Abstract
After a number of New Orleanians died from Hurricane Betsy, having fled to their attics only to find them-JL selves trapped there, many families learned the wisdom of keeping an axe in the attic. One story about such an axe involves a family that was deciding whether or not to evacuate in the face of an advancing hurricane. After the man of the household had decided the family would stay put, his mother-in-law, the matriarch of the clan, ask whether he had an axe in the attic. When he answered yes, she responded, “Good. After you use it to chop us out, I’m going to want you to give it to me, so I can kill you with it.” The family decided to evacuate after all.
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Notes
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* As helpfully pointed out in a personal communication from Edward Thomas (2009), this joke may have greater relevance in the United States than in a number of other industrialized countries. The official policy guidance in the United States, which comes from the U.S. Water Resources Council, effectively calls for levees to provide protection against the kinds of storms and floods that are expected to occur at least once in the next 100-500 years, depending on locations and circumstances, while countries such as Holland or Germany seek to build levees that will provide protection for as much as 10,000 years. In addition, policy guidance in the United States effectively calls for engineering estimates to have a 50/50 chance of being proved wrong by floods that occur within the period for which they are theoretically designed, rather than seeking the higher levels of confidence, such as 90-95 percent, that are more common in other industrialized nations—as well as in many other areas of safety engineering. Those who appreciate high levels of specificity, and any other readers who are gluttons for punishment, are encouraged to consult U.S. Geological Survey (1981) for further details.
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© 2009 William R. Freudenburg, Robert B. Gramling, Shirley B. Laska and Kai T. Erikson
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Freudenburg, W.R., Gramling, R., Laska, S., Erikson, K.T. (2009). The Axe in the Attic. In: Catastrophe in the Making. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-156-6_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-156-6_9
Publisher Name: Island Press, Washington, DC
Online ISBN: 978-1-61091-156-6
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