Amanda Ripley s The Unthinkable, She Covers Disasters...

When I lived in Los Angeles during high school, me and my neighbor Brandon would frequently take the Metro train to get to school. While we waited for the train, we would occasionally hear the automated intercom say, â€Å"In case of an emergency, don’t hesitate to locate the nearest emergency phones or Metro sheriff.† This recurring message was often ignored by us as well as passengers who were occupied with other things or had earphones in. The problem with this is, if an emergency or disaster happened at that moment, we wouldn’t know how to properly engage in saving ourselves. There were no specific instructions on what we could do in case an emergency arises. In Amanda Ripley’s The Unthinkable, she covers disasters when they happen and how†¦show more content†¦Social media and technology in general can provide valuable tools to reduce those gaps (Wukich Mergel, 2015). Another reason the majority are not in readiness of an emergency situation is because, as Dennis Mileti stated, â€Å" Individuals underperceive risk† (Ripley 43). As a person who has been studying ways to warn people of disasters for over 30 years, Mileti believes that we tend to discount low probability, high consequence events. When we think of a disaster, the routine thought is to assume that the probability is so low that it could never possibly happen to us. â€Å"Not this plane ride, not this drive, not this time† is what we tell ourselves, making us doubt the high risk situation. In Chapter 2 of Ripley’s book, she recounts an interview that she did with the daughter of a man who underestimated the power of Hurricane Katrina. The 85 year old man, Patrick Turner, had survived the past two hurricanes that hit Louisiana before Katrina did (Ripley 24). When he heard of the arrival of Hurricane Katrina, he did not take it as serious as he should have because th e warnings the government gave about this tsunami were the same as the last two and the last two hurricanes ended up not being that bad. Before the last hurricane, Turner spent over 10 hours on the road evacuating only to find out that it was not severe. Because of the wrong preparation