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

Catch Up and Slow Down

I was lying half awake in bed at 4 a.m., unable to return completely to sleep after using the bathroom. My mind kept rolling over various competing obligations and necessities, and the thought hit me:

“You must catch up while slowing down.”

Frankly, that made about as much sense to me in the moment as it probably does to you upon reading it. One’s subconscious mind can shed strange light sometimes. The whole idea is as paradoxical as it is imperative. And yet, I mention it because I strongly suspect that many people can relate to it at some level.

We get caught in situations. Mine is partial explanation of why it has been weeks since I last posted on this blog, but that is a minor measure of the overall impact of a combined events and circumstances. As a professional urban planner, I can state flatly that life does not always follow our plans. It springs surprises and throws nasty curveballs.

Work piles up, even if much of it, in my case at the moment, is pro bono or volunteer work. The thought that I am sharing occurred last weekend, and I wrote the first four paragraphs above that morning. I got sidetracked until now, but there’s no better time to finish a blog post than now–I guess.

Let’s go back almost two months. On April Fool’s Day, aka April 1, I flew with my wife (Jean) and a teenage grandson (Alex) to Philadelphia to attend the American Planning Association’s National Planning Conference. This was important to me on several levels, including my role as immediate past chair of the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division, which keeps me on the Executive Committee until the end of this year. Even then, I will still be involved, primarily in charge of a documentary film project, but I will save that topic for my next blog post. You can see the work piling up already. Being there allowed me to network with numerous people about numerous issues and projects and attend our division reception, where we announced a fundraising campaign to support the film project. Over breakfast, it gave one colleague from APA’s International Division an opportunity to recruit me for its Ukraine Rebuilding Action Group. But it was also a chance, during spring break for the Chicago Public Schools, to tour parts of a historic city with Alex and Jean.

A much earlier request to speak at a conference in Georgia set me up to fly back to Chicago on April 4 to stay overnight and fly the very next day to Atlanta. The occasion was the Larry Larson Speaker Series of the ASFPM Foundation at Lake Lanier, attached to the annual conference of the Georgia Association of Floodplain Management. Our distinguished panel was addressing issues of disaster resilience from federal, state, nonprofit, and local planning perspectives.

Little did I know my own resilience was to be tested. Wicked weather sweeping through the Midwest and South that week created havoc. By the time I arrived at O’Hare International Airport, having neglected to check for cell phone text messages, I learned that my flight to Atlanta was canceled and no others were available that day. I needed to be at Lake Lanier by that evening, so I conferred with the event organizers. I had to cancel my flight and hotel room and ended up speaking the next morning by video connection, missing out on personal interactions but delivering my comments anyway. Perhaps my own most notable remark was that I no longer wanted to hear any local official say after a natural disaster that “no one could have foreseen” the event. If the event happened, I said, it was always within the realm of possibility. “What you’re telling me,” I said, “is that you may not have spent much time thinking about it beforehand.” Terri L. Turner, a long-time colleague and recently retired development services administrator for the city of Augusta, Georgia, told me later that there was a ripple of laughter in the audience after I said that. Floodplain managers too often know the truth of such assertions.

Within two weeks, I discovered that my personal resilience was to be challenged in more significant ways. By mid-April, I experienced a sudden problem on the bottom of my left foot that appeared to be some sort of lesion or blister. Not sure, the best move seemed to be a consultation with my primary care physician to see what he thought. That happened on April 19, but he was also uncertain and referred me to a podiatrist. However, the very next morning, I reported to Northwestern Memorial Hospital for a previously scheduled prostate biopsy, which produced its own complications over the weekend. I might have just waited those out restfully if I had not been scheduled as co-instructor for a week-long online, all-day FEMA class that week, which was largely an exhausting experience. In mid-week, I left right after class adjourned for a follow-up appointment with the urologist to learn the results of the biopsy, which were reassuring but will involve some further measures this summer.

I finally managed to see the podiatrist the following Monday. He determined a need to biopsy the growth, a decidedly painful and messy experience even with a local anesthetic. I went home with a bandaged foot that I needed to protect for several days until it healed. A week later, however, I learned that the growth was benign; surgery would still be beneficial though not urgent.

Somewhere, in between all this, my printer died. I bought a new one from Best Buy but asked that the Geek Squad do me the favor of installing it. After all, I bought it the day of the foot biopsy. Our aging electric mower also died, and I brought our 19-year-old college student grandson to Home Depot to help buy a new one. I let him assemble it and mow the yard. I’m fine with mowing now, but for a few days, it was decidedly not a good idea.

By now, the second week of May had arrived, and a number of commitments beyond the FEMA class were amassing a backlog of work for which I needed a rapid rise in stamina, which I have mostly managed to generate. Nonetheless, I wish I had more energy and more hours in the day. That does not even speak to family obligations as summer arrives and school ends, and I dream of a vacation while arranging to see doctors in August. I’ll figure it all out, but as I said, life throws curveballs. The value of being 73 is that one has presumably learned something about how to handle matters more efficiently and wisely. I am applying that wisdom to regain control over those pending tasks and establish priorities. I am learning how to catch up and slow down at the same time.

My next post, coming very soon, will share the biggest project currently on my plate. I hope you will find it as fascinating and exciting as I do. Resilience matters.

Jim Schwab

 

P.S.: While editing this piece for publication, I learned that a Sunday feature article in the Chicago Tribune, in which I was quoted, has appeared online here. The article discusses the impact of climate change on urban heat and social disparities in the city. In addition, the two links below provide methodology for the article and searchable maps:

https://www.chicagotribune.com/investigations/ct-viz-chicago-heat-disparities-climate-change-20230526-mzsazq6xa5b6rejv3rtvfefwoi-htmlstory.html

https://www.chicagotribune.com/investigations/ct-how-we-reported-on-heat-disparities-in-chicago-20230525-hsdhhgzgwrc7tffcre6ftanphi-story.html

Thanks to reporter Sara Macaraeg for alerting me to the article’s release.

Softly Persuasive Planning Pioneer

Photo from David Topping’s Facebook posting of his father’s passing.

I first met Ken Topping at the American Planning Association (APA) office in Chicago on a cold day in January 1994. Chicago was suffering one of its classic Arctic blasts at something like -20°F. Ken, a tall, very polite, and articulate gentleman, had his heavy winter coat for the ride back to O’Hare International Airport toward the end of the day. On January 17, just a day or so before he arrived in Chicago, the Northridge Earthquake struck Los Angeles, an area where he had worked for many years. Ken, who was already developing a significant history of advancing what was then the nascent role of urban planning in responding to disasters, became immediately involved. Exactly one year later, on January 17, 1995, the Great Hanshin earthquake leveled much of Kobe, a major city in Japan. With his extensive acquaintances there, Ken was again on the scene.

At the time, I gently needled him that trouble followed him wherever he traveled. But the reality was that Ken took the lead in planning solutions to some of the world’s most vexing environmental challenges: natural disasters. It took years for me to understand the degree to which that initial meeting with Ken changed my life and my perspectives on what I wanted to accomplish as a professional planner. Ken lured me into the world of disaster recovery and resilience planning in a way no one else did.

When we met, it was Bill Klein, then the research director at APA, who introduced us. Just a few months before, Bill, who had somehow negotiated a modest contract with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to produce a Planning Advisory Service (PAS) Report on planning for post-disaster recovery, offered me the opportunity to manage the project. This was not because I had any great expertise in the subject. It was because no one else at APA did, either, but I at least had a strong background in environmental planning, and disasters are, at least in part, an environmental problem. Actually, I learned, they are many problems rolled into one, and what I was about to undertake was a challenge well above any I had encountered before, even though I was already completing a book—my second—about environmental justice. But that left the question of why Ken Topping, with noteworthy contributions to the disaster field behind him, should be dealing with a greenhorn like me.

That’s not the way he saw it. Or ever saw it. If Bill had confidence in me, then for Ken it was a chance to mentor someone new to the field and help shape the project at its roots. Over the next few years, as the project grew and expanded from its original ambitions, Ken introduced me to numerous players in this then small arena of planning to reduce the impacts of natural hazards. I did not fully appreciate the significance of some of the people I met, a fact I still regret, but it was all such new territory that I did not always fully understand who was who.

Leaders of Tomorrow

My experience with Ken was far from unique. He mentored, nurtured, and influenced the professional development of people who became some of my best professional friends and colleagues in the growing subfield of hazards planning.

Ken and US-Japan team members meeting with community leaders of the Shin-Nagata North neighborhood that was heavily damaged in the 1995 Kobe earthquake. On the front row from left to right are: Robert Olshansky, Laurie Johnson, Kazuyoshi Ohnishi, and Ken Topping (U.S. team leader). Photo provided by Laurie Johnson.

Robert Olshansky, now professor emeritus at the University of Illinois and living in the Bay Area, met Topping and Laurie Johnson, then a young planner with a bachelor’s degree in geophysics, at a conference of the Central United States Earthquake Consortium in June 1994 in Louisville, Kentucky. The conference, which I also attended, drew mostly engineers, so these three planners “stayed up late in animated conversation,” Rob recalls. Frankly, I don’t remember much of what I did there, but I do recall meeting Laurie either there or a month later at the Natural Hazards Workshop in Boulder, Colorado. I was very much the newcomer to this business back then, in any case. But Rob, Laurie, and Ken engaged in a round of post-Northridge earthquake research meetings in California, which led to a proposal, led by Topping, to compare the Northridge and Kobe earthquake recovery experiences. Eventually funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), their work began in 1998, but the important facet was that it involved extensive international collaboration between this American trio and four Japanese researchers. It was Ken who introduced Rob and Laurie to Japanese planning. Rob confesses he had never been to Asia before the Kobe earthquake, but he and Laurie developed close connections in Japan who remain good friends 25 years later. Rob says it was Ken who insisted on the close collaboration with the Japanese and helped select the neighborhoods they chose for comparative study.

Ken with the US-Japan team conducting a long-term comparative study of rebuilding in Los Angeles and Kobe following the 1994 and 1995 earthquakes, respectively, during a team meeting in 2000 in Kobe. Left to right are: Robert Olshansky, Laurie Johnson, Ikuo Kobayashi, Hisako Koura, Yoshiteru Murosaki (Japan team leader), Kazuyoshi Ohnishi, and Ken Topping (U.S. team leader). Photo provided by Laurie Johnson.

The remarkable aspect of all this for Laurie Johnson, now a prominent hazard planning consultant based in San Rafael, California, was Ken’s acceptance and support though, she says, “I was barely in my 30s and had only a few years of relevant professional experience” when they first met. Their first contact, she says, came in 1990, when Ken spoke at the International Symposium on Rebuilding after Earthquakes, hosted at Stanford University by Spangle Associates, the firm for which she was then working. Spangle had produced a study that was among the first I studied in this emerging field, examining four case studies of post-disaster recovery. It profoundly influenced my view of what happens to communities in a disaster.

Ken, says Laurie, “wowed the group with his presentation on LA’s efforts to prepare a first-ever, pre-disaster recovery plan for the city before a major disaster like an earthquake struck.” Ken was then the planning director of Los Angeles. Fortunately, a draft of what became the Los Angeles Recovery and Reconstruction Plan had been completed when the Northridge earthquake occurred. The city formally adopted it a year later. Another NSF study led by Spangle Associates, in which Laurie was involved, found “that the plan was instrumental in contributing to the high level of staff performance” after the earthquake, helping most city departments to understand their responsibilities and prepare to perform them.

Innovations

By the mid-1990s, Ken was a tall, white-haired gentleman in his 50s, a strong intellect with a gentle voice. In coming years, in part working on the project I was leading, he made a significant impression on our colleagues at FEMA. Terry Baker, former National Team Leader for Hazard Mitigation Planning, recalled him as “always generous with his time and thoughts. A luminary in the field, although you wouldn’t know that from his kind and down-to-earth demeanor.” Similarly, Cecelia Rosenberg, who served as both project officer and grants manager at FEMA, recalls his “softly persuasive ways and quiet wisdom.” He was never a loud voice, but people knew they were speaking with someone who mattered.

He mattered because of a history of innovations, a willingness to try new things to solve emerging problems. He was well ahead of most planners in recognizing how planning could be used to reduce disaster risk. In a career that that was already well underway amid the environmental planning revolution of the 1970s, he consistently found ways to generate meaningful change. By 1973, he was planning director in San Bernardino County, California, where, as California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly) Professor William Siembieda notes, he “created one of the first wildfire mitigation programs and an overlay zone on 19,000 square miles of desert land for future regional conservation.”

Ken’s spirit of innovation was not limited to southern California. It was a hallmark of his career. Working with me and a team of contributors to Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery and Reconstruction (PAS 483/484, 1998), his singular contribution lay in crafting a model ordinance for post-disaster recovery that is still in use today. The model offers local governments a means of structuring governance of the recovery process after a major or catastrophic disaster, assigning responsibilities among city agencies and empowering them to handle such urgent tasks as post-disaster demolition and intergovernmental coordination. It helps them create order out of chaos with a management structure for long-term recovery that can be activated as soon as the city declares an emergency. It expedites recovery by saving precious time after disaster strikes. I can state with certainty that no more than a handful of jurisdictions had adopted any similar approach prior to the release of our report.

More than a dozen years later, after I had convinced FEMA to fund an overhaul of the original post-disaster study, adding a bevy of online resources to a new report (Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery: Next Generation, PAS 560, 2014), Ken sought to update the model ordinance as part of the project. When I directed his attention to what I considered an important innovation by the city of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, after its massive 2008 flood, he did not hesitate to contact former Community Development Director Christine Butterfield for details. The new model thus included language requiring municipal licensing of building repair contractors to prevent the sort of fraudulent repairs that had been rife in places like New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Ken knew a good idea when he saw one, and Cedar Rapids had done something important. A major contributor to the later PAS Report was Laurie Johnson, who produced two of the most important chapters, dealing with the recovery planning process and implementation of recovery plans. Like me, under Ken’s influence, Laurie had come a very long way in the planning field since first meeting Ken.

Bill Siembieda says this focus on innovation was also evident in Ken’s relationship with Cal Poly, which began in the spring of 2000 and lasted two decades. Ken was a part-time lecturer and George Hasslein Chair in the College of Architecture and Environmental Design, City and Regional Planning Department. His efforts included an international symposium on risk reduction, multidisciplinary courses focused on mitigation and risk reduction, and work with state agencies, most notably on the 2010 California Multi-Hazard Mitigation Plan, in which “he created a set of working groups within the state government” to discuss topics of mutual interest. He believed strongly in the value of cross-disciplinary discussions to achieve a more integrated approach to solving problems.

This focus on integration led to Ken’s involvement in what I regarded as my own signature project, which resulted in the PAS Report, Hazard Mitigation: Integrating Best Practices into Planning (PAS 560, 2010). For his accomplishments and leadership in city planning and management, environmental and hazard resilience planning, Ken was inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Certified Planners in 2000 and honored with a special session at the 2019 conference of the California chapter of APA.

Multiple Dimensions

Ken died on March 5 from complications of Parkinson’s Disease at 85. He and his wife, Phyllis, spent the last year or so in San Clemente Villas in a seacoast town in Southern California. I had a few last conversations by phone with him after that move from Cambria, California, where he had served at one point as the general manager for the Cambria Community Services District and later chaired the San Luis Obispo County Planning Commission, where he demonstrated his penchant for conservation by helping establish the Fiscalini Ranch as a Pacific Ocean coastal bluff park. Siembieda credits Ken’s “great persistence” and a “willingness to put time and energy into each work product” for his vision to support large solar farms in the county and his opposition to a “large petroleum industry oil train project.”

In one of those calls, he shared with me that he had recently fallen while trying to maneuver his walker in a parking lot. It was clear that time was taking its toll, but in a later call, ever cheerful, he gently told me how much he admired my own career path. He seldom missed an opportunity to encourage the people he had mentored.

Ken with Phyllis, his wife. From David Topping’s Facebook notice about his father’s passing.

One of the more fascinating aspects of his own story, however, was his birth in 1935 in Kobe, Japan, to a pair of American Baptist missionaries. Before the outbreak of World War II, his family found it necessary to return to the United States, where he grew up in San Francisco and Boulder, Colorado, before the family returned to Japan after the war. He later returned to the U.S. for college at the University of Redlands in California, where he met Phyllis, with whom he had two sons, and earned a degree in sociology, followed by further studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. They returned to California, where Ken began a career as a regional planner in Los Angeles but also earned a Masters in Public Administration in 1972 from California State University, Los Angeles. That led to his becoming planning director for San Bernardino County in 1973, and later the city of Los Angeles, appointed in 1986 by Mayor Tom Bradley. One of his achievements was Los Angeles’s first zoning update using geographic information systems (GIS), then a new technology.

The environment was clearly one of his high priorities, something readily apparent in April 2012, when he and Phyllis walked my wife, Jean, and me through the Fiscalini Ranch Preserve before treating us to lunch at a local Cambria restaurant. But he also had a deeply empathetic personal side. I had been in Los Angeles the prior week at the APA National Planning Conference (NPC), much of which became for me a daunting experience as I suffered an attack of prostatitis, though I did not know the diagnosis before visiting a local urgent care center. Exhibiting my stubborn streak, on a Saturday evening early in the conference, I showed up in a hotel meeting room after getting dressed, despite feeling drained and weak, to lead a meeting of the project team for the Next Generation project. Ken took one look at me and would have none of it. His personal touch was evident as he turned to Kathy Smith, our FEMA project officer, and said, “Look at him. He’s in no condition to run a meeting.” At Ken’s urging, It was rescheduled subsequently for a remote meeting from Cal Poly the day after our visit to Cambria.

Ken seated along with children and staff at the Morioka Kindergarten in 2013. Photo provided by Laurie Johnson.

Laurie Johnson believes many of Ken’s finer traits can be attributed to his exposure to Japan. She recalls “a beautiful tribute to Ken and his family’s ties to Japan organized by Professor [Haruo] Hayashi (Kyoto University) and colleagues” in March 2013. They were documenting recovery efforts in northern Japan following the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, but the group visited a kindergarten founded in the city of Morioka by Ken’s grandmother more than a century earlier. “The kindergartners assembled and tried to sit patiently as the history was explained and Ken was honored,” she says. “They then sang a song, “Small Garden,” that his grandmother had taught her classes many years ago and which classes still sing today.”

From David Topping’s Facebook notice of his father’s passing.

Ken tapped a beat, she says, which reminded her that Ken had taught himself to play the bass and guitar and had played before for the joint research team at home in Cambria in 2002. Music was another element of his humanity and family life (including a family band), and that focus influenced his two sons to pursue careers in music. Ken went on that day at the school to remind the children to continue to learn as they grew up, how he was there himself to learn about the earthquake, and about the value of friends around the world. “So please be my friend, too,” he told them, “and keep learning all of your lives so that you can help make the world a better place.”

Connecting People

As that vignette illustrates, there was nothing more important for Ken Topping than connecting people, particularly people of talent and determination, with the resources and networks they needed to succeed at making the world a better place. And that mission spanned international boundaries.

Professor Norio Maki of Kyoto University was one of those who benefited. He describes Topping as “my mentor on planning.” In addition to working with Ken in Japan, he learned greatly from collaboration on a project in Marikina, a city in the Philippines. The goal was to develop an earthquake mitigation plan through workshops with city staff. In what he describes as “real on-the-job training,” Ken advised him on workshop presentations and the use of GIS. Despite his university degrees, he says, “I think I got my degree in planning from Ken.”

Rob also facilitated Rob Olshansky’s now permanent connection to Japan. Ken helped arrange for Rob to follow him in a one-year visiting fellowship at Kyoto University, with Professor Hayashi. The cultural shift could have been deeply challenging, but Rob brought his children along for “a life-changing year at school in Japan.” Ken advised him on “important Japanese etiquette do’s and don’ts, in addition to navigating the Japanese train system.” Eight years later, Rob was able to pay it forward by doing the same favor for another visiting professor, Jim Goltz. And so the waves of influence move forward. Rob also believes that a book he and Laurie co-authored, After Great Disasters (reviewed on this blog), “would never have happened without Ken’s influence.”

I could go on, and Rob, Laurie, Terry, Cecelia, Bill, and Norio submitted numerous and extensive comments for my use, but the overall point seems clear. Ken is gone, but as with all such special and creative people, the lesson for the rest of us is simple—to continue to extend that positive influence into future generations in our chosen field. And beyond, wherever possible. I hope we are still doing that, in our own ways.

Jim Schwab

Disaster Mitigation Act at Twenty

When a law makes a powerful impact over time, it is sometimes hard to remember what life was like before it was enacted. In U.S. history, for example, both Social Security and, later, Medicare, created a new reality for the elderly that makes it almost impossible for most people to imagine what old age meant before they took effect. They are so much a part of the fabric of American life that some people even forget (or never learn) the social and political debates that produced them. That sort of obtuse amnesia was in evidence as Tea Party protests materialized in response to the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, in which some carried signs that read, “Keep Your Government Hands Off My Medicare.” Ponder that conundrum for a while.

Few laws match the scale of impact of those two examples, but many have significant impacts that receive less attention, at least among the general public. One that is reaching its twentieth anniversary is the Disaster Mitigation Act (DMA), signed into law by President Clinton on October 30, 2000. After a decade of expensive disasters in the 1990s—Hurricane Andrew (1992), the Midwest floods (1993), the Northridge earthquake (1994), and Hurricanes Fran (1996) and Floyd (1997)—Congress realized that the nation needed greater accountability from states and local governments in addressing hazard mitigation challenges before disasters occurred. The carrot and the stick were combined in this instance in a requirement that states (including territories and the District of Columbia) and local and tribal governments prepare and adopt hazard mitigation plans that won the approval of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) as meeting the standards of the act and its accompanying regulations as a condition of eligibility for FEMA hazard mitigation grants. Put simply, no plan, no money. Few state and local officials wish to find themselves in that position after a major disaster.

Congress went one step further. Previously, most such grants came through the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program (HMGP), created under the Stafford Act in 1988, the basic law structuring the federal disaster response system, under which every state has some sort of parallel emergency management agency. The problem with HMGP has always been that the money is made available as part of a presidential disaster declaration, using a percentage of overall disaster assistance to determine the amount available. That money goes to the affected states, which are responsible for local allocations. But that means that a state must experience a natural disaster to be eligible for such money. Admittedly, it then becomes useful for mitigating future disasters, but it did nothing to avert the most recent event. In fact, communities that had become adept at mitigating hazards with their own resources often complained that they got no federal assistance because they were doing too good a job of preventing losses. Davenport, Iowa, for example, long ago refused Army Corps offers to build levees along the Mississippi River and opted for a riverfront park that allowed the water to flow without damaging buildings in its downtown. Davenport has not always avoided flood impacts, but it has certainly minimized them.

In DMA, Congress added a new Pre-Disaster Mitigation (PDM) grant program. Instead of being triggered by disaster declarations, it was an annual grant competition, in which state and local governments submitted proposals for projects that would reduce losses of life and property in future events. Its major flaw was that PDM relied on annual congressional appropriations, which predictably ebbed and flowed and often was grossly underfunded. In 2018, in the Disaster Recovery Reform Act, Congress finally opted to stabilize funding by creating a formula by which six percent of total annual disaster relief outlays would be swept into a single pot by FEMA for grants under a new program that FEMA has labeled Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC), which I discussed in a post here in early August. The resulting 2020 grant funds total roughly $500 million, a far cry from years past when the total congressional allocation was often as little as $25 million, which barely put a dent in the mitigation needs of a nation as vast as the U.S.

But the real question after two decades is, How has DMA changed the landscape of American planning and disaster management? Clearly, we have not solved all problems. For one thing, climate change has accelerated and complicated matters significantly. While Congress unquestionably has dithered a great deal on climate issues, DMA was never aimed directly at climate change. Instead, it aimed to create a climate of state, tribal and local responsibility and accountability for planning for hazard mitigation while making federal funding available to support such planning. In fact, federal assistance for such planning is built into the law. Have governments responded?

DMA timeline produced by FEMA, reused from FEMA website. To expand, click here.

The unequivocal answer is yes. By 2002, once FEMA had finalized its guidance for the mitigation planning process, Clackamas County, Oregon, became the first local jurisdiction to win approval for its plan. Within a few years, every state and territory had an approved plan in place. Winning compliance from most local jurisdictions understandably took longer, but today FEMA can claim that more than 23,000 local units of government have approved plans, as do 239 tribal governments, which together cover more than 84 percent of the U.S. population. The gaps in coverage are primarily in rural areas, many of which suffer from low governmental capacity—a subject that can still be addressed in future outreach by FEMA—and some of which simply choose not to plan, presumably not seeing the consequences as outweighing the burden of the work involved.

In the meantime, many professional and intergovernmental associations have done considerable outreach to their own members to explain the benefits of hazard mitigation planning beyond simple eligibility for grants. For example, during my tenure at the American Planning Association, we used a FEMA contract to produce a Planning Advisory Service Report on the benefits of integrating such planning throughout the local planning process, including comprehensive plans, capital improvements programming, and the land-use regulations that implement mitigation intentions, such as zoning, floodplain management, and subdivision ordinances. We published Hazard Mitigation: Integrating Best Practices into Planning in 2010. The concept of integrated planning has enjoyed significant increased attention throughout the second decade of DMA and has become a staple of FEMA guidance for local hazard mitigation planning.

There are many ways to review this history, which may even be worth an entire book. As for what we have achieved, the Natural Hazards Center, based at the University of Colorado, asked me to moderate a webinar on October 13. “The Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000: Twenty Years of Promise, Pitfalls, and Progress from a Planning Perspective,” in which I was joined by three experienced and insightful panelists from state, county, and federal government, provides a fast-paced, one-hour summary of the successes, shortcomings, and future challenges of DMA as part of the Center’s Making Mitigation Work webinar series, and the recorded version is available at the link above. I thank NHC Director Lori Peek for having invited me to lead this discussion.

Make it your DMA anniversary experience. Trust me, it will be worth your time.

Jim Schwab

The Need for Resilient Infrastructure

This summer, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is at last rolling out its Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program, and its first Notice of Funding Opportunity will likely be issued in September. In July, FEMA is airing a series of five weekly webinars to introduce BRIC to communities and state officials around the nation. BRIC is the practical result of provisions in the Disaster Recovery Reform Act, passed by Congress in 2018, to create a secure funding stream for what was formerly the Pre-Disaster Mitigation program. I plan to discuss all that in coming weeks on this blog.

But the personal impact on me was to remind me to attend to an egregious oversight on my part that began earlier this year with the release by the American Planning Association (APA) of a new Planning Advisory Service Report, Planning for Resilient Infrastructure. I read it, attended to some other business in Texas and Nebraska in late February and early March, and along came the coronavirus, upending most of my existing personal and professional plans and refocusing my attention. But it is time for me to give this report the attention it deserves.

First, there is the question of why it deserves attention. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which funded the project led by the Association of State Floodplain Managers (ASFPM), which partnered with APA, chose their joint proposal in funding the first round of projects under its Coastal Resilience Grants Program in 2016. As Jeffrey Payne, director of NOAA’s Office for Coastal Management, states in his preface, “Tomorrow isn’t what it used to be. Increasingly, coastal conditions include all the risks of the past, but risks that are amplified by a changing climate, rising seas, and more rapidly fluctuating Great Lakes.”

In the interest of full disclosure, I was involved with ASFPM executive director Chad Berginnis in co-authoring the proposal for this project in the summer of 2015. (After I left APA, ASFPM hired me back as a consultant in later stages of the effort to help refine and focus the PAS Report.) Our intent was both simple and bold. Local governments spend tens of billions of dollars annually on the construction and maintenance of various kinds of infrastructure. Much of that infrastructure, related to essential services including water, wastewater, and transportation, is subject to the impacts of climate change. While, as Payne goes on to state, this is true away from the coast as well, some of those impacts are particularly significant and noticeable in coastal states and communities. In short, a great deal of taxpayer money is at stake regarding the ability of that infrastructure to withstand future climate conditions and natural disasters. Planning for greatly increased resilience is a recipe for improved fiscal stability. This holds true even if, as planned by statute, a greater share of that funding for hazard mitigation projects comes from FEMA through BRIC. Taxpayers are taxpayers, whether the money used is federal, state, or local.

All that said, the serious work of completing the work fell to Joseph DeAngelis at APA, now the manager of the APA Hazards Planning Center, and Haley Briel, a research specialist for the Flood Science Center at ASFPM, along with Michael Lauer, a planning consultant with deep experience in growth management programs in southeastern coastal states.

Global average sea level rise from 1880 to the present, based on tide gauges and satellite measurements (US EPA). Reuse courtesy of APA.

Their collaborative report addresses the most significant issues of infrastructure resilience. Particularly in areas subject to coastal storms, these involve not just the impacts of major disasters but the everyday nuisance impacts of flooding because of high tides atop sea level rise that already are yielding closed streets and parks and flooded basements. Urban flooding has become a “thing” where the term never used to be heard. They include a small table with projections by the U.S. Global Change Research Program showing ranges of sea level rise between 0.5 and 1.2 feet by 2050, and 1 to 4 feet by 2100. Of course, these are rough ranges in part because various geological conditions, such as erosion or glacial rebound, cause different results from one region to another, although most of the East Coast faces serious problems over the coming century. A major part of the problem is that sea level rise amplifies the impact of high tides in storms, leading to increased flooding and erosion that is already evident in low-lying cities like Norfolk, Virginia, or Miami. The authors note that, “Over the last half-century alone, with just one to three inches of average sea level rise, daily high-tide flooding has become up to 10 times more frequent” in American coastal communities. Even in Midwestern communities, including those along the Great Lakes, problems result from climate-driven increases in high-precipitation storms that frequently overwhelm stormwater drainage systems built in an earlier era based on other, less challenging, assumptions.

Storm surge heights are cumulatively based on the mean sea level, the height of the tide, and the high volume of water pushed toward the shore by coastal storms (National Hurricane Center). Reuse courtesy of APA.

It is natural that a planning document is going to assert a role for planners in addressing these problems. The role the report asserts is entirely logical, starting with “assessing long-term infrastructure needs and understanding future risks to infrastructure assets.” Equally logical, however, is that the report builds upon prior APA literature to outline the need for coordinated action through the plan-making process to integrate climate risk into local plans as a means of “capturing the future conditions to which existing infrastructure and any planned infrastructure projects will be subjected.” Put simply, if the local planning process does not identify those risks and provide clear recommendations for creating resilient infrastructure, it is not likely to materialize in any coherent and consistent fashion. The third chapter outlines a step-by-step approach (see illustrations below) for developing an inventory of local infrastructure, identifying risks, and moving toward an effective plan for adaptation.

The process for conducting an infrastructure vulnerability assessment (Joseph DeAngelis). Reuse courtesy of APA for both diagrams.

 

 

 

 

 

A project or asset’s vulnerability to flood impacts is a product of its exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity (Joseph DeAngelis).

Later, the report provides some examples of what such consistent planning for resilient infrastructure may look like. Its case study of San Francisco’s approach to assessing sea-level-rise impacts outlines how the Sea Level Rise Committee of the city’s Capital Planning Committee (CPC), a body responsible for overseeing capital investments for infrastructure, recommended using the upper end of estimates from a National Research Council report for the West Coast. These were fed into a CPC guidance document for assessing vulnerability and supporting adaptation to sea level rise, a primary outcome of climate change. Without engaging the full details here, the bottom line is that the City and County of San Francisco was working from a single play book for climate adaptation of project life cycles for future infrastructure. Capital planning could thus proceed in a more standardized manner based on common assumptions. The report also uses an extensive example from Toledo, Ohio, the site of one of two pilot projects supported by the ASFPM/APA project. Toledo, sitting on the shores of Lake Erie, has suffered from stormwater flooding and is approaching the problem with a mixture of green infrastructure and analysis of social vulnerability in affected neighborhoods. The report elsewhere delves into questions and methods of documenting and addressing environmental justice and social and racial inequities in environmental protection through appropriate local capital planning projects.

Both cases highlight the value for local planners of establishing credible data sources, which often rest within federal agencies such as NOAA and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. But, as one chapter illustrates, these can include experienced national nonprofits as well, such as Climate Central. Unquestionably, however, the best single assemblage of data and tools is NOAA’s own Digital Coast website. Planners can access additional high-quality resources on climate through other NOAA programs such as the Regional Climate Centers, located at a series of universities across the nation, and the Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments, where RISA staff work directly with climate scientists to communicate the science to the public and local officials.

Just as important as understanding where to find the proper data and tools, however, is a knowledge of best practices in local capital improvements planning, the development of effective standards, guidelines, and regulations for creating resilient infrastructure, and, finally, the best means for financing such long-term investments in infrastructure, especially with an eye to climate resilience. Each of these three topics is covered in separate chapters in the second half of the report.

View of part of the Jersey Shore after Hurricane Sandy, February 2013.

Ultimately, the real challenge for local planners is overcoming a natural discomfort with the inherent uncertainties in planning for infrastructure that must withstand the impacts of climate change within a range of assumptions that, in part, depend on federal and even international action to mitigate rising global temperatures as a result of greenhouse gas emissions. Planners, and the communities they serve, must adjust to those uncertainties and the inherent complexities they embody. Planning, however, has always been a speculative enterprise riddled by uncertainties, yet cities have embraced assumptions about population growth, demographic change, and economic scenarios that have often been equally uncertain, for none of us has a crystal ball. What we do know, however, is the direction of existing and accelerating trends, and climate change is no myth. We are ultimately better off, and will better invest public resources, by anticipating climate change with the best projections available, so that our communities are not overwhelmed by future storms, sea level rise, and storm surge. We cannot say we did not see it coming. We can only hope to say we used a wise approach based on the best data available to avoid catastrophe for ourselves and future generations in the communities we serve.

Jim Schwab

 

Details on Puerto Rico’s Struggle after Maria

The most important feature of this post is simply the link. Clicking here will lead you to a newly published podcast about the recovery struggles of Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria in the fall of 2017. The recording–an interview between me and Professor Ivis Garcia, of the University of Utah, lasts just over an hour, so set aside some time. What you learn will make that investment worth it.

The podcast is the seventh in a series called Resilience Roundtable, produced by the American Planning Association and hosted by the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division. As of this fall, I have assumed the duties of moderator and interviewer, and this interview is my first. I hope you will find it worthwhile and a great learning experience. I won’t say more because I am confident the podcast speaks for itself.

Jim Schwab

Mitigation Challenges on the Florida Gulf Coast

Hillsborough County is a dense metropolitan area, anchored by the city of Tampa. Tampa and nearby St. Petersburg, in Pinellas County, sit on opposite shores of Tampa Bay, a 400-square-mile expanse of water connected to the Gulf of Mexico. Across that gap sits the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, a magnificent and scenic section of I-275. On a sunny day, it displays coastal Florida in all its glory.

Eugene Henry, like anyone else, enjoys those sunny days, but he also worries about what may happen when the region suffers inclement weather. As Hillsborough County’s Hazard Mitigation Program Manager, it is his job to think about how well the area will fare under the impact of natural and other disasters, which can include hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, sinkholes, and wildfires. At least the first two are complicated by sea level rise, and one can easily argue that climate change in a broader sense may well influence the damage from wildfires. For those uninitiated in the particulars of Florida’s natural environment, wildfires are a recurring feature. In what is ordinarily such a lush environment fostered by rain and abundant sunshine, it takes only one drought year amid high heat to turn dense vegetation into a tinderbox. It has happened before, repeatedly.

But the biggest concern, by far, is the arrival of the Big One, the high-intensity hurricane that the county readily admits it has escaped in recent decades. In its Post-Disaster Redevelopment Plan (PDRP), the county states forthrightly that this is merely a matter of good fortune and that planners fully understand that the day will surely come—and that they had best be ready for it. Disaster resilience in the face of hurricanes is not a matter to be taken lightly with 158 miles of shoreline along Tampa Bay, numerous rivers and streams, and numerous vulnerable, low-lying areas. Absent serious attention to mitigation, damages from a Category 4 or 5 hurricane, or one like Harvey that stalls and dumps voluminous rain on an urban area, could become catastrophic.

But Tampa and Hillsborough County have been very fortunate. The last Category 3 hurricane struck the area in 1921. What may have been a Category 4 struck in 1848, though wind speed measurements were primitive at the time, and the U.S. had no official records yet. According to the county’s Local Mitigation Strategy, that storm “reshaped parts of the coast and destroyed much of what few human works and habitation were then in the Tampa Bay area.” Tides rose 14 feet. Tampa was still a small city then, and Gene Henry wonders about the staggering losses that might occur with a comparable event today.

I had long wanted to visit the area to see in person how these issues are being addressed. I have known Gene for a long time, and I have read the county’s PDRP, an extensive document laying out the county’s preparations for recovery from disasters. But I had never been to Tampa. As the result, however, of a personal invitation from a high school classmate, David Taylor, who now lives in Sarasota, my wife and I flew to Tampa February 20 and stayed with Dave and his wife, Linda, for five days. Sarasota is about one hour’s drive south of Tampa. As part of the trip, I arranged to meet with Gene the day after we arrived and tour the county to see the hazard mitigation projects underway there. I also delivered a one-hour lecture the following afternoon in West Palm Beach, on behalf of Florida Atlantic University, as part of a two-hour program that included a panel discussion following my talk on “Recovery and Resilience: Facing the Disasters of the Future.” Not one to skip a learning opportunity, Gene drove four hours from Tampa to attend the program.

But back to Hillsborough. My wife and I met Gene at the county’s Emergency Operations Center (EOC) around mid-morning, hopped in his county truck, and took off. Our first stop was the Florida Center for Design + Research, housed in the School of Architecture + Design at the University of South Florida (USF), Gene’s graduate alma mater. The school features an urban planning program where he wanted us to meet Professor Brian Cook. Planning students often take studio classes, which involve design or research work on real-life community problems. Students learn to define a community design or policy issue, work with clients, and try to produce solutions that will be of some practical value to the community they are serving. They typically work in teams. In this case, students were applying geographic information system (GIS), or mapping, skills to determine areas of high vulnerability to flooding and sea level rise in less affluent neighborhoods. Gene’s county office collaborates with USF instructors to identify areas of practical concern for the students’ work. The photos show some of the design work the students have done, the best of which is often displayed in poster sessions at state and national professional planning conferences.

Posters (above and below) from the USF design studio

The most encouraging aspect of that visit was, for me, the mere fact that the students are engaging with such a pressing problem. I have researched the issue of hazards and climate change in the planning curriculum for both undergraduate and graduate degree programs in urban planning, and most such programs are lacking in this respect, a situation that is disserving the planners of tomorrow who must be well trained to come to grips with these challenges in whatever communities they end up serving. But a growing number of students are getting such training—I have myself been teaching such a course at the University of Iowa since 2008—and southern Florida is as good a laboratory as they could wish for. To see collaboration between a county agency and USF graduate students and faculty is a most welcome note.

But Gene had other places to take us in the afternoon, besides, that is, the Cuban-themed La Teresita restaurant where we ate lunch—a place I am willing to recommend if you ever visit Tampa.

First up in the afternoon was the University Mall area north of downtown Tampa and just east of I-275. This involves a stormwater management and flood-mitigation project in an area subject to a certain amount of repetitive loss, meaning that the same properties continue to suffer periodic flood losses. The project removed structures while creating additional areas for stormwater storage and reshaping a natural area known as Duck Pond, thus creating a system for stormwater conveyance. This includes a large stormwater pump that transfers slow-moving stormwater to areas further downstream and, in due course, to a reservoir owned by the City of Tampa. Before this project was initiated, storms used to inundate multifamily apartment buildings, Gene says, as well as a nearby assisted living facility. How does the county pay for all this? He credits a combination of local funds, which is certainly not unusual, and federal money in the form of Hazard Mitigation Grant Program (HMGP) funds. The latter are available as part of an overall recovery package after a Presidential Disaster Declaration, but require that purchased properties, once cleared, remain in perpetual open space. The point is to ensure that a vulnerable area is not redeveloped, thus perpetuating the problem.

At 132nd Street, also in Tampa, another flood-mitigation and stormwater management project presents a very different appearance. This too was subject to repetitive loss and required protection from urban flooding, which is typically the result of poor stormwater drainage in developed areas. The problems can include poor water conveyance from one area to the next—the nearby highway provided an impediment to drainage—and high levels of impervious surface, meaning coverage with concrete and structures that limit percolation of water into the soil. In this case, a small subdivision suffered repetitive flooding even with small storms. Here also, the county acquired homes with HMGP funds, which are dispensed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The streets were removed, and stormwater ponds were added.

This was a location where the county’s partnership with USF paid dividends. Researchers analyzed which plants were best at removing nitrogen and other chemicals common in stormwater runoff in order to clean up the water before it reaches Tampa Bay. Henry says this project was made possible through a combination of local and HMGP funds in combination with federal Community Development Block Grant entitlement money.

I included the chain link in my photo to show that the solution may not be complete. After all, chain link fences are intended to limit access. What consideration, I asked, had been given to eventually converting this cleared area to some sort of public park and thus facilitating a public benefit? There can be challenges in part because of pollution cleanup and other public safety factors. Gene readily admitted he would love that solution, but it may take time. The adjoining neighborhood must be comfortable with that use, which can involve solving various site-related problems. A nearby church might be a potential ally, serving as a patron and watchdog, but reaching agreement about solutions and responsibilities, including ongoing maintenance and supervision, takes time. And only time will tell whether such a solution materializes with the support of local public officials.

Some projects assist a single homeowner with a stubborn problem. This is often the case with homes that are elevated, a common site in parts of the Southeast, where coastal and riverine flooding can wreak havoc with homes in vulnerable locations that do not necessarily require buyouts and relocation. That was the case near Rocky Creek, where a homeowner rebuilt a structure elevated three feet above base flood elevation (BFE) using a combination of private funds and a Flood Mitigation Assistance (FMA) grant from FEMA. The result is living space that is better protected when flood waters surround the lower level.

The same story occurred at a home near the Alafia River, where another homeowner was elevated three feet above BFE, using the same combination of funds.

Gene also shared with us an interesting strategy at a frequently flooded and highly vulnerable modular home park, where an area had been cleared of its former homes to allow repopulation with recreational vehicles (RVs). The logic is that, when flood warnings arrive, RV owners will be able, unlike those with more stationary modular homes, to simply drive off the site to safer areas until the emergency subsides. The initiative, Gene says, was taken by the park’s new owner (which owns other parks nationwide), which identified no more permanent structures in the floodway as part of its compliance strategy after the most recent flooding event in the area.

This area is slated for RV occupancy only.

Finally, we returned to learn a little about the EOC. We visited what is often known in such centers as the “war room,” where designated officials meet to discuss and establish strategies for dealing with an emergency of any sort that activates the emergency operations plan. In the photo, each chair is designated for a specific official, with groups of people with related tasks seated in color-coded sections of the room. Many such EOCs are much smaller, but Hillsborough County is very urban and populated, and the needs are complex and interrelated. It is expected that those involved will arrive with authority to respond to the disaster, to indicate what they are and are not capable of doing as part of the overall response to disaster. It is not a place where one expresses a need to go back to another office and “find out.”

Hillsborough County Emergency Operations Center “war room”

Ready to relax and enjoy a drink and a snack, we followed Gene down the highway to the Sunset Grill at Little Harbor, which has a beautiful view of the bay. At dusk, numerous people followed a daily ritual of photographing the sunset over the water. Tourist attraction it may be, as well as a local watering hole, but the surrounding area has a significant mangrove forest and salt-bed areas that were preserved as open space using Environmental Land Acquisition Funds from what Gene describes as a “locally instigated preservation program.”

Hillsborough County’s Hazard Mitigation Program Manager, Eugene Henry, at rest at Sunset Grill at the end of our day-long tour.

And so, with the sun declining in the west, we sat at an outdoor table and hashed over the world’s problems, and sometimes our own. One point that seems clear to me is that Hillsborough County has a great deal to offer to other jurisdictions, just as it has undoubtedly learned a great deal as well—one reason both he and a resident scholar and Japanese graduate student from the University of Illinois, Kensuke Otsuyama, planned to drive to West Palm Beach the next day to hear my presentation. Although there is sometimes a tendency for local governments to become more insular, to allow fewer opportunities for employees like Gene to share and exchange information in professional forums and conferences, this, I think, is always a mistake. The growth in the value of what someone like Gene does lies in this fruitful sharing of experience and perspectives that such opportunities allow, and I hope that will continue, for certainly Gene made my day by sharing his time to allow me to learn and to share with the growing readership that follows this blog.

Supplemental Comment:

Although the hearing was held today, making live streaming a moot point, significant written and recorded testimony on hazard mitigation and climate resilience issues occurred before the U.S. House Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing, and Urban Development. Yesterday, the following link was made available from several sources including the American Planning Association (APA) to provide access to this testimony and information:

Representatives from APA, PEW, Houston Public Works, Rutgers University, and the Town of Arlington, MA are delivering testimony to the Transportation and Housing and Urban Development (THUD) congressional subcommittee tomorrow, March 13th at 10:00 a.m. EST. THUD, a part of the House Committee on Appropriations, writes laws that fund the federal government’s important responsibilities. The testimony is available for streaming here:

https://appropriations.house.gov/legislation/hearings/stakeholder-perspectives-building-resilient-communities

APA will submit written testimony that will be put into the Congressional record. The testimony will be available on APA’s website tomorrow.

Jim Schwab

Reducing Risk from Natural Hazards

Eroded hillsides have helped push New Zealand to adopt its own approach to risk reduction.

Late in 2017, I received an inquiry from Oxford University Press. Professor Ann-Margaret Esnard at the Urban Studies Institute at Georgia State University had recommended me for an assignment they had in mind to add an article to their growing specialty encyclopedia on natural hazards, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Natural Hazard Science. They needed someone to write a peer-reviewed article about “Planning Systems for Natural Hazard Risk Reduction,” using roughly 10,000 words plus appropriate graphics and illustrations. We discussed why they saw me as an appropriate candidate for the job, and I accepted the assignment.

Over the following few months early last year, I spent many hours over several weeks fashioning the article. Although I started out with a clear vision of my subject matter, I also explored and sought more international material than I had ever previously examined. By the spring of 2018, I submitted my draft. Over subsequent months, it underwent editing, peer review, revision, and proofreading, and then final preparation for online publication. Today, I received the announcement. It is online and available to the public.

So, the question for most readers, even those already immersed in the subject matter of natural hazards, is, “What do you mean by planning systems”? Oxford did not venture a specific definition of what they had in mind; they left that to me. I decided that the answer was “essentially a layer of guidance or legal requirements that sit atop plans of any type at any governmental level at or below the source of that guidance.” In other words, the system describes what a plan should look like, or what is expected of a plan that complies with the framework that is established. A planning system is a statutory or programmatic framework for a specific type of plan, in this case, one that aims to reduce losses from natural hazard events.

This had long been important to me. As far back as 2002, while I was at the American Planning Association (APA), I had arranged a contract between APA and the Institute for Business and Home Safety (IBHS) under which APA researched and described state laws that related to planning for natural hazards, updated annually until 2010, when IBHS decided to discontinue the contract. An elaborate matrix detailed which states prescribed planning to address hazards and what they required, suggested, or allowed, supplemented by explanations of specific items in a key code and by color-coded maps. In 2007, I convinced the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to underwrite an APA project that examined how communities could better integrate hazard mitigation priorities into local planning processes. The result was a 2010 Planning Advisory Service Report, Hazard Mitigation: Integrating Best Practices into Planning. That has led to elaboration of FEMA guidance on this point, as well as playing a role in more recent guidance to communities from the State of Colorado on resilience, spurred by the September 2013 “mountain monsoon” flooding that afflicted the state. The point is that I have been pursuing this subject for nearly 20 years. I understood why Oxford had approached me for this task.

The encyclopedia article allowed me to expand the subject in new ways, and for those readers curious to explore the topic, I hope it proves useful. Just follow the links in the first paragraph of this post to my article or the encyclopedia more generally, which provides a wealth of knowledge on the larger subject of natural hazards. I hope it provides planners and others in the professional community engaged with natural hazard issues an analytical framework for thinking about how we can tackle these issues.

But that is not all. The concept behind the APA/IBHS work has been revived. Immediately after leaving APA, under a short-term consulting contract, I helped APA prepare a new grant proposal for FEMA’s Cooperating Technical Partners program to revive the state statutory summary in an updated and expanded framework. Although that is not yet complete, PDF summaries of the state-level planning framework for all 50 states are available. Click here for the landing page with an introduction to the overall project. Then stay tuned for the findings and overall summary of the project, which are yet to come.

Jim Schwab

Aligning Planning and Public Health

Just nine days ago, on November 15, I stood in front of two successive audiences of long-term health care practitioners to present workshops at a conference in Wisconsin Dells discussing, of all things, “Fundamentals of Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery.” Where, some might ask, is the nexus between these two subjects?

Patients who survived evacuations from New York City area hospitals, six in the city itself and one just outside, during Hurricane Sandy would know. People with disabilities, the elderly, the ill are especially vulnerable during disasters, and moving them out of harm’s way is no picnic. They cannot just grab the keys to their cars and drive out of town ahead of the storm. Evacuating them is a major undertaking that must be well-planned.

And so, our fields of expertise converged. I discussed what I knew from urban planning, but I invited input from their experiences in handling such situations. Some had not yet experienced a disaster, but others had, and their numbers in the health care field are growing, as doctors and nurses find clinics and hospitals impacted by wildfires in California, and hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes elsewhere. Mine was not the only presentation related to such concerns. The keynote by Desiree Matel-Anderson, founder of the Field Innovation Team and a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) advisor, detailed personal interactions with disasters. Others focused on emergency management. The audience needed to know about new regulations and laws, such as those promulgated in 2016 by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) or the Disaster Recovery Reform Act (DRRA), passed in October as a

Photo by Kristina Peterson

rider on the FAA Reauthorization Act. DRRA outlines new responsibilities for the FEMA administrator in providing training to local officials and utility providers in planning for emergencies for nursing homes, clinics, and hospitals, and for the Federal Highway Administration regarding evacuations for these facilities, prisons, and certain classes ofdisadvantaged persons. I told the nurses and administrators in my audience they needed to prepare for these new responsibilities. There seems to be a growing conviction in Congress and federal agencies that health care institutions need to be better prepared to protect their patients during disasters. In the light of events dating back to Hurricane Katrina, that does not seem unreasonable.

To some extent, I believe it is the growing engagement of the urban planning profession with natural hazards that is facilitating a re-engagement of the profession with public health practitioners. I say “re-engagement” because the two fields grew up together, at least in North America. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, industrializing, rapidly growing American cities were often festering incubators for diseases because of pollution, overcrowding, and fire and other hazards. The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 laid the groundwork for major reforms related to building codes, helping to create the largely masonry-based architecture now predominant in the city. Activists like Jane Addams inveighed against oppressive health conditions for the working class. There was an urgent need for both better planning and public health measures that would prevent the spread of disease, and the two professions matured accordingly. At the same time, civil engineers took growing responsibility for developing the sanitary infrastructure cities needed, such as sewer treatment systems and effective drainage, a topic I addressed in a keynote in September 2015 in Boston for the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Coasts, Oceans, Ports and Rivers Institute (COPRI) annual conference. All three professions grew up in the same cradle, addressing urgent societal needs for health care, better urban design, and public sanitation.

Scene on the Jersey Shore after Hurricane Sandy.

All of this is a long, but I think crucial, introduction to a book by Michael R. Greenberg and Dona Schneider, Urban Planning & Public Health: A Critical Partnership, published by APHA Press. I had planned to review it earlier, but recent events expanded the context for its importance. Greenberg, a long-time planning colleague and professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, previously authored Protecting Seniors Against Environmental Disasters (Routledge, 2014), a book inspired in part by his own experience with elderly parents during Hurricane Sandy. He is certainly familiar with the territory. Schneider, also at Rutgers, brings the perspective of a public health expert.

The book reads mostly like a textbook and thus may be of most valuable to instructors willing to acquaint students in both fields with their organic relationship to each other and why the partnership is important today. Admittedly, the problems are not the same. We no longer face the scourge of tuberculosis, and smokestacks no longer belch particulates as freely as they once did. The water is less polluted. But our society is creating other problems of a momentous nature, including climate change and the resulting increased severity of weather-related disasters. Under the Trump administration and various less environmentally friendly state administrations, there have been concerted efforts to retreat from previous initiatives aimed to clear the skies and foster environmental justice. It is thus imperative that we have trained, knowledgeable, and articulate professionals who can advocate for the public interest when powerful political forces push in other directions.

The book makes powerful arguments in this context for the salience of a collaborative assault on the threats posed to our communities by natural hazards, using the tools of both public health and planning to analyze the threats and identify meaningful solutions. Not everything needs to happen at a macro level, either; in fact, planners and public health officials often are at their best in examining trends at the neighborhood and community level to find very geographically specific solutions to localized but persistent problems.

The authors are methodical, laying a groundwork in the first three chapters for understanding the building blocks of the two professions and their integral relationships. One can easily detect the influence of Greenberg’s long and distinguished career on both a practical and theoretical level as he discusses the impacts of various approaches to zoning, such as the use of downzoning to protect open lands and natural resources and the use of special districts, as in Austin, Texas, to protect the environmentally sensitive Edwards Aquifer through measures such as integrated pest management practices, which reduce the use of toxic chemicals that can enter the water supply. And the connection to natural disasters? Even recent history has revealed the vulnerability of Texas to prolonged drought, making the protection of water supplies essential to public health and welfare.

Recognizing the modern context for their focus on this “critical partnership,” the authors have included significant material on the role of risk and hazard mitigation analysis in planning, with a whole chapter on “Keeping People Out of Harm’s Way.” As with much of the book, it leads students on a path through the critical minutiae of planning and public health analysis, including case studies at various levels of analysis—for example, a brief but close look at the Galveston City Hazard Mitigation Plan.

Other sections address critical current issues such as the availability of healthy foods in poor communities, and how that can be addressed through laws, community organizations, and better resources; how to redevelop safe community assets from former brownfield sites; and potentially evaluating the benefits and drawbacks of major regional development proposals. In short, this is not bedtime reading for most laypeople, but it is solid instructional material for aspiring young professionals and may be useful as well to community advocates who are willing to learn the nuts and bolts of using planning to achieve better public health results in their neighborhoods and communities. As such, it is a timely and needed addition to the literature.

Jim Schwab

Housing the Needy after Disaster

This post will be brief. Rather than ask you to read my thoughts, I want you to listen–hard. It has long been known among disaster recovery planners that lower-income citizens are considerably more vulnerable to disasters largely because of the marginal resilience of most low-income housing. The affluent can afford to build fortresses, some of which may still be lost to the elements, but those in second-rate housing, poorly maintained multifamily buildings, and most certainly the homeless, face life-or-death dilemmas when disaster strikes in any form. They live with mold without the resources to make expensive repairs. They face shortages of affordable housing. Federal programs designed to help them often fall short.

Few people have worked harder to remedy these problems than John Henneberger, a 2014 MacArthur Fellow and the executive director of Texas Housers, a nonprofit advocacy organization that has been working with low-income communities in tracking recovery from Hurricane Harvey. This link will take you directly to a podcast page on the American Planning Association website to hear a 46-minute interview with Henneberger about this experience.

The podcast, the first in a series called Resilience Roundtable, is the product of collaboration between the APA technical staff in Chicago and the Professional Development Committee (PDC) of the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division, of which I am currently chair-elect. In that capacity, I organized and have led the PDC. More such podcasts will be released in coming weeks, but this is the first, and we are very proud to introduce John Henneberger to a new audience. His message is detailed, highly informed, and eloquent. Please check it out.

Before I leave the soapbox, I wish also to provide you to a link to a recent study detailing why minorities are more vulnerable to the impacts of wildfires, a subject that has not been explored widely in the past. “The Unequal Vulnerability of Communities of Color to Wildfire,” available online as linked, was printed in the journal Plos One, and enriches our awareness of equity issues in disaster.

Jim Schwab