Tag Archives: Colorado

Who’s Gonna Watch This Movie?

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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

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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

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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

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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

Envisioning a More Resilient Future

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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

 

No Laughing Matter

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This is a story both personal and political. On May 31, the American Planning Association hosted a wonderful retirement party for my last day on the job as Manager of the Hazards Planning Center. I have spent much of the past quarter-century helping to make natural hazards an essential focus of the planner’s job. The reasons are scattered all over dozens of previous blog posts, so I won’t repeat them here. It was a great send-off.

The next day, June 1, I was at home beginning the task of establishing my own enterprises in writing and consulting, including what shortly will be significantly expanded attention to this blog. In the rush to ensure that the transition for the Center would be smooth, I maintained a busy schedule in May, and I am aware this blog was somewhat neglected. Sometimes there is only so much time, and the blog has until now been a spare time project. That is about to change.

I spent much of that Thursday morning downtown. My wife had a dental appointment, and I had some minor issues to attend to. We paid a pleasant visit to Chicago’s Riverwalk and returned home on the CTA Blue Line. As we ate lunch, I watched the news on CNN. It was announced that President Trump would be announcing his decision on U.S. participation in the Paris climate agreement. I waited to see what would happen.

By now, I am sure everyone knows that he announced U.S. withdrawal from the accord. I remember two distinct impressions from the occasion. The first was that I was certain that nearly everything he said was wrong, that he was twisting the truth, and that his reasoning was badly distorted. The second was that, the longer he talked, and he talked for a while, the angrier I became. The sheer moral and political blindness of his position infuriated me. It has taken me three days to decide to write about it because I like to apply a reasonably broad perspective to the issues I address here. In part, I had trouble with that because I had planned a busy agenda in the opening days of my new phase of life to reorganize my home office, inform key contacts of my new e-mail address, and take care of the new business that accompanies “retirement.” (I put it in quotes because, for me, it mostly means self-employment.)

Trump’s announcement on the first day I spent at home felt like a slap in the face. The title of this blog, “Home of the Brave,” is meant to assert some claim to moral courage on behalf of those who are willing to pay homage to the truth. Trump finally had succeeded in embarrassing me as an American citizen. In my view, one of America’s claims to greatness in the world has been its willingness to educate its citizens and embrace honest science, and suddenly I was watching our president embrace brazen ignorance. There has been a tendency in some political circles over the years to glorify ignorance, but that tendency has seldom found its way into the Oval Office.

We join two other nations in the entire world that have not endorsed the Paris agreement. It is not hard to understand the problem in Syria, a nation that is basically at this point one huge battleground with a highly dysfunctional government that is slaughtering thousands of its own citizens. It would seem that Syria might have other priorities than negotiating a climate agreement. As for Nicaragua, what most people do not know is that Nicaragua, which has an abundance of both geothermal resources (also known as volcanoes) and tropical sunshine for solar energy, refused to accept the agreement not because it opposes progress in addressing climate change, but because the accord did not go far enough. That makes the United States of America the only nation taking exception to the very idea of combating climate change.

Trump does this in spite of the fact that American researchers have been leaders in generating the science that has documented the problem. Scientists quickly declared that many of Trump’s “facts” were either bogus or exaggerations of data chosen with an extreme bias toward his point of view. Moreover, in statements by administration spokespersons like Press Secretary Sean Spicer or U.S. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, no one was willing to answer explicitly reporters’ questions about what Trump truly believes about climate science. They talked around it, under it, behind it, and did all manner of verbal contortions to avoid simply saying whether Trump believes in the reality of climate change.

They prefer to stand behind the mistaken assumption that he is somehow protecting American jobs, but his views on this point are almost a half-century behind the times. Most coal jobs disappeared not because of climate regulations but because of automation that began nearly three generations ago. More recently, coal has been threatened economically by a surge of natural gas supplies as a result of fracking. One amazing aspect of this story, which includes the whole fight over pipelines, is that Republicans have tried very hard to have it both ways on the energy front. They have decried the decline of coal even as they themselves have supported fracking in a relentless bid to support all available options for developing American energy supplies. These various energy supplies compete with each other, and more natural gas at cheaper prices inevitably means less coal production and fewer coal jobs, a result that has little to do with environmental standards. It is called free enterprise. It is true that public policy tilts the scales in the energy industry, but public policy ought to do so with the future and the long-term best interest of the public in mind. In fact, a wiser administration might realize that now is an ideal time to begin to develop renewable energy sources in Appalachia to replace jobs that are unlikely ever to come back. Instead, politicians in places like Kentucky and West Virginia choose to play on fears and insecurity rather than offering a new economic vision that might actually improve the lives of workers. Unfortunately, this sort of political cynicism seems to be richly rewarded. That is the only explanation for a truly bizarre CNN interview by Jake Tapper with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) just ahead of Trump’s announcement. Setting up one straw man after another, Paul stated that the earth has undergone much more serious climate change than humans can cause. No one with a modicum of scientific education would not know that there have been wide swings in climate over geologic time (presuming you accept the theory of evolution), but they occurred over tens of thousands of years, not decades. Yes, we know about the Ice Age, Senator. It is not “alarmist” to note that climate change is occurring at a rate faster than nature has historically caused on its own.

Trump’s supposed defense of American jobs collapses in the face of the economic evidence. Renewable energy is producing new jobs as fast or faster than any other sector of the U.S. economy, as noted by people like Jeff Nesbit, who has a bipartisan track record of research on the issue. Trump outrageously claimed that other nations were laughing at us for being taken advantage of in the accord. In fact, they have respected American leadership in this sector, and if they are laughing at anyone, it is surely Trump himself, although I suspect that many are spending more time pulling their hair out in frustration and dismay at the direction he is taking. They are also preparing to move ahead without U.S. involvement, a stance not unlike that being taken by California and other states and cities with a more progressive view of the world’s economic future. My impression was that Trump, in obsessing about our nation being a supposed laughingstock, is revealing personal insecurities for which the nation is paying a high price. What, Mr. President, is the source of this persistent insecurity? You are wealthy enough to afford psychological counseling if you need it. I admit that you tapped into a good deal of voter insecurity, but you are leading your base nowhere. Do us all a favor and find them a vision for the future, instead of a nightmare based on a flawed vision of the past.

Scene from New Orleans in November 2005 after Hurricane Katrina

So let me circle back to what so offended me personally about being confronted with this public policy disaster on my first day after leaving APA. Little more than a decade ago, following Hurricane Katrina and the Indian Ocean tsunami, with many years of planning experience behind me in the disaster arena, I realized that my position at APA afforded me a truly rare opportunity to shape planning history by refocusing the profession’s attention on the numerous ways in which planners could use their skills and positions in local and state government, consulting firms, and academia, among other possibilities, to design communities in ways that would save lives and reduce property damage. I was determined to devote the remainder of my career to helping make that happen, with the help of numerous experts and veteran planners who shared my vision of those opportunities. Uniquely, however, I was in a position to shape the agenda of the American Planning Association on behalf of its nearly 40,000 members to provide the resources, research, and training those planners would need to attack the problem.

By 2007, we had persuaded the Federal Emergency Management Agency, still reeling from perceptions of ineptitude in the response to Hurricane Katrina and other events, to underwrite a study of how planners could better incorporate hazard mitigation as a priority throughout the local planning process. The result, Hazard Mitigation: Incorporating Best Practices into Planning, has had a growing impact on community planning since its release in 2010. It had been truly heartbreaking to see communities so poorly prepared for natural disasters that more than 1,800 Americans lost their lives in Mississippi and Louisiana as a result of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. We could do something to change that. FEMA has since then incorporated this concept of integration into a variety of guidance, and so has the State of Colorado. Things are changing.

Scene on the New Jersey shore after Hurricane Sandy, February 2013

We also in 2010 persuaded FEMA to underwrite another project that would rewrite our 1998 guidance on planning for post-disaster recovery, and the result in late 2014 was not only another Planning Advisory Service Report, Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery: Next Generation, but a substantial collection of online resources to supplement that report. Among the key recommendations for communities was the idea of planning ahead of disasters for major policy decisions that would govern the post-disaster recovery planning process so as to expedite wise decision making. That project has also proven highly influential.

Throughout this all, the growing impact of climate change was making itself evident. This is not just a matter of jobs. It is a matter of whether our President believes in making his own nation, his own citizens, safe in the face of natural disasters that, in many cases, can be made worse by climate change. This is not just a matter of sea level rise increasing the impact of storm surges produced by tropical storms. It is also a matter of increased susceptibility to prolonged drought in many parts of the U.S., and increased susceptibility to wildfire, as well as more extreme high-precipitation events that can exacerbate urban and riverine flooding. That is why APA and the Association of State Floodplain Managers, in a Regional Coastal Resilience grant project supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is working with pilot communities on both the East Coast and the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes do not experience rising sea levels, but they do experience fluctuating lake levels and greater weather extremes that can raise the costs of natural disasters in coming decades.

All that brings us back to the President’s admittedly alliterative statement that he was putting Pittsburgh ahead of Paris. That’s a nice sound bite, but it makes no sense. For one thing, Pittsburgh voters no longer look to coal and steel mills to secure their economic future. For the past 30 years, Pittsburgh has moved ahead with a new economic vision based on industries of the future. Almost surely, that was the reason Hillary Clinton won 75 percent of the vote in Pittsburgh last year, although Trump won Pennsylvania by a narrow margin, racking up most of his victory in rural areas. Pittsburgh’s economic growth model may not be perfect (what big city is?), but it is better than most. And it certainly is not tied to President Trump’s retreat from progress on climate change.

Nowhere in the administration message did I hear any acknowledgment of the job growth that is tied to our leadership on climate change, and the opportunities that may be sacrificed to the President’s flawed analysis of who is supposedly laughing at us. Technological and scientific leadership have been the lifeblood of America’s prosperity. We are now retreating from that prospect at what may be a high cost in the future unless we turn this ship around again. Nowhere did I hear any acknowledgment of the cost to communities in lost life and property safety as a result of ignoring warnings about the impacts of climate change.

On one level, the priorities for which I have worked for the last 25 years may not matter much in terms of my resentment at seeing so much of this work seemingly undone on the day after my retirement from APA. Trump also may ultimately have far less impact on the subject than he intends. But on another level, I was just one more contributor to a great push by millions of Americans toward that safer, more prosperous future that remains possible despite this grand presidential blunder. Maybe the Nicaraguans, who are not part of the Paris accord, are right—we should do far more, not less. But we certainly should not be following the lead of President Trump. He has dramatically gotten it all wrong, and we must all say so as forcefully as we can.

 

Jim Schwab

Drifting into Disaster

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Scene from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta

Scene from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta

Across the United States of America, about one in five people live under the rules and structures of some sort of private association that governs common property interests. These can be condominium associations, homeowners associations, or similar entities that are somehow responsible for levying fees and maintaining communal property. To degrees they often may not realize, the residents are thus controlled and constrained by the decisions these associations make, which often may concern themselves with details that a local government would not even consider, such as the color of aluminum siding, allowable holiday decorations, and other matters with minor impacts on the quality of life. Many homeowners associations are established by developers at the time they get permits to create a new subdivision. In some states, local governments are happy to offload responsibility for infrastructure maintenance, such as private roads, onto these associations while coveting the property taxes they will still pay.

The implications of all this were brought to my attention in the past week or two by Chad Berginnis, the executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers (ASFPM). He has been working with me on material for a future report we plan to publish at the American Planning Association on subdivision design as it relates to areas with flood hazards. The issue that concerned him as he wrote a chapter on subdivision standards for local governments, which have the primary responsibility for permitting new development, is how well these private owner associations can sustain over time the financial responsibilities for infrastructure designed to protect their properties from disaster, most notably but not exclusively, flooding.

Among the items that have come to my attention is a paper by two California attorneys, Tyler P. Berding and Steven S. Weil, disturbingly titled, “Disaster! No Reserves. No Insurance. What’s Left if a Natural Disaster Destroys a Community Association?” They begin with a cautionary tale about the Bethel Island Municipal Improvement District, actually a California special district, not a homeowners association. Its mission is to maintain and improve the levees that surround the Sacramento Delta island of 2,500 residents, where the interior is seven to 15 feet below sea level. To say that their survival depends on well-maintained levees is no exaggeration. Moreover, in that part of California, the levees are subject to collapse from earthquake shaking as well as from overtopping in a flood. I have some idea of their peril because four years ago, a representative of the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) took me on a six-hour guided tour of the levee system in the delta area, plying me with a number of the background studies by DWR of the overall situation. There are hundreds of such islands throughout the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, many used for agriculture, and some developed. In their 2012 article, produced about the time of that tour, Berding and Weil note, “But the district is broke.” Voters “soundly” rejected a 2010 parcel tax measure to fund improvements, and much of the district staff was laid off. The levees were deteriorating, to some extent “suffering damage by beavers and rodents.”

It is disturbingly easy for homeowners association or other private association board members to take their eyes off the ball of maintaining adequate reserves and resources to address dangers that seem less than imminent, and even to forget why they are responsible for collecting assessments in the first place. And it is even easier for residents who must approve some of those assessments to lack meaningful knowledge of the consequences of either depleting or failing to maintain adequate reserves for unfortunate natural events like floods, earthquakes, or other disasters. Once they begin sliding down that slippery slope of amnesia and unawareness, it is not long before they have put a good deal of common and individual property at risk. The few who may be aware of the long-term consequences often may lack the ability to make their case to less concerned neighbors.

This issue is one of concern in the field of urban planning because new subdivisions, in particular, often arise at the edge of metropolitan areas in unincorporated county lands or small towns, where governance capacity may be limited and resistance to government regulation particularly high. The result is that oversight is weakest, and the desire for new development highest, precisely where the need for that oversight may be greatest. In regulatory terms, it is the theory of the weakest link. One of our motives for the new report (underwritten by the Federal Emergency Management Agency) is to help shore up those weak links with stronger guidance about sound practices in reviewing plans for new subdivisions. Berding and Weil were serving a similar purpose, at least in the California context, by describing sound practices for community associations, particularly in sustaining adequate reserves for contingencies such as disasters.

But finances are only part of the problem. Sometimes, the leadership of such associations can become so focused on issues like aesthetics and conformity that they lose sight of larger issues like public safety. In the past, the National Fire Protection Association, which supports the Firewise Communities initiative, has trained its attention on the question of covenants that run counter to public safety, for example, by inhibiting well-researched methods for containing wildfire threats. Many of these techniques involve either landscaping or building design, yet some associations have rules limiting tree trimming or landscaping that would aid in wildfire mitigation. In Safer from the Start, NFPA’s 2009 study of the issues involved in building and maintaining “firewise-friendly developments,” a sidebar notes that the state of Colorado’s recently passed “Colorado Common Interest Ownership Act,” among other measures, basically invalidated a number of types of association covenants and restrictions that inhibited defensible space around private dwellings in order to advance wildfire safety statewide. In effect, the state was saying, with regard to rules that made wildfire safety more difficult to enforce, “enough.” At the same time, the publication overall provided a significant amount of sound advice about best practices in wildfire protection in rural subdivisions and new developments.

That seven-year-old NFPA advice recently got a new boost from an interesting direction: Green Builder Media just recently issued its own e-brochure, “Design with Fire in Mind: Three Steps to a Safer New Home,” in cooperation with NFPA. Green Builder Media has more of a direct avenue to influence those developers who want to build safe, resilient, energy-efficient communities.

The fact that these resources have continued to materialize on a regular basis over the past decade or two indicates, to me, that the subject of good design and homeowner association responsibility is not going away any time soon. It is the job of planners, floodplain managers, and local and state officials to ensure that those responsibilities remain on their radar screens and are taken seriously. One-fifth of the American population depends to a significant degree on the quality of their oversight.

 

Jim Schwab

The Past and Future of Disaster Research and Practice

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Interdisciplinary disaster studies are still relatively new, compared to long-standing fields like geology or even psychology. I spent last week (July 19-23) in Broomfield, Colorado, first at the Natural Hazards Workshop, sponsored by the University of Colorado’s Natural Hazards Center, and then at the one-day add-on conference of the Natural Hazard Mitigation Association (NHMA). The International Research Committee on Disasters Researchers Meeting took place at the same time as the NHMA gathering. The main event marked the 40th year of the Natural Hazards Workshop, launched in 1976, with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), by the Natural Hazards Center’s renowned founder, Gilbert F. White, who virtually pioneered studies of flooding in the 1930s as a geographer who served in the New Deal under President Franklin Roosevelt, later taught at the University of Chicago, and finally found his home in Boulder, where he died in 2006 at age 94. You can read a full biography of White, a true scientific pioneer, in Robert E. Hinshaw’s Living with Nature’s Extremes, published shortly after White’s death.

To mark this milestone, current NHC director Kathleen Tierney invited several of us to join a panel for the opening plenary on July 20 to discuss both retrospective and prospective views of disaster research and practice within four disciplines. I spoke about urban planning; Howard Kunreuther spoke by video on economics; Tricia Wachtendorf of the University of Delaware on sociology; and Ken Mitchell of Rutgers University on geography. In the end, of course, we all use and benefit from each other’s insights, so it was intriguing to hear the comparisons in how our fields have approached problems of hazard mitigation and disaster recovery. The forum was moderated by long-time NSF program director Dennis Wenger, who previously served at Texas A&M University, where he was Founding Director and Senior Scholar of the Hazard Reduction & Recovery Center.

Wenger himself had a story to tell before introducing his panel, one involving more than 800 projects funded by NSF for more than $200 million over the years his program, Infrastructure Systems Management and Extreme Events, has been in place to fund research on hazards. It has not always had that name; as Wenger humorously noted, however, its four name changes over some four decades is “not bad for NSF.” The ballroom of 500 disaster practitioners and researchers from multiple disciplines contained more than a few people whose research has benefited from those NSF grants, which have moved the field forward in numerous and remarkable ways.

The American Planning Association taped the opening plenary and has made it available on its multimedia Recovery News blog at http://blogs.planning.org/postdisaster/2015/07/28/what-next-the-past-and-future-of-disaster-practice-and-research/. The blog post includes the PowerPoint accompanying my presentation.

 

Jim Schwab

Interview with Boulder, Colorado, Mayor

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This is one of those short posts that takes you to a different blog, but one for which I have direct responsibilities–the Recovery News blog at the American Planning Association website. We posted last Friday a video interview with Matthew Appelbaum, the mayor of Boulder, Colorado, exploring the lessons the city learned from the floods that afflicted the city in September 2013. Appelbaum discusses the road to recovery, the unique circumstances of the flood, and the fact that “resilience is the watchword.” I hope you enjoy listening. Click here.

Jim Schwab

One Thing Leads to Another

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I have been to my fair share of presentations on disaster-related issues. When I hear a particularly good presentation, I know it is good because I have a lot of others to which I can compare it. Sometimes local planners, emergency managers, and engineers, among others, can bring a certain parochial flavor to their presentations. I think this is usually the result of not having either the experience or the inclination to think beyond the set of problems and challenges immediately before them.

But there are also those who have thought bigger thoughts, figured out larger patterns, and validated them through observation and experience. Last week, at a conference in Broomfield, Colorado, north of Denver, I heard one such presentation that I thought gave listeners something serious to think about.

The Association of State Floodplain Managers, which is based in Madison, Wisconsin, was holding its Sixth Triennial Flood Mitigation and Floodproofing Workshop. I was invited to help present a 90-minute workshop on the integration of hazard mitigation into comprehensive planning, a subject I will address in a forthcoming blog. Before I do that, however, I thought it more important to discuss what Brian Varrella, an engineer and certified floodplain manager for the city of Fort Collins, Colorado, discussed in a plenary presentation based in part on his city’s experience with serious floods in September 2013.

Varrella did not settle for merely telling us about the extent of the flood and resulting damages in Fort Collins, and how the city is rebuilding again. He took the audience back to some neglected basics. In teaching graduate urban planning students about hazard mitigation and disaster recovery at the University of Iowa, I often try to do the same thing early in the course. I stress that all hazard events involve some very basic equation rooted in physics. Want a wildfire? Combine oxygen, fuel, and heat. Want to predict the direction of a flood? Think about gravity, and you will find the water, which inevitably flows downhill. Of course, the specific circumstances of any disaster require some knowledge of the local conditions, particularly topography, to make that understanding useful. But the basic equations never go away.

What differentiates a disaster from a natural event—what, for instance, turns a hurricane into a disaster—is the presence of the built environment and humans in the path of that event. A hurricane (typhoon) passing over an uninhabited island in the Pacific Ocean does not produce a disaster. The same storm assaulting Miami becomes a disaster. The difference is what we have built in harm’s way.

What if the conditions exist for several hazards simultaneously? That is the Colorado challenge that Varrella addressed. Wildfire, he noted, creates other problems from one disaster, in part by baking the soil when it is particularly intense. Subsequent thunderstorms cannot penetrate the now hardened soil, and instead carry vegetative and muddy debris downhill into the watershed, producing “muddy material that is opaque,” water that is heavy with silt. The result is a more intense flood. Colorado, Varrella noted, lost 10 people in last year’s floods; that was fortunately not even close to the record of 140 lives lost in the Big Thompson flood of the 1970s.

Yet some solutions commonly used to mitigate future damages elsewhere cannot always work because of Colorado’s steep terrain. Elevation, for instance, is commonly used in riverine and coastal floodplains to place the living area of a home above projected elevations of future floods, as determined by National Flood Insurance Program maps. But in mountainous terrain, watersheds can rapidly migrate in flash floods, washing out the toe of ledges beneath houses on hillsides. Elevation does nothing to restore the underlying stability of the soil, but significant setbacks from such ledges may help. Varrella suggested that Colorado borrow standards for such situations from other states with similar experiences, citing Vermont, New Mexico, and Washington. He noted that flood insurance rate maps (known as FIRMs) do not show all hazards. “We must find a new way of doing business,” he said. Maps that are static in time are not prone to show or predict such dynamic erosion.

It is always helpful when such a speaker has a set of recommendations for moving forward with a dynamic, complex problem, and Varrella did, so here goes:

• Create a framework for understanding wildfire and flood as cascading, related events.

• Reduce the human side of the disaster equation, for example, by requiring setbacks in the cases cited above.

• Treat wildfires as a prelude to the sequence of floods followed by erosion and debris.

• Change our hydraulic and hydrological practices to think in the fourth dimension of time; advocate for unsteady hydraulic models that reflect dynamic realities.

• Collaborate as a watershed among local governments. The watershed is the most efficient level at which to mitigate damages from wildfire and flooding; combine resources, stakeholders, and solutions.

• Communicate all natural hazards to the public. Establish flood warning systems before wildfires ever happen.

• Break the fire-flood-erosion cycle by managing forests as assets, not just resources.

• More helicopters, please; get eyes above the ground to see what’s happening on the ground in a timely fashion in order to save lives.

It’s a tall agenda, but a sensible one that is manageable if we focus on the problem. I think he’s clearly on the right track.

Jim Schwab