Todd Zwillich: Welcome back to The Takeaway, I'm Todd Zwillich, and we return now to our ongoing coverage of hurricanes Harvey and Irma. Storms like these aren't new and that means that history probably has something important to teach us about how we deal with natural disasters like Harvey and Irma.

Caller 1: One thing we still need to learn as a society is the difference between coming together for mutual support versus help for exploitative profits and price gouging.

Caller 2: I was an EMT in New Jersey during Sandy, and I have to say the one lesson that we need to learn is to stop funding the stuff after the fact. During Sandy, resources became useless because regardless of the amount of money we couldn't get machines and equipment that we needed in time.

Caller 3: What I learned from being in past natural disasters, not to attach too much to my possession.

Todd Zwillich: Your voice is there sharing what you've learned in the wake of disasters like Irma and Harvey. In the midst of crises like these, it can be hard sometimes to see beyond the wreckage staring us right in the face. Some elected officials have said in recent days that it might even be inappropriate to try to look past the immediate suffering of the moment in search of lessons for the future. If history is any guide, catastrophe has always been part of the human experience and the American experience.

It made us wonder here if we are doing enough to try and learn from previous disasters. Scott Knowles is professor and head of the department of history at Drexel University, and he's author of the Disaster Experts: Mastering Risk in Modern America. Scott, welcome to The Takeaway.

Scott Knowles: Hi, Todd.

Todd Zwillich: You went on Twitter recently and said that disaster preparedness had kind of a golden age in this country, but now that we've forgotten many of the lessons from that age, what did you mean?

Scott Knowles: What I meant by that was that if you look in the 19th century we were facing some really existential problems in American cities. They were burning down, they were flooding, really enormous catastrophes. What came out of that actually was a really important era of research across the sciences, the social sciences, engineering, the built environment, and by the 1930s, we weren't having fires that were burning whole cities down anymore.

It was a coming together of many different types of expertise in the traditional American way that it's not going to flow from one government agency actually was pretty broad-based. We transformed urban life from something that was pretty dangerous and horrifying into something that was at least sustainable for that time. My concern is that those kinds of investments are not keeping up with the enhanced hazards that we're facing today, particularly from climate change, but also from 50 years of deferred maintenance on our infrastructures.

Todd Zwillich: Sometimes it's hard to remember, hard to really envision that all of these changes that you're talking about, really, were decades of work from hydrologists, engineers, seismologists, fire experts, really a massive effort. Right?

Scott Knowles: Absolutely. I think when we put a historical lens to that, the challenge is for us to get out of what I call event thinking. Looking at a disaster as a discreet event with a beginning, a middle, and an end, something that happened to us, but rather to move our thinking into what I like to think of as a slow disaster thinking. Let's look at these disasters and group them over years, decades, maybe even centuries.

I think, for example, the coastal hazards that we're looking at right now in Texas and Florida, those disasters are an accumulation of history of land-use decisions, deciding where people are going to live and where we're going to put our emphasis on keeping people safe as they look at these hazards.

Todd Zwillich: What does it take for a historian like you to convince planners, the public, the rest of us that Harvey and Irma are discreet events? Of course, they are and there's no doubt about it, but to take a longer view, a planning view, a more overarching view instead of just a disaster response view.

Scott Knowles: My experience in working with emergency managers over the engineers is that they're so busy working on the technical aspects of the problems they're facing or the operational aspects of their emergency managers. They don't have the time, the resources to do this longer-term thinking or to do what I try to do, which is to connect the past to the present by following very, maybe common sense things like the law, politicians come and go, but the law carries on.

If a historian can provide some context for the national flood insurance program, for example, or for land-use pattern in Florida and Texas, that's something that a lot of those practitioners don't have time to do. I think that's some of the important work. I think there's another role to it as well that people who engage historical thinking can bring to this, which is to tell the story of victims across time.

To talk about the suffering, to talk about the injustice of disaster doesn't affect people equally across time and space, so I think we can tell that story. There's also a role for museums and memorials too. After disaster, I think we have a duty to learn technical lessons, but also I think maybe broader societal lessons about what happened, and September 11, I think we've done a pretty good job with that. With coastal storms, hurricanes the last 20 years, we haven't done as good of a job trying to memorialize them or learn from them in a formal way.

Todd Zwillich: All right. Well, Scott Knowles, put yourself in that place then. Let's imagine a massive zoning planning meeting in Houston, I don't know, 15 years ago where the zoning board or the local politicians are saying, "Yes, we should build a new neighborhood in this basin over here, in this certain neighborhood. That's a flood plain, we don't really have to worry about it." Scott Knowles, you have the chance to come bursting through the door and warn them about what?

Scott Knowles: I'm going to have a handful of maps. I'm going to have oral histories of people who suffered from previous disasters. I think also I'm going to try to draw their attention, again, to the way that decisions like zoning affect people differently. I don't think politicians or planners set out to try to achieve injustice in the way that they develop land, but the fact is that often that's exactly what occurs.

I think those stories of individuals who find themselves in harm's way because of, let's say, the inheritance of racial segregation patterns. Those are important stories to tell. These are not just spinning yarns around the campfire about disasters of yore, we're talking about justice and injustice and dollars and cents. Hopefully, that would get their attention, and then when I have their attention then we can get into the nitty-gritty of building codes, and land use, and zoning, and things like that.

Todd Zwillich: Scott Knowles is one historian who thinks that he can and should get the attention of planners, politicians, and city officials all over the country to get them to take a longer view of disasters and disaster preparedness in this country. Scott Knowles is professor and head of the department of history at Drexel University. He's author of The Disaster Experts: Mastering Risk in Modern America. Scott Knowles, thank you for being here.

Scott Knowles: Good to talk to you, Todd.

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