Psychology

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After having survived the tornadoes of Kentucky, the hurricanes of Florida and the snowstorms of Boston, Linda Smith Frost feels that natural disasters are a way of life that can’t be avoided.

“I have no control over nature, so basically I just try to deal with it when it happens,” said the marketing executive.

Earlier this year, Frost canceled the earthquake insurance policy on her Culver City home which isn’t bolted to its foundation because she felt that the price wasn’t worth the investment.

“From what I understand, the quasi-government agency handling insurance could run out of money should an earthquake occur, so where would that leave us?” Frost said. “It doesn’t make much sense to pay for something that you may never might see.”

Such fatalism is one aspect of the psychology of disaster. Living in the fault zone, Angelenos are well aware that a catastrophic earthquake could strike at any moment. But they feel powerless to do anything about it and that powerlessness even leads to a kind of inertia when it comes to taking preventative measures.

“People are simply fatalistic about disasters,” said Tupper Hull, spokesman for the California Earthquake Authority. “They feel an earthquake will be so bad, there isn’t anything they can do and everybody will be in the same situation they are.”

If fatalism is one common coping strategy, so is ignoring the problem entirely. Thinking too much about earthquakes can lead to great anxiety, and who needs that?

“You would think that most people would have a heightened sense of fear, especially following the two quakes in California in the past 10 years,” said Elizabeth Carll, a New York psychologist who specializes in stress and crisis management during disasters. “But there’s still an element of denial. People avoid the issue, thereby avoiding the accompanying uncomfortable anxiety.”

The topic is top of mind following a disaster, such as the recent horrors in Turkey and Taiwan. But the urgency ebbs over time.

“When the Richter scale moves, we get lots of interest in our education seminars. Then 30 days later, something else occupies their attention,” said Joseph Kaplan, president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Safety Council, a non-profit organization dedicated to saving human life. “And, as the years pass, they feel that if they can survive one quake, they can survive another. They become invincible.”

It isn’t as though the public is unaware of potential dangers. The Insurance Research Council performed a survey during the first half of this year which found that six in 10 Americans believe a natural disaster might occur in their area in the next 10 years. That figure represents a 12 percent jump from the 1995 survey.

UCLA’s Center for Public Health and Disaster Relief recently completed a study showing that Angelenos have become more focused on earthquake preparedness since the Northridge quake, but their efforts tend to be minimal.

Some 50 percent of L.A. County residents have an emergency preparedness kit, said UCLA assistant professor Kimberly Shoaf, a 40 percent improvement over a decade ago. Typically, the kit contains five essentials: a flashlight, radio, first aid, food and water.

But Shoaf doesn’t believe that’s enough.

“People are slowly getting the message, but I would like to see that figure rise to 100 percent,” she said. “These are very easy things to do at a very low cost to the individual. There really isn’t an excuse.”

For all the dangers of complacency, there is a flip side to the psychology of earthquakes. While it’s important to have a healthy respect for the possibility of a disaster, focusing too much on the prospect can lead to an unhealthy existence.

“You can live your life in a constant state of fear and be paralyzed into inactivity,” said Dr. Paul Rosch, president of the American Institute of Stress in New York and former professor of medicine and psychiatry at New York Medical College.

Rosch cites Hurricane Floyd as an example of exaggerated doom and gloom.

“People in Florida were in a state of shock anticipating damage. For five or six days, you couldn’t find anything in supermarkets and hardware stores as people stockpiled,” he said. “Then, it turned out, the estimates were incorrect and that widespread panic wasn’t justified.”

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