Jump off or stay onboard? Recasting the shipwreck metaphor for emergency management

“[Lucretius] imagines observing, from the safety of the shore, other people who are at peril on the storm-tossed sea. . .” Hans Blumenberg (1997). Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a metaphor for existence. Translated by Steven Rendall, The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA

I

Hans Blumenberg, the German historian, underscores that being at sea was not the preferred state of affairs in early Greek and Roman times. That was the purpose of terra firma. Now even terra firma is compared to being anchored while in uneasy waters. In this way, being shipwrecked or falling overboard applies both to being at sea and on land.

Those who don’t drown outright try keeping afloat by grabbing onto whatever is at hand. Try to improvise a raft—or to be tossed up on the shore, itself now a raft of a different sort. If there is any longer term hope it is to render whatever the raft into something more seaworthy.

II

What does this mean practically?

Assume the raft we—that is, the survivors so far—have made for ourselves is a cobbled-together set of re-made critical infrastructures. As when retrofitting bridges and patching up levees are what’s left from prior failures and workarounds.

Why would we now leave this raft—this large-scale water system, this electricity grid—and start over again? Or are we to imagine that jumping overboard now means survival doesn’t also depend on improvising a raft from the debris already there? Clearly, we need different infrastructures, but it is still more reliable and safe infrastructures being sought regardless.

III

So what?

The chief implication is that alternative infrastructures said to make for “calmer conditions” (e.g., micro-grids at smaller scales) nevertheless involve their own adventures and risks.

That educated and informed people regardless stay at sea (as in earthquake zones) even if they can get away tells us something about their—and our—preferences for safety with respect to the known unknowns of where they and we live and work versus safety with respect to unknown-unknowns of doing otherwise.

Which, in case it needs saying, means the shipwreck we see from the safety of the shore is the least objective of them all.

IV

One last point. The “shipwreck metaphor” that interests Blumenberg is actually several. That is, in crises we all are like:

• spectators on the shore looking out to that storm-tossed ship; or
• shipwrecked survivors trying to keep afloat by clasping onto a plank or other debris, only later to be tossed up on a shore, if at all; or
• those who keep rebuilding the ship while at sea, storm after storm, since returning to port is not possible nor is finding any nearby shore.

Note that the significant shift from ship-as-wrecked to survivor-on-their-own. Efforts to restore critical infrastructure services, even if temporarily during immediate emergency response, become a key operational interconnection between the individual as unit of analysis and the infrastructure as a reconstructed unit of analysis. It is that interconnection that is glossed, perhaps often too vaguely, as “building in resilience” as if the next storm is as important as the current one.