Memories of disaster fade fast

AFTER HURRICANE BETSY pummelled New Orleans in 1965, causing damage so severe that “Betsy” was retired from the rotating list of names given to Atlantic hurricanes, the Governor of Louisiana, John McKeithen, pledged that nothing like it would happen in his state again. Exactly 40 years later Hurricane Katrina brought even greater destruction to the city, and hazard planners were deemed to have ignored the lessons of the past. New research suggests that far from being an exception, Louisiana’s forgetfulness is the rule.Collective memory for past calamities is of more than just academic interest, precisely because resilience to future calamities is thought to depend on it. Most research on the subject has been conducted by social scientists who have tracked the durability of memories over years—at most a decade—usually by means of questionnaires. Researchers at the Czech University of Life Sciences, in Prague, led by environmental historian Václav Fanta, have approached the problem differently, investigating how memories of disasters shaped decisions over several generations.