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After HURRICANE BETSY pummelled New Orleans in 1965,
1965年颶風(fēng)貝齊席卷新奧爾良后，
causing damage so severe that "Betsy" was retired from the rotating list of names given to Atlantic hurricanes,
造成了非常嚴重的破壞，以至于“貝齊”從命名大西洋颶風(fēng)的輪班名單上退位，
the Governor of Louisiana, John McKeithen, pledged that nothing like it would happen in his state again.
美國路易斯安那州州長約翰·麥基森承諾本州再也不會發(fā)生類似災(zāi)害。
Exactly 40 years later Hurricane Katrina brought even greater destruction to the city,
正好40年后， 颶風(fēng)卡特里娜對這個城市造成了更嚴重的破壞，
and hazard planners were deemed to have ignored the lessons of the past.
災(zāi)害部門被認為忽視了過去的教訓(xùn)。
New research suggests that far from being an exception, Louisiana's forgetfulness is the rule.
新研究表明路易斯安那州的健忘絕非例外而是常事。
Collective memory for past calamities is of more than just academic interest,
對過去災(zāi)害的集體記憶不僅僅是出于學(xué)術(shù)興趣
precisely because resilience to future calamities is thought to depend on it.
更準(zhǔn)確的說是因為對未來災(zāi)害的恢復(fù)力被認為取決于這種記憶。
Most research on the subject has been conducted by social scientists
關(guān)于該主題的大部分研究都由社會科學(xué)家進行，
who have tracked the durability of memories over years—at most a decade—usually by means of questionnaires.
他們通常通過調(diào)查問卷的形式對多年—最多十年—的記憶持久度進行跟蹤研究。
Researchers at the Czech University of Life Sciences, in Prague, led by environmental historian Vaclav Fanta,
布拉格捷克大學(xué)生命科學(xué)系的研究人員在環(huán)境歷史學(xué)家Vaclav Fanta的帶領(lǐng)下
have approached the problem differently, investigating how memories of disasters shaped decisions over several generations.
通過調(diào)查災(zāi)難記憶如何影響幾代人的決策，用不同方式理解這個問題。
In a paper published recently in Nature Communications,
近期在《Nature Communications》發(fā)表的一篇論文中，
they analysed data on almost 1,300 towns and villages in the Vltava river basin in central Europe
他們分析了中歐地區(qū)伏爾塔瓦河流域近1300個小鎮(zhèn)和村莊的數(shù)據(jù)
—drawing both on historical records and on archaeological methods such as carbon dating—
—選取了它們的歷史數(shù)據(jù)和考古方法，如碳測定年代—
and compared them with the timings of floods in that basin over the course of nearly 900 years.
并對該流域近900年間發(fā)洪水的時機進行比較。
The floods studied were defined as extreme, meaning that the river's run-off was in excess of 4,000 cubic metres per second,
該團隊研究的洪水均被定義為極端災(zāi)害，這意味著該條河流的流量超過了4000立方米每秒，
or almost 30 times its normal rate. Such mega-floods occur, on average, less than once a century,
幾乎是正常速度的30倍。這種特大洪水發(fā)生的平均次數(shù)為一世紀(jì)不足一次，
and the researchers recorded seven of them, the first in 1118 and the last in 1845.
研究人員記錄了其中的7起，第一起是在1118年，最后一起是在1845年。
In each case, new settlements appeared a significantly higher vertical distance above the river's normal level
在每種情況下，新建定居點的垂直距離都比洪水前同片區(qū)域定居點高，
than settlements built in the same area before the flood, and continued to do so for 25 years (about a generation) after the deluge.
且高于河流的正常水位，這種情況在洪水發(fā)生后持續(xù)了25年（約一代人）。
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