Salon: Some natural disasters -- the earth-shattering, world-ending kind -- we can`t prepare for. But smaller disasters, cataclysmic on a local scale, strike all the time. And yet each time they do, they never fail to take us by surprise.
The problem isn`t so much that we can`t anticipate disasters, says geologist Susan W. Kieffer, but that the public, and policy makers, don`t understand the way they work as well as they should. In "The Dynamics of Disaster," Kieffer, a professor emerita of geology at...