whom to mend? Where to erect the police barricades? Theirs is not so much a fascination with disaster as it is a half-religious, half-martial hankering to see what they can do to help. Nuclear holocaust would be too big to handle. Murphey, for all his quixotic zeal, understands perfectly the indifference to his brand of civil defense. "The idea of a huge disaster, a war -- that just floors people. They really won't think about it. But a fire, a flood, a tornado . . . Well," he said, "there you've got something you can work with."