APA Chapters Step Up to Host Film Project

Over the past few months, we have posted ten short blog videos detailing the progress of Planning to Turn the Tide, the documentary on planning for resilience against natural disasters being produced by the American Planning Association’s Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division. In this post, we highlight the support of APA Chapters by featuring a staff member from APA Florida, Suzie Gray, who talks about her role at the APA Florida conference we visited in Jacksonville in early September.

Florida APA annual conference reception at Hyatt Regency Jacksonville

From our first interactions with Florida Chapter representatives and staff, they have been enthusiastic about supporting the project. Not only did they supply numerous contacts, suggesting people for interviews or information, but they also extended a gracious invitation for us to visit their annual conference in Jacksonville, which took place September 5-8. We have forged similar alliances with other APA chapters since then, one of which was illustrated in Colorado in July, and most recently in Texas, the subject of upcoming blog videos. These are really important opportunities for professional collaboration and support within the framework of a larger professional organization, but it also affords us an effective base of operations during a conference, especially in the use of space suitable for recorded interviews.

Click here to watch the video featuring Suzie Gray discussing her work with us under the banner of the Florida APA Chapter.

The core team of the HMDR video project wishes to thank APA Florida staff and volunteers for their wonderful assistance in putting us in touch with the best planning voices in their state and lending their credibility to what we are trying to accomplish. Our challenge would be much greater without them.

To support the HMDR film-making effort, use either the donations link here or the QR code below. We will acknowledge all donors, whose help we greatly appreciate. Make this your film too as we move forward.

Jim Schwab

Lasting Lessons in Resilience

In the latter half of June 2008, it was hard to imagine Cedar Rapids as the city it had been just one month earlier. A massive flood along the Cedar River clobbered the city with a classic double whammy: About the time existing flood crests that had already swamped upstream Cedar Falls hit Cedar Rapids, a severe thunderstorm reached the city to compound the impact. The river, which runs through downtown in this city of 130,000 people, reached a flood level of 31.2 feet, besting the all-time previous record of 20 feet, reached in 1851 and 1929.

Downtown Cedar Rapids undergoing debris removal, late June 2008

Flood waters covered 14 percent of the city, more than 10 square miles. About 10 percent of the city’s population was evacuated from the deluge. Highway ramps became inaccessible, and at one point, a bus carrying prisoners from the county jail stayed just inches ahead of the rising waters to make its escape. City Hall, unfortunately situated on Mays Island in the middle of the river, was underwater, and governmental operations were moved to high ground elsewhere. In the end, nearly 1,300 flood-damaged homes were demolished, many making way for permanent open space as the city used federal hazard mitigation grants to acquire the properties with deed restrictions. Amazingly, as city officials have often said, there were no deaths due to the flood.

Relocated Czech & Slovak National Museum following June 2008 flood, Cedar Rapids

The avoidance of loss of life can be credited to the city and Linn County’s rapid response, which was not limited to emergency management. Within days, the Cedar Rapids City Council adopted a set of recovery goals that guided planning for long-term recovery for months and years afterwards. It shifted outside consulting contracts from riverfront planning to flood recovery. And it moved forward with a litany of creative approaches to business restoration, employment stabilization, and affordable housing development. Cedar Rapids became a living laboratory for community resilience.

For that reason, we made a special point during our Colorado to Iowa road tour for the film Planning to Turn the Tide, the documentary project of the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division, to interview five essential city staff members on Tuesday, July 18, before closing out our trip by heading back to Chicago. These included City Manager Jeff Pomeranz and Community Development Director Jennifer Pratt.

Click here to hear two Cedar Rapids officials—Jennifer Pratt and Brenna Fall—discuss why they are supporting the HMDR film project.

These lessons have had lasting impacts in Cedar Rapids, which also suffered massive tree canopy devastation, as well as building damage, from an August 2020 derecho whose worst winds, exceeding 140 mph, swept through Linn County, including several suburbs. Taking climate change seriously, the city also last year adopted its own climate action plan. Cedar Rapids has quite probably done more to attack these problems in a forward-looking fashion than any other city in Iowa.

In coming weeks, this blog will feature new video clips from a four-day visit to the Florida APA conference in Jacksonville in early September. Meanwhile, plans are afoot for a November trip to Texas to capture additional content from the Texas APA conference in Corpus Christi, follow a mobile workshop exploring Hurricane Harvey recovery in Rockport, a Gulf Coast city where Harvey first made landfall in September 2017, and visit environmentally disadvantaged communities in the Houston area and record interviews with planners and activists there. Those posts will acknowledge the gracious support we are already receiving from several organizations and institutions in Texas.

To support the HMDR film-making effort, use either the donations link here or the QR code below. We will acknowledge all donors, whose help we greatly appreciate. Make this your film too as we move forward.

Jim Schwab

Who’s Gonna Watch This Movie?

The field production of Planning to Turn the Tide, the documentary film project of the American Planning Association’s Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery (HMDR) Planning Division, has involved dozens of local volunteers and supporters in several states spread from Florida to California. In recent blog posts, I have been sharing our progress but not always featuring some of those volunteers. That is about to change.

Some of those volunteers were interviewed for the film because we felt that their experience and expertise supported our educational objectives for the project. Others have helped us identify people who should be interviewed, and others have led us on tours or directed us to other resources we needed to know about.

Molly Mowery, the Chair-elect of HMDR, has served as all of the above and been a great supporter. She is also the executive director of the Community Wildfire Planning Center, based in Colorado, and has spent years consulting with communities about better planning strategies to address wildfire hazards. In a recorded interview you can watch here, Molly and I discussed what we hoped to achieve in the film.

Steven Williams discusses post-fire rebuilding in Superior

David Taylor and I had visited with Lisa Ritchie, currently the planning manager for the city of Erie, Colorado, but formerly with Louisville, and Steven Williams, the planning manager for Superior earlier in the day on Friday, July 14. Lisa and Steve took us on walking tours of areas in both Louisville and Superior where hundreds of homes had burned in what started as a grass fire on December 30, 2021, now known as the Marshall Fire. Lisa and Steve helped author a report published by the Urban Land Institute studying the causes and consequences of that fire, which has also been examined by Boulder County Emergency Management, and recommending policies and regulations.

Rebuilding underway in Louisville, July 2023

Later that same day, David and I also recorded an early evening interview with Lori Hodges, the emergency management director for Larimer County, a vast area north of Boulder, whose largest city is Fort Collins, the home of Colorado State University. Lori provided a highly articulate argument for coordinating emergency management with comprehensive planning and other strategic county services to achieve a more holistic approach to building community resilience. She is an exemplar of a new generation of emergency managers who apply a much wider lens to their profession than has traditionally been the case. A new day of interdisciplinary collaboration in local government is dawning. It is a day I advocated more than a decade ago in the APA report, Hazard Mitigation: Integrating Best Practices into Planning. I have long believed that all communities will be better off when city planners and emergency managers, among other local officials, are meeting at the same table to find ways to make their communities safer and more resilient. People like Lori are making it happen.

If you wish to support our efforts, please use the QR code below to make a secure donation.

Jim Schwab

Decade of Recovery and Resilience in Colorado

Victoria Simonsen discussing a map of the town’s flood damage with visitor, 2014

Ten years ago this month, Colorado faced a crisis. Following previous years of drought and wildfires, Rocky Mountain monsoon rains dumped a year’s worth of precipitation on the Front Range in a single day. Water poured down mountainsides that were sometimes so parched and scorched from previous high heat and fires that they could not absorb the rainfall, which then carried mud and debris downhill through the towns in its path. One of those towns was Lyons, which we visited on July 13 to interview Town Administrator Victoria Simonsen, who has remained on the job through thick and thin, helping to guide a remarkable recovery. But she also helped arrange for us to interview homeowner Priscilla Cohan, who is also a local artist, and Neil Sullivan, owner of the St. Vrain Market local grocery store. He has also served on the town’s planning commission, and his wife served two terms as mayor during the recovery.

Click here to watch the blog video recorded in Lyons.

I had previously visited Lyons twice in the early years after the flood, discussing some of the situation in an early blog post here. During the same time, a Community Planning Assistance Team (CPAT) from the American Planning Association spent several days visiting Lyons and producing a report with its own recommendations for moving forward. Lyons received other outside help too, from agencies like the Federal Emergency Management Agency, of course, but also from entities like the planning school at the University of Colorado at Denver.

Aerial view of damage to bridge over St. Vrain River in September 2013

Now, the town is moving forward this month with a commemoration of that infamous flood that divided this Rocky Mountain hillside community into six islands divided by flood waters, compounding the difficulties of search and rescue until the flood waters receded. Why did we go there now? We wanted to capture this story and learn how it fit into a larger story of the State of Colorado building capacity for local governments to develop resilience in the face of cascading disasters like drought, wildfires, landslides, and flooding. We will integrate that story into the final film product for Planning to Turn the Tide, made possible by the assistance of people like Simonsen and numerous other volunteers from the Colorado APA Chapter and the Colorado planning community.

If you wish to support this endeavor, please use the QR code below or link here.

Jim Schwab

Filming at the Omni

As previous installments of our blog video series have indicated, the production team for Planning to Turn the Tide spent a great deal of time in June and July first in Florida, then on a two-week road trip to Colorado and Iowa from Chicago to capture additional content.

Click here to see the short video taped at the Omni Interlocken Hotel and Resort in Broomfield, Colorado.

From July 9-12, we attended and filmed at the Natural Hazards Workshop, held at the Omni, completing eleven interviews with leading planners and hazards experts:

This range of expertise became available to us largely because of the enthusiastic support of the Natural Hazards Center, part of the University of Colorado, and its executive director, Lori Peek, who arranged meeting room space where we could set up equipment, and to which we could direct those willing to be interviewed for the film. In addition, I was able to scout plenary and breakout sessions for promising speakers, some of whom are on the list above, to supplement those I contacted ahead of time.

Natural Hazards Workshop Barbecue on closing night, University of Colorado Stadium (Folsom Field), July 2013

It may be obvious, at least to those experienced in such productions, that a one-hour documentary can use only a small fraction of the recordings we have gathered to date, but the beauty lies in our ability to identify those segments that will best help tell the larger story and illuminate the issues involved in planning for resilient communities in the face of natural disasters and climate change. Each of these highly trained and knowledgeable individuals gave us new perspectives and ideas to think about as we develop our film. The end product will be richer for it. But it is also likely that we will find other ways to use some of the material that does not make it into the initial film efforts, in part because the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division, which is sponsoring and supporting the project, has other avenues for offering public and professional education on hazards.

And who is to say that, as time goes on, and with additional resources, this is our one and only film? If you wish to support our efforts, please use the QR code below to make a secure donation.

Jim Schwab

Heading Out on the Film Trail

The view from this week’s brief video blog is from Chicago’s 606 Trail, but David Taylor, our videographer for Planning to Turn the Tide, and I were actually headed out on a much longer trail for nearly two weeks. In a car containing his video equipment, we departed Chicago on Thursday, July 6, and drove across Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska to arrive two days later in Broomfield, Colorado, the site of the 2023 annual Natural Hazards Workshop. We returned to Chicago on Tuesday evening, July 18.

Click here to view this new video blog installment in our ongoing series.

Why such a long road trip for this documentary film of the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division? We had long hoped that we could combine travel to Colorado and Iowa in a single trip. This project, dependent on grants and individual and corporate donations, does not thrive on an expensive news media budget. It is driven by a great deal of volunteer support from planners and supporters of the planning community across the country, and specifically by ad hoc groups organized in the locations where we have chosen to film segments that we think will be of the greatest educational and inspirational value in the final product. Part of the answer, therefore, lies in a diligent frugality with our donors’ money.

Flying is inevitable to some locations. In this case, however, an extensive network of grassroots contacts let us bring several elements of the production together in a short, concentrated time scale. First, we are extremely grateful to the University of Colorado’s Natural Hazards Center, which welcomed our operation enthusiastically at its conference at the Omni Interlocken Hotel and Resort in Broomfield, which took place July 9-12. Their embrace allowed us to film interviews at the hotel throughout the conference.

At the same time, support from the Colorado Chapter of the American Planning Association, as well as other volunteers, made it possible to arrange meaningful visits to communities along the Front Range that have been affected over the past decade by drought, wildfire, and flooding, and to interview people who could share their knowledge and experience, which will be detailed in upcoming blog posts over the next few weeks. That filled out the first week.

Over the following weekend, we made our way back east again to Iowa, stopping in Iowa City and Cedar Rapids to discuss some meaningful Iowa planning innovations at both the state and local levels, dealing mostly with floods but also larger implications of climate change. I will note here that, while we stayed overnight in Lincoln on this return trip, we experienced what I had already seen in Chicago two weeks earlier: significant air pollution sweeping through Nebraska as a result of drifting smoke from raging wildfires in Canada.

Chad Nabity

Little more than a week earlier, on our way out to Colorado, we had stopped in Grand Island, Nebraska, to visit on a late Friday afternoon with Chad Nabity, AICP, the planning director for Hall County and Grand Island. Chad is the sort of remarkable professional who loves to give back to his profession. He currently serves the American Planning Association as Chair of the Divisions Council, of which HMDR is a member. In our chat at his office in City Hall, as well as at a nearby chocolate shop, he discussed Grand Island’s encounters with natural disasters, which included some flooding issues but also the Night of the Twisters in 1980, when seven tornadoes visited Grand Island in rapid succession, devastating parts of the community and triggering frantic emergency response efforts. Chad himself was entering high school that year in Grand Island. Although his parents’ house suffered little damage, he says, “not the same for close friends of mine.” Later, Chad went off to college, earned his planning degree, and eventually returned as a Grand Island native in the position he now holds. Not surprisingly, Chad is also a member of HMDR.

The evening became famous enough to draw Hollywood attention, resulting in the first Family Channel movie production, titled, you guessed it, Night of the Twisters. The movie itself drew from a 1984 young adult book of the same name by Ivy Ruckman. I guess we are not the first to think of making a movie about disasters, but I confess to viewing most such movies with a jaundiced eye because of their tendency to sensationalize such events.

We are producing an educational documentary because we are more interested in telling the story of how to prevent or mitigate such hazards, how to create resilient communities, and how to persist in the long road to recovery that inevitably follows. We want to build a community of interest for better planning for disaster resilience.

If you think that is a worthwhile enterprise, I will once again mention our need for financial support. Use the QR code below or this link to help us out. We will truly appreciate it.

Jim Schwab

Fort Myers and the Impact of Hurricane Ian

In last week’s post, I discussed on our video blog the interviews we had conducted for Planning to Turn the Tide in Sarasota County, Florida, during our mid-June trip through southwestern Florida. Today, we wrap up the Florida trip with a brief video blog about our visit to Fort Myers and Fort Myers Beach, which both suffered the brunt of the impact of Hurricane Ian in September 2022. Despite repeated efforts to identify and contact planning and administrative officials in Fort Myers Beach, we never succeeded, even with the help of some area volunteers. Perhaps if we had more time in our tight schedule, we could have persisted, but my time, at least, was about to expire that weekend before flying back to Chicago on Monday, June 19. The clock ran out for us, but we did tour the city and gather extensive dashcam footage of conditions there. This Category 4 storm substantially damaged more than 1,000 homes in a city of 5,600 people.

City Hall was obliterated by Hurricane Ian, and recent news from the city indicates that the building was slated for demolition starting today. You can see a tour of the damaged City Hall on this local NBC video clip, and you can see the beginning of that process in a Fox news video.

We did, however, conduct an interview that Friday morning, June 16, with Tony Palermo, assistant director of community development for the City of Fort Myers, at that City Hall and learned a great deal about what Fort Myers had experienced. Tony generously followed with a personal tour on foot and by car of the downtown area, again allowing us to gather additional footage of the area. Many downtown businesses suffered flood damage with two to three feet of water, but nowhere near the direct impact of Fort Myers Beach. When we visited, most were back in operation.

Our upcoming video blog posts will take us to destinations in Colorado and Iowa, which videographer David Taylor and I covered during a two-week road trip from July 6-18. Stay tuned.

As always, if you wish to support the project, please use the QR code below for an online donation.

Jim Schwab

Addressing Hazards in Sarasota County

A bit more than a month ago, I introduced this blog audience to Planning to Turn the Tide, the film project being undertaken by the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division. I noted that we would be rolling out a series of updates as we completed work on new trips around the country, but the first was in Southwest Florida in late June of this year. A week later, we shared the first blog video discussing our progress, focusing on a series of interviews with planners and others at the Tampa Bay Regional Planning Commission. Today, I am sharing the second blog video, which discusses our subsequent work in Sarasota County.

Phillippi Creek in southern Sarasota County

Click here to watch the summary video about the interviews we conducted in Sarasota County.

Those interviews included:

SW Florida, USGS map. Sarasota is midway along the central coast in this section. 

One key point throughout the discussions was that Hurricane Ian at one point had been projected to move through Sarasota County before weather patterns in the Gulf of Mexico pushed it eastward into Lee County and Fort Myers instead. That near-miss still allows Sarasota County officials, like those further north in Tampa Bay, to make the point that preparation for a direct hit in a future storm is the entire region’s best bet.

Except for one unrelated post on July 4, it has been a while until now. David Taylor and I left Chicago on a road trip on July 6 to film in Colorado and Iowa, returning on July 18. The delay since then in putting this series back on track arose from both a short-term illness and a long to-do list of other tasks once I was back home, but here we are. We have much more to share now about Florida, Colorado, and Iowa to keep readers aware of our progress, so please keep tuning in every few days. We’ll be working to keep you updated.

If you wish to support the project, please use the QR code below for an online donation.

Jim Schwab

Tampa Bay and the Quest for Resilience

In my last blog post, I discussed the origins of a current active film effort, Planning to Turn the Tide, which I have been leading on behalf of the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division. This post, which includes the first of a series of blog videos recorded during our travels, discusses what we learned during our meetings and interviews around Tampa Bay, especially during an afternoon at the Tampa Bay Regional Planning Council (TBRPC) in Pinellas Park, Florida, just north of St. Petersburg.

Click here to watch the summary video about the interviews at Tampa Bay Regional Planning Council.

One of our interviews featured Jerry Stickney, Director of the Sunshine Line, a Hillsborough County agency that provides transportation for disabled and disadvantaged people, including special services during natural disasters. That last point provided the bulk of our discussion because evacuating and sheltering these people during hurricanes, major storms, and other disasters is a major responsibility, but one that ensures some degree of social equity in the face of life-threatening circumstances. Hurricane Ian could easily have become the major hurricane that finally invaded the Tampa Bay region but instead turned east further south, striking the Fort Myers area.

Cara Serra, resiliency planner for TBRPC, discussed her role in facilitating the work of the Regional Resiliency Coalition, which consists of several working groups examining regional issues concerning shoreline management, infrastructure, stormwater management, and resilient building design and land use, among other concerns. They are currently developing a Regional Resiliency Action Plan.

In the quest for regional resilience, learning lessons from disasters elsewhere plays a major role, one that has not been neglected. Sarah Vitale, planning director for TBRPC, led the development of a new iteration of Project Phoenix, originally created in 2009, to help business leaders and others in the Tampa Bay region understand what the impact of a Category 4 or 5 hurricane might be if it took aim directly at Tampa Bay, something that last happened more than a century ago, when the population was barely one-tenth

Damage from Hurricane Michael, Bay County, FL. Photo by David Taylor

of what it is now. Her training workshop includes video clips of both a simulation of such a storm and real-life stories from Mexico Beach of economic recovery from Hurricane Michael, which struck the Florida Panhandle in October 2018.

Finally, we also spoke with Sean Sullivan, the executive director of TBRPC, whose engaging New England accent kept us captivated as he outlined his vision for a six-county region that is aware of its risks and prepared to handle the impacts of climate change. It is clear that he has a committed staff that is helping to implement that vision and develop the tools for effective change in that direction.

As promised in the video link above, here are links to the film trailer and the donations page to support Planning to Turn the Tide, the documentary film for which all this work is being done:

Film Trailer

Donations Page (QR code below)

Supplemental note:

The impacts of climate change are affecting us all, often in unexpected ways. As I write this, my own sinuses are recovering from the onslaught of smoky air, full of particulate matter, spread south by the winds from thousands of acres of Canadian forests being scorched by massive wildfires. Winds from such fires in Quebec swept through much of the Northeast two weeks ago, including New York City. Yesterday, it was the Midwest’s turn to suffer, and Chicago was one huge grey fog that burned the eyes and made even healthy people catch their breath. The Chicago Tribune reported that we had the worst air quality of 95 major cities worldwide.

If we needed a vivid illustration that climate change and its impacts know no borders, this is certainly it. That is one more reason we at HMDR find urgency in our mission to develop this film and discuss how better planning at local, regional, national, and even international levels can help us turn the rising tide of losses from natural disasters.

Jim Schwab

Envisioning a More Resilient Future

One reason I have long loved being an urban planner is that, ultimately, planning is about imagining a better future. Or should be, anyway. Although I was in my early thirties before I returned to school for a pair of graduate degrees in Urban and Regional Planning and Journalism (a very unusual combination, I soon learned), I was intrigued with the creative process as early as high school. At the time, I applied it mostly to writing, but I learned in college that creativity was valuable for just about any endeavor. Much later, I was enthralled when I read University of Chicago psychology professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s path-breaking 1990 book, Flow, a study of the creative process. By then, I was already in the throes of writing my own books and learning where my planning credentials could take me.

While most planners never write or publish books, we all are quite accustomed to producing plans, reports, and other documents for consumption by the public, public officials, and other decision makers. We learn how to present these materials and visualizations in public at meetings and hearings. Visual depictions, for example, of what a neighborhood not only is, but could become, are standard fare. Many of us learn to work with various kinds of visualization and design software that create renderings of future versions of boulevards and parks and other public spaces. What architects do for individual buildings, we try to do for entire neighborhoods and cities. In the process, we try to feed and amplify the public imagination for what could be, hoping to find options for improvement that will appeal to a public that may be looking for alternatives to an unsatisfactory or uninspiring status quo. Whole books and software programs, such as CommunityViz, have been devoted to sharing strategies with planners for accomplishing these visionary goals.

The written word and visualizations are two ways, often combined, for helping people see new possibilities or change the way they see the familiar. I have used them for decades, in evolving ways, to help people better understand my own planning specializations, hazard mitigation and disaster recovery. When a natural disaster such as a hurricane or earthquake has shaken a community’s assumptions about its own future, it can be time to think about rebuilding in a way that makes that community more resilient in the face of future events. I helped advance the idea of pre-disaster planning for post-disaster recovery, that is, thinking before a disaster even happens about what would expedite the recovery process and allow the community to emerge stronger and more prosperous than before. This has become known as finding the “silver lining” in the dark cloud of disaster recovery, building hope during a process that can take years or even decades in the most drastic situations.

Left to right, crew members Jim Schwab, David Taylor, and Kim Taylor Galway toast the film project at Royal Peacock, Sarasota, FL, June 18, 2023

Even when I left the American Planning Association (APA) at the end of May 2017, I largely envisioned a continuation of my hybrid journalistic and planning career in the form of books and teaching, for the most part, augmented by various consulting jobs. It was only after conversations with high school classmate David Taylor at the 50th reunion of our Brecksville, Ohio, Class of 1968 in June 2018 that another idea took shape. David, a Purple Heart Vietnam Veteran, had taken a very different path in life after recovering from war wounds, by becoming first a photographer, and later a videographer. After retiring from a marketing position with the U.S. Postal Service, he opened his own studio and has done film and photography work for veterans and environmental groups, as well as traditional assignments like weddings.

Dave had followed my career for decades, starting with the publication of my first book, Raising Less Corn and More Hell (University of Illinois Press), in 1988. As I grew into my role as a leader in hazards planning, he became fascinated with what planners do in that realm, regarding them as “unsung heroes” of the recovery process. Further conversations led to a visit to his home in Sarasota, Florida, in February 2019, which included a presentation at a Florida Atlantic University symposium in West Palm Beach, and eventually that fall into the idea of producing a video documentary about the role of planning in helping communities address threats from natural disasters and climate change. As chair-elect at the time of the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division (HMDR), I took that idea to the executive committee, and they chose to sponsor the project.

Devastation from Hurricane Michael, October 2018. Photo by David Taylor

Thus began, for me, a new way of thinking about how to engage the public on these issues. I had no experience with film as a vehicle for this process, except as a viewer, but the idea captured my imagination. What can one do with film that would be different from the written word? As the script writer, how would I think about the narrative differently? Moving out of my comfort zone forced me to think even more creatively than usual, but I welcomed the experience because I sensed that it might give us a new way to capture people’s emotions and imagination around an idea whose time was overdue. The United States, and the world, were suffering ever more massive losses from natural disasters, in part as a result of climate change, and needed new ways to approach the problem. Maybe the kinetic visual impact of a film could help affect that, if crafted with the right forward-looking perspectives in mind.

It would not be easy, and I readily understood that. Moreover, the first question was how to pay for the project. Movies are inherently more expensive to produce than books, and involve at least as much work in most ways. But if we could pull this off . . . .

Fortunately, incoming chair-elect Stacy Wright was able to arrange a $5,000 donation from Atkins, a consulting firm, to start the ball rolling in the fall of 2019. I became chair of HMDR on January 1, 2020, but the COVID pandemic intervened within weeks and by March 2020, we had to shut the project down and wait for the best. It was the fall of 2021 before we were again able to move forward. We created a Video Project Advisory Committee to provide guidance on the project. It consists of leading voices in the hazards planning subfield. We also began to assemble teams of regional volunteers who could assist us with logistics and recommend leading planners for interviews and advice.

We chose to name the film Planning to Turn the Tide because of the metaphorical implications of seeking to reverse the growing tide of losses of life and property from natural and other disasters. Well aware of the impacts and trends of climate change, we know that the number and costs of America’s billion-dollar disasters has risen rapidly in recent decades. We also know that planning can make a difference.

Outdoor interview with Julie Dennis, owner of OVID Solutions (also a member of Video Project Advisory Committee) in Blountstown, Florida, July 2022. Holding camera is Kim Taylor Galway; to her left is videographer David Taylor.

In the meantime, we raised additional donations from other consulting firms* and won two small grants from the APA Divisions Council to help us get started. We announced our project in May 2022 at the APA National Planning Conference in San Diego and recorded interviews with leading hazards professionals at the Association of State Floodplain Managers annual conference two weeks later in Orlando. By mid-July, we had recorded 14 more interviews in the Florida Panhandle, mostly in Panama City, following the area’s recovery four years after Hurricane Michael struck as the first Category 5 storm to reach the U.S. mainland since Hurricane Andrew in 1992. In that visit, we had extensive support from both City Hall in Panama City and the Bay County Chamber of Commerce, which provided its board room for a recording studio for an entire day.

Local entrepreneur Allan Branch explains his restoration efforts at History Class Brewing in downtown Panama City, July 2022

By then, our main problem was that we needed an easy way for people interested in supporting the project to make donations. Fundraising can be hard work, but there is little reason these days to make it harder than it needs to be. APA worked with us over subsequent months to create a dedicated donations page where people could donate online. Because we were the first division in APA’s history to attempt a project like this, we were also the first to need such a mechanism, but by late March of this year, it was ready. The donations page, which you can also reach with the QR code below, channels donations directly to HMDR and tracks the donor information for us, so that we can recognize our supporters appropriately (unless they choose to be anonymous). You can help keep this project moving ahead by donating now, and I sincerely hope you choose to do so. You will be helping us sell the concept of resilient communities to America.

If you need more information on the project itself, visit our project information page. I will be adding new posts regularly as we continue our work, including short blog videos summarizing what we are doing along the way. Please stay in touch.

Jim Schwab

*Early Supporters:

Atkins

APA Divisions Council

Michael Baker International

JEO Consulting

Association of State Floodplain Managers (in-kind donation)

Jim Schwab Consulting LLC

OVID Solutions

Richard Roths, AICP

Clarion Associates

Punchard Consulting