Podcast on Hawaii Volcano Recovery

Volcanoes pose a unique challenge for hazard mitigation and post-disaster recovery in the parts of the world where they occur. In the United States, these regions are along the Pacific Rim and in the middle of the ocean itself—in other words, the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, and Hawaii. In Hawaii, an archipelago that grew from volcanic eruptions over millions of years, all active volcanoes are located on the island of Hawai’i, also known as the Big Island because, as Hawai’i County planner Douglas Le notes, the land area of all the other major islands could be fit into this one land mass.

As I have done with previous installments of the American Planning Association’s Resilience Roundtable podcast series, for which I have been host for the last year and a half, I am providing this brief introduction with a link to the podcast on the APA website. The series is sponsored by the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division, of which I am currently chair.

The subject of this podcast is Hawai’i County’s planning for recovery from the numerous impacts of the 2018 Kilauea volcanic eruption, which buried homes in its path and disrupted life in several subdivisions on a largely rural and agricultural island. The issues involve displacement, social equity, native land rights, environmental quality, and economic recovery, to name a few. Please take time to listen to this 52-minute exchange between me and Douglas Le, disaster recovery officer for the county planning department, and learn more than you may have imagined about how planning can help address this fascinating problem.

Click here to listen.

Jim Schwab

Charting a Path to Sustainability

A presidential transition has always been a time to look forward in American history, anticipating change, contemplating new directions. Sometimes we like the new direction, sometimes we don’t; sometimes we think it just doesn’t go far enough to remedy the problems we face. But never have we faced the narcissistic spectacle of a president unwilling to release his grip on power. Every president before Donald Trump has been enough of a patriot to cooperate with a new president of the opposite party, and losing candidates who never ascended to the White House have been willing to concede. It is extremely unfortunate that some Americans are trying to deny others the right to focus on defining a more positive future.

But they are only trying because the right to map out an alternative future is still ours. The capacity to imagine a different future is one of the defining characteristics of a society that is capable of renewal, resilience, and sustainability. It is vitally important that civic leaders, academics, and authors help us clarify the truth of our past and map out paths to a better future. And, presidential transitions notwithstanding, it can and should happen below the national level, to help states and communities explore their unique history and their opportunities.

It is in that context that I wish to introduce readers to Green, Fair, and Prosperous: Paths to a Sustainable Iowa, the work of Charles E. Connerly, who by next summer will be retiring as professor and the director of the University of Iowa School of Urban and Regional Planning, recently renamed the School of Planning and Public Affairs after Connerly’s successful push to incorporate a Master’s in Public Affairs to the program’s offerings. Connerly has been at Iowa since 2008 since migrating back to his Midwestern roots after a long tenure at Florida State University in Tallahassee. As a matter of full disclosure, he was also responsible for hiring me as an adjunct assistant professor to teach one course each fall that has come to be known as Planning for Disaster Mitigation and Recovery. His many years at Florida State, working alongside Robert Deyle, a colleague who worked with me on disaster issues as far back as the 1990s, made him supremely aware of the importance of addressing hazards in the planning process. I was hired in the immediate aftermath of the massive 2008 floods in Iowa.

Connerly (in gray jacket) during a 2014 field trip of post-flood redevelopment in Cedar Rapids.

Connerly is truly a comprehensive thinker in the best planning tradition, and this book shows it. While I am certain, because of publishing schedules, that he had completed his manuscript before the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police over the Memorial Day weekend, his book is incredibly timely in the fall of 2020 because of his focus on the history of racial and ethnic disparities in Iowa. In fact, Chapter 4 is simply titled, “Why Is Iowa So White?”

Indeed, that is a very good question. It is not just a matter of Iowa being farm country. After growing up in the Cleveland metro area in Ohio, then moving to Iowa in January 1979 before ultimately enrolling in graduate school at the University of Iowa, I remember being struck by the apparent lack of diversity, especially outside the handful of cities above, say, 50,000 people. There is, after all, industry in these cities, and industry has often attracted multiracial work forces. Unless, that is, political and social forces intervene to prevent such an outcome. Most people, however, never notice such forces at work and never learn about them in school. History can be very silent about such matters unless diligent researchers insist on exposing that legacy to sunshine, aka “the best disinfectant.”

Connerly digs deep on this topic, all the way back to antebellum Iowa politics. Sitting just north of Missouri, a slave-holding border state, Iowa was both a frontier of the Underground Railroad and a harbor of typical northern mixed feelings about African Americans. In 1850, Iowa was no less than 99.8 percent white, and did not dip below 99 percent, Connerly notes, until 1970. Since then, there has been a substantial growth in minority populations. But African Americans have historically been concentrated in just four urban counties. All that said, it was also the Iowa Democratic caucuses in 2008 that launched Barack Obama on a streaking path to the presidency. What accounts for this paradoxical history?

From the early days of statehood, Iowa suffered from a typical northern moral conflict between supporting emancipation and not particularly wanting too many blacks in the neighborhood. That is not putting too fine a point on the matter. Connerly notes that before the Civil War, Iowa had enacted laws banning blacks from the state. The territory avoided enacting such black codes to win statehood, but once that was achieved, Iowa legislators had no problem backtracking on the issue. The bottom line was that Iowans, overall, opposed slavery but did not necessarily favor civil rights for freed slaves.

That changed somewhat after the Civil War, with Radical Republicans pushing through changes that liberalized matters considerably, but it was only following World War II and through the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s that serious, permanent change began to occur. By that time, however, previous history had done its work in making African Americans largely feel unwelcome. Iowa stayed overwhelmingly white, but not entirely by accident. At the same time, the state has been receptive to refugees, for example, after the Vietnam war, and remarkably progressive on some other issues. Northwest Iowa elected the remarkably ignorant Steve King to Congress, but Republicans themselves dethroned him in this year’s June primary.

Prior to white settlement and the rise of modern agriculture, much of the Iowa landscape enjoyed by Indians consisted of prairie. Photo by Suzan Erem

Connerly writes that African Americans were not the only minorities to feel the impact of 19th-century American racism. Before European settlement, which took place in earnest only after Iowa became part of the United States following the Louisiana Purchase, fourteen Native American nations had, over millennia, occupied some part of what became Iowa. Before the 1800s, their interaction with Europeans was largely through trade, but eventually their land ended up in the hands of white settlers. The short answer as to how that happened is simple: “We took it from them.” Today, only the Mesquaki settlement in Tama remains as a reminder of the formerly dominant Native American presence.

The Hispanic presence, and that of various Asian minorities, is a product of more recent history, some of it involving the evolution of labor relations, particularly in agriculture and meat processing plants, but today there is a distinct, but distinctly disadvantaged, Hispanic presence. It is no accident that earlier this year, some of the most intense controversy over coronavirus spread in states like Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota involved minority workers in the meat-packing industry and deficiencies in safety protocols among the companies involved. In a whole chapter dealing with labor issues over time in both the food and agricultural equipment industries, one can see the steady decline of leverage among white-dominated labor unions and the rise of cheap labor and mass production within the industry as it is today. It is hardly a stretch to suggest that these social and economic changes have had profound impacts on, and implications for, the future of Iowa’s economy and society. Iowa did not shift from supporting Obama in 2008 and 2012 to Trump in 2016 and 2020 without some massive strains within the body politic. How those tensions are resolved will go a long way toward determining whether Iowa can chart a successful path to a sustainable future, as Connerly’s book suggests. Iowans will have serious work ahead in improving social equity while adjusting to a changing demographic makeup across the state.

But I do not wish to create the impression that the book is strictly focused on such demographic issues, as important and critical as they are. It is important to notice that Connerly has tied together the issues of environmental health, fairness, and prosperity in his title. His larger point is that all these questions are inextricably related. To quote some planners I have known, “Everything is connected to everything else.”

Connerly takes us on a detailed, well-documented tour not only of Iowa’s demographic history, but of its environmental and economic history as well. Iowa clearly entered statehood as a predominantly rural, agricultural state, though not necessarily producing the corn and soybeans that predominate now. Originally, in fact, it grew more wheat, but trends shifted to corn and hogs. But the state is still heavily dependent on agriculture, with 43 percent of its 2015 manufacturing centered on either food processing or machinery used in agricultural production. These two gave rise in the twentieth century to some powerful unions representing workers who were largely able to achieve a blue-collar version of middle-class prosperity. Hogs, supported by state laws exempting agriculture from county zoning laws, gave rise to the growth of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) in the past 40 years, and the meat-packing industry itself became more concentrated and able to mechanize increasingly and replace high-wage jobs with lower-wage mass production and weaker unions. The people working in the newer factories are definitely more racially diverse but definitely not more empowered and definitely paid less. The growing inequities have resulted in a shrinking middle class.

One factor that distinguished the Iowa packing plants prior to the major, union-busting shifts of the 1970s and 1980s was that the plants were closer to the farms, and thus, unlike larger plants in Chicago and Kansas City, bought animals directly from farmers. Connerly maps out the consequences in urban development for Iowa, namely, that Iowa never developed the metropolitan magnets of neighboring states like Minnesota, Missouri, and Illinois because of the dominance of the Twin Cities, Chicago, and Kansas City, and instead has a number of smaller cities, the largest being Des Moines, which has about 215,000 people, though the entire metro area is about three times that size. Smaller cities have mostly grown around agriculture-related industries.

All this has had significant consequences not only for quality of life but the quality of the environment, with water quality problems arising from rural land use issues such as CAFOs, soil erosion, and nitrate concentrations in groundwater. Connerly’s final chapter asks whether Iowa truly is the “best state in the nation,” a title bestowed in 2018 by U.S. News and World Report. As a former Iowan, I do not offer this review as a way of trashing the state, nor does Connerly offer his book in that spirit, but the question is an opportunity to explore the complexity of a state that too many elsewhere see as simply white and rural. Iowa, with the right policies, the right incentives, and the right opportunities, has the potential to create a healthy environment and economy, but it must examine current trends and determine how to reverse those that are moving the state in the wrong direction. The last chapter is a succinct compendium of recommendations for moving Iowa toward a growing middle class, a healthier environment with better recreational opportunities, and a progressive approach toward making agriculture more ecologically sound and resilient in the face of natural hazards, most notably, floods.

Testing facility of the Iowa Flood Center, 2019.

The state has created some interesting mechanisms for doing this, but has a stubborn habit in recent years of shooting itself in the foot. In 1987, the legislature wisely passed the Groundwater Protection Act, which created the Aldo Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University, which has done remarkable research on establishing a balance between economic and environmental needs in agricultural practices. Yet, in recent years, the legislature has significantly limited state funding for the center at the behest of corporate agricultural interests. In 2010, following the devastating floods in 2008, the legislature funded creation of the Iowa Flood Center at the University of Iowa, which has become a model in advancing flood prediction and mitigation that other states are considering copying, yet some question the need for continued funding. It is almost as if Iowa wants to replicate the larger national battle between science and an increasingly poisonous distrust of “experts.” Would it not be better to marshal and support the best intellectual resources Iowa can muster for an assessment of the opportunities that lie ahead?

Connerly points out, in contrast, how Iowa could take the lead in solving problems like climate change and excessive nutrient runoff in the Mississippi River basin that leads to both groundwater contamination locally and hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico. This last chapter is the biggest single reason to read the book, but its logic is only fully clear after reading the thorough research that precedes it.

My final comment is that it may seem that this is a book that is primarily or perhaps solely relevant to Iowans. I think that conclusion, however, would be short-sighted. While I am profoundly aware of the many books others have produced about other states, regions, and metropolitan areas across the U.S., I think it is vitally important that other scholars across the nation undertake similar efforts to assess the path to sustainability for their own states, regions, and cities. We could sorely use such a book in Illinois, and the same is probably true for every neighboring state. As I suggested at the outset, it is not enough to chart a new national path. We need these serious explorations at subnational levels as well. In that sense, I believe Connerly has done a major service for the Hawkeye state. I’d like to see more such books.

Jim Schwab

Truly Hard Wind

What in the U.S. Midwest would spur comparisons to a hurricane? What could spread damage over an equally wide area? It is a good bet that most people are unfamiliar with the word “derecho,” which comes from Spanish, meaning “straight,” but such a storm made itself felt just three weeks ago in Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana, as well as parts of Nebraska and Wisconsin. The Spanish word with an adopted meaning in English refers to such a storm’s powerful straight-line winds, as opposed to another adapted Spanish word, “tornado,” literally meaning “turned,” which, of course, refers to a cyclonic, or spinning, meteorological phenomenon.

The Event

On August 10, a derecho took shape in eastern Nebraska and the southeastern corner of South Dakota early in the morning. The city of Omaha suffered some of the initial damage, with an estimated 57,000 people losing power. But as it roared across the center of Iowa, the storm, as derechos often do, rapidly gained wind speed until estimated winds of 140 miles per hour struck Cedar Rapids and surrounding Linn County in eastern Iowa. Nearby Iowa City, home of the University of Iowa, also suffered extensive damage. Derechos can and typically do strike with little warning, unlike hurricanes, but even at speeds of 90 to 100 mph, in this case, it still takes hours to cross Iowa from west to east, and even longer to reach Illinois and Indiana.

Thus, my first warning of what was to come, sitting here in Chicago, was a telephone alert from the University of Iowa around noon that day. I get such alerts because I am on the faculty, although I now teach remotely as an adjunct. But our landline and my cell phone are on the system, so the alerts come automatically. Fortunately, that gave me most of the afternoon to prepare for what was coming, which arrived in our area around 3:45 p.m. Winds and rain pounded on our skylights for nearly 45 minutes, leaving numerous branches and twigs on the ground from our stately American elm, which towers above our house and garage and has probably withstood other storms for at least a century. It was already huge when we built our house in 1994, and we chose to make it sure it remained. Even this storm caused it only minor damage.

The same could not be said of many street trees in parts of Chicago. Trees often collapsed on top of parked cars, leaving many owners to bemoan what became of their vehicles—or, in some cases, the roofs of their homes.

Even the repose of the dead was not left undisturbed. Graceland Cemetery, one of the more famous in Chicago, faces months of repairs and replanting and is closed for six weeks. The storm uprooted about 40 trees and damaged numerous gravestones and monuments. It had become a popular place for peaceful strolls and contemplation during the months of coronavirus-induced shutdown. After the storm, it was a visual mess that will cost about $250,000 to repair.

Removing damaged trees in Chicago’s Rogers Park.

One lesser-known by-product of derechos is tornadoes, which can be spun off from the shelf cloud as it moves through an area. In Chicago, two tornadoes, one EF-1 in the Rogers Park neighborhood along Lake Michigan near the city line with Evanston, literally buzzsawed trees in an area of densely built multifamily housing and small

Insurance claims agents inspect building damage in Rogers Park.

businesses. A few days later, I visited the area to shoot photos that appear here. At first, driving up Greenwood Avenue, I wondered where the damage was. But as I drove further north and approached W. Jarvis Ave., the answer became starkly obvious. I could not drive beyond that corner because the street was blocked; Jarvis was one way going east, but Jarvis east of Greenwood was also blocked. City trucks were removing damaged trees. After finding a way to park without impeding traffic, I encountered insurance agents on the ground shooting outside photos of nearby buildings, presumably for damaged masonry. Any damaged cars had already been removed.

That tornado, and another that reportedly skipped across the Eisenhower Expressway (I-290) on the West Side, dramatically demolished for some an old urban myth that tornadoes don’t strike urban areas. People believe this for various reasons, including how they think tall buildings disrupt wind circulation, but trust me: I’ve been involved in disaster recovery long enough to know that tornadoes do not discriminate against smaller towns. Rogers Park is very urban. Tornadoes go where they please. This specific tornado eventually skipped out over the lake, becoming a waterspout. But it left its mark.

The storm, by the way, ultimately spun off at least 17 documented tornadoes, mostly in northern Illinois, but a few in Wisconsin and Indiana. All were either EF-1 or EF-0 on the Enhanced Fujita scale. But by far, most of the damage resulted from the straight-line winds themselves, which were often in the range of 90 to 100 mph, with a top measured speed of 126 mph in Atkins, Iowa, making them basically of tornado or hurricane strength. And they sped, over the course of a single afternoon, across all or parts of several states.

By 4:30, the storm had continued its march into northwest Indiana, where it finally petered out. But what happened along the way?

Iowans can attest that it functioned across much of their state like a Category 2, maybe even Category 3, hurricane. Lyz Lenz, a columnist for the Cedar Rapids Gazette, noted in a guest column for the Washington Post four days later that the winds had damaged “more than 10 million acres, or 43 percent, of the state’s corn and soybean crop.” The reduction in harvest in Iowa is likely to be between one-fourth and one-half. The heading on her column referred to the storm as an “inland hurricane” that most people had not heard about. The damage was massive enough to be visible in satellite images.

The damage was not just to crops on the ground, but to hundreds of millions of bushels in storage bins on farms and in commercial storage facilities, according to the Iowa Department of Agriculture. Toppled grain bins were a common site.

Damage to Chinese House roof in Grinnell. Photo by Rachel Bly.

Despite those staggering figures, that was only the beginning. Between Indiana and Iowa, four people died from either falling trees or electrocution, and, in one case, a mobile home tipped over by high winds. Losses of electric power affected approximately 585,000 Iowans, or roughly 20 percent, while 1.9 million lost power in neighboring Illinois. Tree damage in Linn County totaled in the hundreds of thousands, and most buildings suffered anywhere from mild to catastrophic damage. In small towns, like Grinnell, building damage and tree damage to cars was also extensive. Here, I wish to thank Rachel Bly, director of Conference Operations and Events for Grinnell College, for sending me dozens of photographs she shot after the event. Bly, I might note, has a certificate in emergency management from Park University in addition to her MPA from Drake University. The images she shared help convey some reality to the trauma that occurred. Hundreds of other small communities suffered similar impacts. Not surprisingly, Gov. Kim Reynolds issued a state disaster declaration by August 14 for 25 counties, and has sought a federal declaration from President Trump, citing an estimated $4 billion in damages. By August 19, Trump had signed a declaration for Public Assistance (PA) but not Individual Assistance (IA) for Iowa. PA provides aid for restoring public infrastructure, such as roads and bridges and community facilities, while IA provides direct aid to individuals for reasons such as loss of housing.

Power line damage in Grinnell. Photo by Rachel Bly.

Photo by Rachel Bly

Roof seen through the window. Photo by Rachel Bly.

Inside a damaged salon in Grinnell. Photo by Rachel Bly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Derechos as a Natural Hazard

All this raises the question of what we know about derechos as a wind-related hazard. I will confess that I spent most of my life never having heard the word, let alone understanding what it meant. It is not the most common occurrence, but it certainly ranks among the most destructive. To my surprise, I learned from Wikipedia that the term was coined in 1888 by a German-American scientist, Gustavus Detlef Hinrichs, who had emigrated to St. Louis just before the Civil War. He wrote in the American Meteorological Journal about a storm that struck Iowa in 1877 and described its unique characteristics. Nonetheless, even in the Midwest today, many people are unfamiliar with the term—until they hear it on the news, as they did on August 10 amid storm warnings.  

The gust front “arcus” cloud on the leading edge of a derecho-producing storm system. The photo was taken on the evening of July 10, 2008 in Hampshire, Illinois. Credit: Brittney Misialek. From National Weather Service website.

There are several types of derechos, but the National Weather Service describes a derecho as a “widespread, long-lived windstorm that is associated with a band of rapidly moving showers as thunderstorms.” More specifically, it defines the phenomenon as a swath of damage that “extends more than 240 miles (about 400 kilometers) and includes wind gusts of at least 58 mph (93 km/h) or greater along most of its length.” In plain English, this is a huge, regional storm, not some localized thunderstorm. It exhibits straight-line winds that can be at least double the minimum in the definition, and the August 10 event involved winds far above 58 mph in most locations. Like all such storms, it is a product of unstable atmospheric systems, in this case typically involving a bow-shaped front in a large squall line.

The storms are typically a mid-latitude phenomenon, making North America and the Midwestern U.S. particularly susceptible, but they occur elsewhere in the world as well, including southern latitudes (southeastern Brazil and Argentina), South Africa, China, and even eastern Europe, where a derecho struck parts of Estonia in August 2010, and near Berlin in Germany in 2002. The August 10 event was not the first one I have witnessed in Chicago—another struck in July 2011 and disabled electric power for nearly a million people—but it was certainly the largest in a long time.

70% of all derechos occur between the months of May-August (the warm season). The other 30% occur during the cool season. From National Weather Service website.

As a mitigation planning response, almost no hazard mitigation plan (produced for FEMA approval as a condition of eligibility for federal hazard mitigation grants) for any state or community east of the Rockies (with the possible exception of Florida) should fail to identify derechos as a potential hazard. Moreover, especially in the Midwest, it may be time for states and communities to reexamine their building codes for wind resistance as a means of limiting future damages from derechos. Finally, it may also be time for many communities to examine more closely their urban forestry programs for adequate attention to hazardous tree management. That does not mean refusing to plant trees or removing them unnecessarily as a mindless precaution. It does mean engaging professional urban foresters in an assessment of the urban tree canopy with an eye to ensuring forest health and removing those trees that are most likely to fail under severe wind pressure. Already, the call has arisen for such reforms in Chicago. It is time for planners, environmentalists, disaster professionals, open space advocates, and concerned citizens to seize the moment while they have the public’s attention.

Jim Schwab

Gratitude on Parade #4

GRATITUDE ON PARADE
#gratitudeonparade
I am devoting much of this week to people who contributed in significant ways to my early publishing career. For the last 35 years or more, I have mixed journalism and writing skills with technical and professional knowledge to fulfill my aspirations. Many people helped make that possible.

One of them was my advisor for the master’s program in journalism at the University of Iowa, John Erickson. I have no photo to offer from way back then or more recently. He is now emeritus professor, and I hope enjoying a well-earned retirement, but I have not heard from him in a long while.

Nonetheless, way back in early 1984, when I needed to decide on a master’s project to complete my degree requirements, I met with him to state that I wanted to turn my project into a published book when I was through. We had the choice of a practical journalistic project or an academic investigation on some subject related to mass communications. I chose the former, in the form of an oral history project concerning a major issue in Iowa at the time–the growing farm credit crisis.

Completely unfazed by my audacity, John quickly wrote out two titles of books he thought would help me think through my strategy. Both concerned oral history and interviewing techniques. I ordered the books, went to work, and began networking across the Midwest to find farmers to interview on the subject, eventually taping interviews with more than 70. When I had about 140 pages of a book completed, John insisted that was enough for the project and I should turn them in–and complete the book later. Three years after earning my degree, Raising Less Corn and More Hell was released by University of Illinois Press. Only after that, for fear of jinxing success, did he tell me it was the first master’s project in the school’s history, at least to his knowledge, to achieve commercial publication. But he provided steady encouragement all along the way and always seemed to know I could pull it off. Call him my chief enabler. I never gave him nearly enough credit, so this is my feeble partial payment. Thanks, John, wherever you are.

Posted on Facebook 1/22/19

GRATITUDE ON PARADE
#gratitudeonparade
Two days ago, I noted the important role played by Professor John Erickson in the development of my first book. As i roamed the Midwest collecting the interviews that were at the core of Raising Less Corn and More Hell, there were many people who were helpful, but some were especially supportive of my project from the moment we first met.

Among those people were Gary and Mary Beth Janssen. Gary went through tough times as a farmer in northern Iowa, and he and Mary Beth eventually moved to Emporia, Kansas, after she studied to become a teacher. In Kansas, Gary began to grow organic vegetables and provided fresh produce to local schools for school lunches.

But in the 1980s, while I was researching and writing my book, Gary provided numerous contacts and referrals within the farming community to make my work possible. We grew close enough that he and Mary Beth drove to Omaha for our wedding in June 1985. After the book was published, Gary was an enthusiastic grass roots promoter. Without him, much of it might never have happened.

Unfortunately, Gary died of complications from colon and liver cancer in September 2013. Mary Beth has survived him, and I am still grateful to both of them.

Posted on Facebook 1/24/2019

GRATITUDE ON PARADE
#gratitudeonparade
I have discovered that my biggest obstacle to completing one of these tributes every day is not writing; that part is very easy for me. I barely know what writer’s block is. It is the fact that, Facebook being what it is, I prefer to find photos of the people for whom I am expressing thanks, and when, as I did this week, I reach into the more distant past, sometimes finding those photos is a challenge. For many people involved in helping me see my first book to completion, it just takes a while. Many photos I had in the 1980s preceded my ownership of a computer and have never been digitized, if I even had a photo in the first place. It is turning out to be a major undertaking with major competition for my time. I have had to compromise. Some photos are still on their way from sources I had to track down.

While I figure that out, I want to honor someone else of more recent vintage. At the end of 2013, a year in which I took 23 trips on APA business, five more teaching at the University of Iowa, and some personal trips, I realized I needed to do something serious to stay resilient. I enrolled in a new health club (X Sport Fitness) and arranged for a trainer just before New Years’ Day. I was about to undertake the new routine when I had to delay it because of a pinched nerve in my shoulder that occurred on that holiday. A few weeks later, I began my new routine with a good trainer, but he left abruptly a year later.

Then came Mike Caldwell, one of the most talented, thoughtful, creative, and dedicated personal trainers I am likely to encounter in that business. He pays very close attention to my development and ensures the routines are well attuned to my current situation. I have learned a great deal about fitness techniques and achieved things, now at 69, that I never did when I was much younger. I could not ask for more and have no regrets. Particularly at my age, fitness matters, and good advice in that arena matters even more. So here’s to Mike, a true pro at what he does.

Posted on Facebook 1/26/2019

Jim Schwab

The Predictable Impact of Florence

Flooding in Rosewood in Horry County, SC, September 24, 2018 (All photos by Allison Hardin with exceptions of FEMA photo from Hurricane Floyd and Charlotte image.)

It has been a few weeks of drought on this blog, but just the opposite in North Carolina, where Hurricane Florence dropped up to 30 inches of rain in some locations, and floods migrated downstream via numerous rivers to swamp cities both inland and near the coast. Now, Hurricane Michael threatens to compound the damage as it migrates northeast from its powerful Category 4 assault on the Florida Panhandle, with storm surges up to 14 feet in areas just east of the eye, which made landfall near Panama City.

The blog drought was the result of both a bit of writer’s block, mostly induced by a busy schedule that included two conference trips over the past three weeks, combined with a bit of fatigue and a few significant diversions of my personal time. But that may be okay. My intent was to write about the recent hurricane along the East Coast, and sometimes letting the subject ferment in the mind results in a more thorough and insightful perspective. I hope that is the result here.

Storms never happen in a vacuum. In a world with relatively few uninhabited places, their impact is the result more of patterns of human development and the legacy of past choices in land use and building practices than of the storm itself, which is, after all, simply a natural and very predictable event. Hurricanes were part of the natural cycle on this earth long before humans took over the planet (or thought they did).

Hurricane wind warning at bridge in Socastee, South Carolina

But they appear to be getting worse, and climate change, most of it almost surely attributable to human activity, is an increasingly evident factor. Meteorologist Ken Kunkel, affiliated both with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and North Carolina State University, stated that Florence produced more rain than any other storm in the last 70 years except for Hurricane Harvey last year. According to Kunkel, five weather stations over an area of 14,000 square miles in the Carolinas recorded an average of 17.5 inches. Harvey’s average was 25.6 inches. By comparison, Chicago averages about 37 inches for an entire year. Such heightened precipitation levels are in line with expected impacts of climate change.

What became obvious to me early on was that Florence would rehash a certain amount of unfortunate North Carolina history regarding feedlot agriculture. I am familiar with that history because 20 years ago I authored a Planning Advisory Service Report (#482) for the American Planning Association, titled Planning and Zoning for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. (In that same year, APA also published PAS 483/484, Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery and Reconstruction, for which I was the lead author and project manager.) I want to emphasize that what happened in North Carolina was not unusual. Nationwide, many states have laws dating to the 1950s that exempt all or most agricultural operations from county zoning ordinances. Most of these were intended to create a friendly regulatory environment for family farms, and they were often followed by other “right-to-farm” laws designed to shield farmers using conventional farming methods from nuisance lawsuits. Only later, as the large feedlots known also by the acronym “CAFO” became widespread, did it become clear that such exemptions, by then fiercely defended by industry groups, became giant loopholes for the detrimental environmental impacts of such operations. This story has been repeated in Iowa, Missouri, Utah, and numerous other states.

In North Carolina in 1991, State Senator Wendell Murphy, who owned a direct interest in the growing Murphy Family Farms, engineered passage of a law widening the state’s exemptions to include CAFOs. Within two years, as I noted in the report, North Carolina’s hog population shot up from 2.8 million to 4.6 million. Today, the number is at least 9 million. A public backlash at the impacts of CAFOs resulted in a new law in 1997 that included a moratorium on new waste lagoons, but by then, although the hogs were firmly ensconced in a growing number of feedlots, the figurative horse was out of the barn. Many counties in eastern North Carolina, where the industry was concentrated, were slow or reluctant to use their newly regained powers. In any case, various large operators were effectively already grandfathered into continued existence. Today, consolidation within the industry has left Smithfield Foods in possession of most of the business in North Carolina, yet Smithfield itself was acquired by the Chinese-owned WH Group several years ago.

Grenville, NC, September 24, 1999 — The livestock loss and potential health hazard to Eastern North Carolina is huge. Here volunteers have towed in dead and floating cattle from a nearby ranch at Pactolus, NC (just North of Greenville), trying to remove them as fast as possible to lower the potential health hazards associated.
Photo by Dave Gatley/ FEMA News Photo

Along came Hurricane Floyd in 1999. The low-lying plains of eastern North Carolina, always vulnerable to flooding, were deeply awash, but worse, filled with millions of pigs and poultry and their excrement in manure lagoons. Hurricane Dennis just weeks earlier had dumped 15 inches of rain on the region, and Floyd dumped even more in some areas. The Tar and Neuse Rivers, among others, badly overflowed their banks and inundated numerous farms. More than 110,000 hog carcasses, and more than 1 million chicken and turkey carcasses, floated downriver while waste lagoons were breached, creating a stench-filled public health disaster only partly solved when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency brought in huge incinerators to burn carcasses, though most animals were buried. It was a fiasco that did not have to happen at the scale on which it occurred.

Fast forward to this year and Hurricane Florence, presuming a surfeit of lessons to be learned from the 1999 disaster as well as later storms. As Emily Moon notes in the Pacific Standard, North Carolina has had opportunities over the past 20 years to introduce serious regulatory change, but various factors foiled those chances, and North Carolina remains the nation’s second-largest hog producer, having pushed aside every state but Iowa. The industry has evolved, but the problem remains. The state has bought out 46 operations since 1999 and shut down their lagoons, but the vast majority remain in operation. The numbers changed in Florence—more than 3 million chickens and 5,500 hogs dead and afloat in the flood waters—but the devastation rooted in CAFO practices continued. Coal ash landfills associated with power stations added to the environmental impacts. And the beat goes on, in a part of the state heavily populated by African-Americans, many too poor and powerless to challenge the system effectively without outside help.

I mention all this aside from the obvious human tragedies of lost lives, ruined homes, and prolonged power outages affecting some 740,000 homes and businesses.

Flooding at Arrowhead Development in Myrtle Beach, SC, September 26, 2018

Still, there are significant lessons available from Hurricane Florence outside the realm of mass production of poultry and hogs, and I want to offer a positive note. One is that, while only about 35 percent of properties at risk of flooding in North Carolina have flood insurance, which is available from the National Flood Insurance Program, neighboring South Carolina ranked second in the nation with 65 percent coverage. While I do not know all the details behind that sizable difference, it seems to me there is surely something to be learned from a comparison of these results and how they were achieved. They come in the context of a “moonshot” by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to double flood insurance coverage nationally by 2022. That will happen when South Carolina becomes the norm rather than the exception. Sometimes we can use these events to push in the right direction. Texas, for instance, has added 145,000 new flood insurance policies in effect since Hurricane Harvey; the question will be whether the new awareness wears off as memory of Harvey fades, or whether the state can solidify those gains. For that matter, can the states in the Southeast—the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida—leverage the lessons of Florence and Michael to push in the same direction?

Hidden Valley drainage restoration project, Charlotte, NC. Image courtesy of Tim Trautman.

Recently, Bloomberg Business News offered an example within North Carolina of how differently floodplains could be managed by highlighting the case of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County. I worked for several years in a series of training workshops on flood resilience with Tim Trautman, the manager for the engineering and mitigation program for Mecklenburg Storm Water Services, so I am familiar with their intriguing story. The county for many years has used a stormwater utility fee on property owners to fund its own hazard mitigation program, using the money to buy out flood-prone properties and increase open space in its floodplains. The result has been a significant reduction in flood-prone land and buildings. The question is not whether Charlotte is successful, but what state and federal programs and authorities can do to encourage and support such efforts and make them more commonplace.

Every serious disaster offers lessons and opportunities, and I am not attempting here to pick on North Carolina alone. Other states face their own challenges; Iowa, for one, is undergoing a somewhat muted debate about the impact of its own farm practices on downstream flooding and water quality, in part as an outgrowth of the 2008 floods. What is important is that we use these windows of opportunity, the “teachable moments,” as they are sometimes known, to initiate the changes that are surely needed for the long term in creating more resilient, environmentally healthy communities. What we do not need is a natural disaster version of Groundhog Day.

Jim Schwab

Shoot the Messenger (Even When the News Is Positive)

The people of Iowa are about to get a new governor. Lt. Gov. Kim Reynolds will be sworn in as soon as Terry Branstad wins confirmation to his new post of U.S. ambassador to China and he resigns his position as governor. President Trump nominated him because of the business ties he has cultivated between Iowa and China, a state that makes ample use of Iowa agricultural products. Branstad faces little controversy in his nomination hearings in the U.S. Senate, so his confirmation is only a matter of time. Meanwhile, the people of Iowa who retain some common sense are hoping that he completes his long legacy as governor by vetoing a particularly asinine piece of legislation that recently passed both houses of the General Assembly. Senate File 510 defunds the Aldo Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University and mandates its closure by July 1.

Branstad, a Republican, was first governor from 1983 to 1999, when he stepped down and Tom Vilsack, later to become President Obama’s Secretary of Agriculture, won the office. Branstad returned when he defeated one-term Governor Chet Culver. But he was governor in 1987 when the Iowa legislature passed the Iowa Groundwater Protection Act, which used fees on nitrogen fertilizer and pesticides to fund the creation of the Leopold Center. That act was passed because of widespread concerns about pollution from agriculture and industry that diminished the quality of the state’s groundwater. Branstad signed that act into law. A subsequent campaign by the chemical industry against the bill’s supporters backfired in the 1988 elections, a result I wrote about the following year in The Nation (“Farmers and Environmentalists: The Attraction Is Chemical, October 16, 1989).

Apparently, the current Republican-dominated legislature fears no such backlash because Senate File 510 directly targets the Leopold Center, whose total annual budget is only $1.3 million, yet somehow is unaffordable according to the legislature. What Iowa loses is much greater:

  • It loses the status of a national leader in practical research on sustainable agriculture. Bryce Oates, writing for the Daily Yonder, described the center as “sustainable agriculture loyalty,” and “a hub for information.”
  • Last summer I wrote here about Iowa State’s crucial research on the value of filter and buffer strips in reducing runoff in waterways and mitigating flooding in the process. That kind of research would likely not be happening without the Leopold Center. The filter strips also play a role in reducing nitrate pollution.
  • The center has supported research and cost-benefit analysis of hoop house and deep-bedding livestock production methods used by meat companies that supply natural food stores and restaurants like Chipotle, Whole Foods, and many independent outlets. The center also helped launch “Agriculture of the Middle,” connecting family farmers with value chains that provide better prices for farming operations.

 

The entire focus on more sustainable, less environmentally damaging agriculture must have been too much for the commodity groups and agricultural giants and their water carriers in the legislature. They apparently see this modestly funded program as too great a threat to agricultural business as usual, which says a great deal about their own their own sense of vulnerability. So there is but one effective solution: Even when the messenger is producing good news about alternative, less polluting forms of agricultural production, shoot the messenger. It is a message that is all too common in the current political climate.

Jim Schwab

Making Natural Infrastructure Solutions Happen

From time to time, I contribute to the APA Blog, which consists of a variety of news and perspectives the American Planning Association provides to its members on its own website. Recently, I composed an article about an effort APA undertook in concert with several organizational partners to explore issues related to permitting of wetlands restoration projects and some of the obstacles such projects may face. For those interested, just follow the link: https://www.planning.org/blog/blogpost/9118459/.

Jim Schwab

Subdivide and Conquer the Flood

Photo by Chad Berginnis. Used with permission.

Photo by Chad Berginnis. Used with permission.

Floods generally result from regional storm systems producing intense precipitation, from fast melting of winter snows, and occasionally from the failure of protective infrastructure such as dams and levees, often as a result of pressure from such events. We tend to think of the resulting flood damages as the inevitable consequences of these events, but they are not. Flood damages are the result of development decisions that place the built environment—and humans—in harm’s way. Most of those decisions, at least in the U.S., are made at the local level. In city halls and in planning commission and city council meetings across the nation, we have met the enemy of flood hazard reduction. It is usually us.

Tucked away from most public attention, the little decisions a community makes in approving new subdivisions are among those with the biggest influence in exacerbating or minimizing flood hazards to residential development. Cities, towns, and counties often assume that, if they simply comply with the fundamental requirements of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), they are home free. But the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which runs the program, while it can establish minimum requirements for local participation in the program, will never be in a position to substitute for local judgment on flood risk. There are too many important decisions that local government alone can make that FEMA cannot.

Less well understood by many is that there are significant practical limitations to the capabilities of the NFIP. NFIP regulations apply to mapped floodplains, but mapping floodplains for insurance rating purposes costs money, and that means higher priorities for mapping urbanized and developed areas where flood insurance will be sold. With more than 3.5 million miles of coast and river and stream frontage in the U.S., the NFIP has mapped about 1.2 million miles for Flood Insurance Rate Maps (FIRMs). Much of the rest is in rural and undeveloped areas, along smaller tributaries, such as streams and creeks, where development has yet to occur. Subdivision, of course, is a process of dividing and developing plots of land precisely where development has not yet happened. The possibility of a new subdivision proposal including land with unmapped floodplains is a constant reality. The stream corridors involved may seem small, but when flooding occurs they can often pose serious problems. Moreover, their floodplains may well expand as a result of the creation of new impervious surface in small watersheds—that is, hard surfaces such as building footprints, driveways, and roads. These impacts expand the floodplain because such hard surfaces do not absorb stormwater, unlike open space with trees and grass, thus increasing the volume of storm runoff.

pas-report-584-cover-revised

Cover of report reprinted with permission from APA.

To address these sorts of issues, the American Planning Association in 2014 FEMA to fund the production of a report for planners that has just been released: Subdivision Design and Flood Hazard Areas (Planning Advisory Service Report 584). It actually builds on prior work by APA two decades ago in a similar report, Subdivision Design in Flood Hazard Areas; both are being made available online as free PDF downloads and companion documents. The new report, however, goes far in bringing the subject forward and addressing contemporary realities, including the need to get ahead of climate change by anticipating potentially more extreme events and, in coastal areas, sea level rise. To amplify the outreach of the report, APA is scheduling its next Planning Information Exchange webinar in early December to address this topic.

The panel will include California attorney Tyler Berding, of the Walnut Creek law firm Berding & Weil, which has specialized in working with homeowner associations and developed an acute awareness of the problems raised when these associations inherit responsibilities for funding and maintaining flood protection infrastructure such as levees and small dams. As Berding notes, developers often sell local planners and elected officials on the idea that such arrangements, approved during plat reviews, free the municipality or county of the burden of such infrastructure. The problem arises many years later, when it becomes clear that these volunteer-managed organizations lack the expertise and also suffer from predictable downward pressure from property owners on maintenance fees, resulting in steadily deteriorating flood infrastructure that can result in disaster. Also on the panel will be Chad Berginnis, executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers and a major contributor to the report, for which I served as general editor, and Jerry Brems, now a retired planning director of Licking County, Ohio, who lent his experience in advising the project, who has dealt with these issues. I will moderate.

Photo by Chad Berginnis. Used with permission.

Photo by Chad Berginnis. Used with permission.

The overall point of the report is to highlight the fact that there is typically much more a local government can do to exercise vigilance in this respect than typically happens. The report outlines a number of standards communities can adopt with regard to the protection of natural and man-made features on a subdivision site, the layout and design of the site, its infrastructure, platting requirements, and watershed management. It also discusses how all this can be integrated effectively into the larger planning process of the jurisdiction. For instance, it discusses and provides a case study on the use of conservation subdivision design, which allows the clustering of structures on a site to locate them on higher, safer ground while maintaining more vulnerable, low-lying sections in common open space, which in turn allows the creation of such amenities as riverside walking paths, habitat protection for wildlife, and preservation of forested buffer areas along stream corridors. These and many other steps help reduce flood losses while creating a more resilient, safer, and environmentally sustainable community.

In short, the entire project invites communities to explore ways to become more forward-looking and creative in their approaches to flood hazards. The world is improved more often incrementally than radically. We hope we’ve brought planners’ and public officials’ attention to one more such increment.

 

Jim Schwab

Hold That Soil, Please

Photo by Suzan Erem

Photo by Suzan Erem

 

Ours has often been a profligate society in using the vast natural resources with which it was originally endowed. We’ve improved our attitudes about conservation, but we have a long way to go. Among those resources we have been prone to waste in the interest of short-term gain has been the deep topsoil that made the Midwest superbly productive. Less than 200 years ago, according to Rick Cruse, an Iowa State University researcher, Iowa had an average of 14 inches of topsoil in which grew thousands of square miles of prairie. Now that soil is about six inches deep, less than half what we inherited—or more accurately, mostly took—from the Native Americans who first lived here.

Those estimates come from an August 12 article in the Chicago Tribune that I shall credit as the inspiration for my addressing this topic. However, those familiar with my first book, Raising Less Corn and More Hell, will be well aware that the topic is not new to me. In 1985, farmer Gary Lamb and I wrote an op-ed for the Des Moines Register decrying the lack of conservation and what it might do in the long term to the fabled productivity of Iowa farmland. In essence, we were saying, nothing lasts forever if we insist on killing the goose that lays the golden egg.

Farmers mostly tore up the prairie to plant the corn, soybeans, wheat, and other agricultural products that now grow on the vast majority of the land in states like Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas. Prairie plants had deep roots that held topsoil in place and nurtured it. With prairie grasses removed, loose soil began to erode, clogging streams and rivers that feed the Mississippi River, which dumps its overload into the Gulf of Mexico, producing what has become known as a “dead zone.” This is an area suffering from hypoxia—a shortage of oxygen in the sea that chokes out life. This comes at the additional cost of stripping Midwestern farms of much of the topsoil with which they were originally blessed. We have unhinged that layer of topsoil by depriving it of the prairie root systems that once anchored it. In fact, we continue to do so.

But the problem is more serious and immediate than simply undermining the long-term productivity of the soil. Current practices also threaten the public health and welfare of people in states like Iowa. Not long ago, the Des Moines Water Works filed suit against three upstream counties for failing to control the nonpoint source runoff that is contaminating the capital city’s water supply. That suit is being met with a good deal of anger and skepticism, but it is symptomatic of a larger conflict. That conflict pits the priorities of agriculture versus public welfare, a dispute playing out in other forms in even larger venues like California. But there the issue often has more to do with drought and the protection of adequate water supplies than with polluted runoff. In Iowa, floods have been a more persistent danger in recent memory.

Lawsuits, however, are not the only rational response to such a major public policy problem. It is critical that public universities support research aimed at viable solutions, and at least some research at Iowa State University is pointing to an answer that should seem remarkably obvious: restore the prairie. The imperatives of modern food production may make it clear that we are not going to restore all the farmland in the Midwest to pre-modern conditions. But the prairie provides demonstrable ecological benefits that we can ignore only at the cost of prolonging current problems with flooding and water quality. In a sense, what we are learning about the value of restoring some prairie for the purpose of reducing runoff and improving downstream water quality is similar to what we are learning in more urban contexts about the value of green infrastructure—the urban forest, the green roofs, the living shorelines, and other nature-based features that enhance the environmental quality of our communities.

But green infrastructure is not a concept that need be limited to our urban areas. Nature provides vast ecological functions for human benefit in all sorts of settings if we are wise enough to investigate them and learn to use them.

In that sense, I think that Iowa State University is on to something. Researchers there have been demonstrating the value of prairie restoration with a project called Science-based Trials of Rowcrops Integrated with Prairie Strips (STRIPS). Test sites have shown not only that these prairie strips can capture much of the polluted runoff from farms and enrich the soil, but that they provide valuable habitat for birds and other wildlife, restoring some of the richness of the land in the process. For instance, one research project by Lisa Schulte and others showed that such treatments doubled or tripled the presence of bird species, both in overall abundance and variety. Other research has found that wider strips of prairie serve to trap greater levels of sediment that would otherwise clog streams and reduce water quality. It is as if, having been blind to the free benefits of natural systems for so long, we have at last begun to learn to sing nature’s tune anew.

But it will take time to change attitudes and perspectives in a farm sector that has often been rather conservative about adopting such techniques. There is still likely to be a lively debate between environmentalists and dominant sectors of the agricultural industry, with varying levels of resonance in different states, but results speak volumes and gradually help to change minds. There may be more lawsuits like the one that originated in Des Moines, and there may ultimately be some meaningful legislative debates about incentives and regulations. We can at least hope that the steady infusion of research-based information on the benefits of prairie restoration will make a difference soon enough to matter. There is certainly a great deal at stake.

Jim Schwab