Tag Archives: tornado

Filming on the Texas Gulf Coast

Posted on by
Reply

It has been a couple of months since I last posted a video of our progress in filming for Planning to Turn the Tide. That last article summarized our film efforts in Jacksonville, Florida, in September 2023, but we had another trip in the offing then, to the Texas Gulf Coast. In between, as noted in a January 1 post, I underwent prostate surgery on September 29, which required at least a month of rest and inactivity at home before venturing out again, in order to ensure successful recovery. But on November 7, I met up with videographer David Taylor at Houston Hobby Airport and we drove to Corpus Christi, where the annual conference of the Texas Chapter of the American Planning Association was getting underway. The new blog video presented here was filmed there but edited and produced later.

Devastation in the Bolivar Peninsula from Hurricane Ike, 2009

Despite my own challenges, what compelled this schedule was that conference at the American Bank Center in Corpus Christi because it allowed us to interview eight Texas planners who have been prominently involved in efforts to confront and address resilience issues along the Gulf Coast, where coastal storms and flooding remain major concerns. Hurricane Harvey, which struck in the fall of 2017, may be the most famous, and famously expensive, disaster of recent history in the area but is certainly not unique. People with a longer memory can cite Tropical Storm Allison, which struck Houston in 2001, and Hurricane Ike, which devastated Galveston in 2008, as part of the long parade of such events.

It is easy enough to cite shortcomings of the past that made destruction in such storms worse than it needed to be, but it is also important to note the resources that Texas has created to tackle those problems, including Texas Target Communities, a program at Texas A&M University that aids resource-challenged communities. These groups were present at the Texas APA conference, and we interviewed both Jaimie Masterson, the director of Texas Target Communities, and Shannon Van Zandt, a professor of urban planning at the Texas A&M School of Architecture, who has long researched and advocated for better affordable housing solutions in disaster recovery.

Tornado impacts in Van Zandt County, Texas, April 2017. Seven tornadoes struck the area in one evening.

I should also note that disaster resilience has been a consistent theme of the Texas Chapter. Back in November 2017, I spent time in Texas at the behest of the chapter, which asked me to facilitate and keynote a recovery workshop in Canton, Texas, following a series of tornadoes there, but I also worked with their Harvey Recovery Task Force well into 2020. The film trip grew out of that partnership, which extends even further back to my speaking at chapter conferences in El Paso and Galveston after Hurricane Ike. We want to thank the Texas Chapter for their logistical and promotional support during the conference.

Peer exchange workshop in Rockport, February 2020, involving Harvey and Sandy recovery planners. Kim Mickelson, of Houston, with microphone, is moderating this session.

Following our time in Corpus Christi, we drove up the coast to Rockport, the site of the first landfall of Hurricane Harvey, where we interviewed four community leaders, including a city council member, the local newspaper editor, the public works director, and a former president of the local chamber of commerce, about Rockport’s experience in recovery. I have learned a great deal in recent years about Rockport, in large part because of my work with Amanda Torres, the former city planner there, now working for the Corpus Christi Planning Department, and Carol Barrett, a veteran planner now living in Austin, who led APA’s Community Planning Assistance Team in Rockport in 2019. They helped me design the Rockport case study for an interactive workshop, including both graduate students and practicing planners, that is part of a course I teach for the University of Iowa School of Planning and Public Affairs.

We ended our trip in Houston, which included a tour of largely Hispanic neighborhoods in the shadow of the city’s huge petrochemical complexes, where they face ongoing racially disparate environmental impacts. We were hosted on that tour by TEJAS Barrios, a local environmental justice advocacy group. We hope to return to Houston, but our challenge for now is to raise substantial money to try to complete the film project in the coming year. Fortunately, our core team has grown, with more hands on deck focused on fundraising. If you are willing to help, you can donate here or use the QR code below to contribute online at the APA website.

 

Jim Schwab

Heading Out on the Film Trail

Posted on by
Reply

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

Truly Hard Wind

Posted on by
1

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

The Event

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

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

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

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

Removing damaged trees in Chicago’s Rogers Park.

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

Insurance claims agents inspect building damage in Rogers Park.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Power line damage in Grinnell. Photo by Rachel Bly.

Photo by Rachel Bly

Roof seen through the window. Photo by Rachel Bly.

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Derechos as a Natural Hazard

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jim Schwab

Disaster Guidance for Rural Communities

Posted on by
Reply

Planning for long-term community recovery after a disaster has never been an easy task, but in larger communities with significant planning resources, it can be less daunting. For rural communities that may not have local planning staff or that may suffer from inadequate training and experience, it often seems that the path ahead is strewn with land mines. When there has been no advance preparation for the day of reckoning  produced by a serious natural disaster, the swirl of demands surrounding such an event can lead to burnout and confusion. State and federal assistance can often seem as problematic as it is helpful because of paperwork demands, auditing concerns, and the sheer complexity of the overall challenge.

It is extremely important that communities learn from their peers, and that those peers share lessons from similar circumstances. Even in the same state, what works in a large city may have little bearing on the compelling needs of a small town or rural county. Rural communities need to learn from the experiences of other rural communities. They rely far more on the work of volunteers and part-time staff than is typical in urban areas.

For those reasons, it is refreshing to see a new publication from Texas, Emergency Preparedness and Recovery: A Toolkit for Rural Communities. It is available online. At 89 pages, it is not overly long, and sticks religiously to a mission of practical advice. Particularly interesting is how it came about. I have had some involvement in the project that gave birth to this document but was not involved in producing the guide itself. Instead, I served as the keynote speaker for a disaster recovery workshop last October in rural Van Zandt County, about which I wrote in a previous blog post.

Planners4Health, the project that produced the guidebook, is a collaboration between the Texas Chapter of the American Planning Association (APA) and the Texas Public Health Association (TPHA). The two organizations came together in response to an APA program, funded by the Centers for Disease Control, that sought to produce such collaboration on common public health issues between planners and public health officials. In two previous rounds, the two Texas organizations had received the sub-grants from APA’s Planning and Community Health Center to work on healthy foods issues in North Austin and Fort Worth.

Photo from Texas Planners4Health

For their third project, however, they dramatically shifted their focus to work in a rural area about an hour east of Dallas. On the evening of April 29, 2017, Van Zandt County experienced seven tornado sightings including one EF-3 and one EF-4, both high-powered storms that fortunately did not strike any of the county’s small towns. But the storms inflicted serious damage, and the project to assist the county led to the October 29 disaster recovery workshop in Canton. Much of the work was done by public health student interns from the University of North Texas, in Fort Worth, and planning students from the University of Texas-Arlington campus, under the overall guidance of Melissa Oden, a public health professor from UNT and former president of TPHA. Those students were the backbone of the workshop and collaborated closely with local officials from Van Zandt and neighboring counties.

Much of what this team produced consists of highly usable principles and checklists that are accessible to professionals and volunteers alike. These people need to understand quickly and succinctly what needs to be done. But not just after disaster strikes—the document makes perfectly clear that the wisest strategy for any community, rural or otherwise, is to organize and empower a long-term recovery group before disaster strikes, to avoid wasting valuable time after the event finding the right people, training them on essential procedures, and establishing the legal channels for raising and accepting donations to help the survivors of disasters. In most disasters, the events that follow move too quickly to allow the community to afford such a luxury. Major opportunities can be lost forever while a community is trying to organize its response. Having a long-term recovery planning group in place to meet, discuss scenarios, and become prepared for the eventuality is a much wiser strategy.

The guide also delves into a variety of practical considerations that will then confront this leadership group and others working with them: conducting a needs assessment, case management for disaster survivors, managing volunteers and finances, spiritual and emotional care, animal care, and measuring outcomes, among others. By and large, it is a thorough, sensible document, with which I have only minor quibbles. I do wish they had noted the need to document volunteer hours, whose monetary value can often help in establishing a local match for grants that require such. In discussing long-term disaster impact, I wish they had added environmental impacts to social and economic impacts, though I can also understand being wary of overloading the responsibilities of rural volunteers. The substantial section on animal care is particularly apt for rural communities, where these can include livestock, horses, and other animals in addition to the dogs and cats that dominate more typical urban pet concerns. There is no substitute for knowing your audience.

The guide includes some very useful appendices, one of which outlines roles and responsibilities for local officials. While the guide is already useful beyond Texas, it would be welcome imitation if similar collaborative efforts in other states produced similar guides. Some of the language, for example, that refers to county judges, who are actually chief executives of county governments in Texas, could then be translated to whatever terms apply in other states to make them sound more relevant. I suspect that the Planners4Health organizers in Texas would welcome such flattery as both sorely needed and a high compliment (and complement) to their efforts.

Jim Schwab

On Enacting False Economies

Posted on by
Reply

Claiming to protect the public’s purse is always great politics, at least in some quarters. Actually doing so requires considerable thought and homework, but grandstanding is cheap and makes for great sound bites in an election season. And thus, it is often silly season not only in Congress, but in many of America’s state legislatures.

I say this because a legislative alert from the Illinois chapter of the American Planning Association (APA), of which I have been a member for decades, turned my attention to an attempt in three pending bills to prohibit (HB4246) the use of local government funds “for expenses connected with attendance by an employee or contractor of the unit of local government at a convention or gathering of personnel.” HB4247 disallows spending on “access to physical space for booths, hospitality suites, or other physical space” at such events. All three bills, HB4246, 4247, and 4248, create the Local Government Convention Expense Control Act, sponsored by Rep. David McSweeney, a Republican conservative from the collar counties north of Chicago. A quick check on McSweeney in Wikipedia illustrates a history of such initiatives, some of which may make sense, but this one is clearly a case of tossing out the baby with the bath water. That said, he has a number of co-sponsors including some Democrats.

I have no problem with appropriate limits on the ways in which public funds are used for conventions and conferences. Public money clearly should be used for sensible and responsible purposes at such events. But I have attended and presented at dozens of professional conferences involving local and state government professionals all across the United States, and I have yet to see anything highly or even mildly inappropriate. When such outrages do occur, they tend to find their way into mass media coverage that goes viral, and heads roll, but such incidents are extremely rare, which raises the question of the necessity of the proposed legislation.

There is a reason for professional conferences that involves an intelligent use of public money. If we can at least accept the notion that we want our professional public servants—planners, financial officers, civil engineers, transit officials, and others—to be well informed and up to date on best practices in their fields—then there is a solid argument for affording them the opportunity to attend professional conferences at which they can attend sessions and workshops and learn. What they bring back to their jobs enhances the service they provide on their jobs.

In my own role, I was usually speaking or attending as an employee of a national nonprofit professional association, APA, most of whose members work in the public sector. Many of the rest are consultants, professors, or land-use attorneys, but there are numerous special niches in which people find useful employment. I did not attend state or regional conferences for urban planners, floodplain mangers, and other professional groups for the social opportunities. I can think of much better forums for enhancing that aspect of my life. I was typically either trying to learn something that would make me a better manager for the research and training projects I was leading, or because I was presenting information in a session or as a keynote speaker. Urban planning, for example, is a rapidly evolving field of practice. Being denied access to the networking and learning opportunities afforded by such gatherings is a blow to the professionalism of the dedicated public servants who work for local government. The alternative—to say that they must spend their own money to attend, which some do anyway—is to drive the best of them away from the public sector to firms that offer such opportunities as a means of maintaining a top-flight staff. It is as much a question in job interviews as compensation or prospects for advancement.

Let me offer a couple of minor examples to make my point. Just three years ago, I attended the Illinois APA conference to present findings from a national study APA’s Hazards Planning Center had completed with support from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) on planning for post-disaster recovery. Sharing the podium for the session was Jon Oliphant, the planning director of Washington, Illinois, a Peoria suburb, which was struck by an EF-4 tornado in November 2013. He complimented my presentation with real-life details of the rebuilding experience in Washington since that event. For the people in that room, many of whom had not experienced a similar disaster in their own communities, but worried about the day they might, it would be hard to replicate the value of being able to hear all this first-hand and to “kick the tires” by asking questions of the panel. The modest expense of attending that two-day conference, within driving distance for many registrants, must be weighed against the considerable value of the knowledge and insights they gained from not only that session but many others they undoubtedly attended while there. The same could largely be said whether the topic is stormwater drainage, public finance, or economic development. If many people later exchanged business cards over drinks and snacks at a reception (typically sponsored by exhibitors), so what? In most cases, in my experience, it was an opportunity to chew over and compare impressions of what they had heard and discussed throughout the day.

In another example, Chad Berginnis, the executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers, and I tag-teamed an opening keynote for the Illinois Association for Floodplain and Stormwater Management. Our topic was a forthcoming report, also supported by FEMA, on subdivision design and flood hazard areas. How do we better design and review new developments to minimize or avoid damage from floods? The annual losses from poor handling of this issue can easily exceed any costs associated with anyone’s attendance at that event. It is important that our planners, engineers, and floodplain managers be aware of current best practices in this field. Impoverishing access of such public employees to professional education simply weakens the expertise and knowledge base of the people a city employees.

Simply put, if we are going to insist that public employees do their jobs well, we need to do two things. One, which is the diametrical opposite of what bills like these would achieve (and such proposed legislation is hardly limited to Illinois), is to ensure that our public servants have meaningful opportunities to improve their skills, to say nothing of meeting continuing education requirements for professional certification in their fields. The other is to insist that legislators do their own jobs by making an honest effort to determine whether their proposed legislation helps enrich the quality of service these employees can offer or is a simplistic smoke screen for being too intellectually lazy to undertake an honest evaluation of the true impact of their proposals. I repeat: This is yet another case of throwing the baby out with the bath water. It offers false economies that undermine the value of public service. Taxpayers do not gain; they lose.

Jim Schwab

Life after Tornadoes

Posted on by
1

Despite the impression many people may have from watching the news, most disasters do not result in a presidential disaster declaration, and the federal government is not always involved in response and recovery. Many smaller disasters, however, result in a state declaration issued by the governor. The threshold for determining whether federal assistance is justified differs by state, with the Federal Emergency Management Agency assuming larger states are capable of handling larger events. Major or catastrophic disasters like Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria invariably trigger federal assistance, but it may matter whether a tornado occurs in Texas or Delaware. It also matters greatly how much damage it produces. In any event, assessing the toll that nature has inflicted is never simple business.

The remains of a home destroyed by the tornado.

On April 29 of this year, seven tornadoes rampaged across rural Van Zandt County, east of Dallas, Texas, and parts of some neighboring counties. One of those was an EF-3; another was an EF-4. The scale runs from EF-0, a relatively minor twister, to the very rare but extremely dangerous EF-5. Such a monster struck Greensburg, Kansas, ten years ago, causing enormous damage and nearly wiping the small city off the face of the earth. Fortunately for Van Zandt County, the tornadoes struck mostly in rural areas outside Canton, the county seat. Nonetheless, four people died, and dozens were injured. The state issued a disaster declaration.

Vicki McAlister, Van Zandt County’s public health emergency preparedness coordinator, noted at a disaster recovery workshop in Canton on October 26 that a triage center was established at Canton High School within a half-hour, and that almost immediately “between 35 and 40 ambulances were on the scene.” The triage center, however, had no electricity because of extensive damage to power lines from the tornadoes, which damaged or destroyed about 200 homes in the area, and killed between 250 and 300 cattle. Within two hours, two task forces were conducting search and rescue along every mile of the 35-mile storm path. The county shut down air traffic around the path in order to focus on the effort. McAlister noted that they were soon “swamped by the media,” for whom they set up briefings on a regular basis. It is critical in such situations to keep the public informed through accurate news of the events that follow the disaster.

Student interns join me (left), Melissa Oden (to my right), and Texas APA chapter administrator Mike McAnelly (far right) for lunch in Canton the day before the workshop.

The workshop was the result of a collaboration between the Texas Public Health Association and the Texas chapter of the American Planning Association (APA), joint recipients of a $70,000 sub-grant from APA’s Planning and Community Health Center in Washington, D.C., operating under a much larger multi-year grant from the Centers for Disease Control for a program called Plan4Health, designed to foster collaboration between urban planning and public health professionals. The unique feature in this case is its focus on post-disaster recovery public health needs, but It is the third Plan4Health project between the two Texas organizations.

I attended the workshop as the invited keynote, but I played another role as well: I facilitated a group exercise in which those attending broke into five groups, each of which spent time summarizing on an easel sheet where they saw their efforts now, and where they would like to be. Each group reported back to the whole, and those reports became part of the record of the workshop itself. After that, I spoke over lunch.

Debris from the April 29 tornadoes.

What was interesting to me, however, especially after listening to Russell Hopkins, the leader of the county’s Long-Term Recovery Group, a body empaneled to handle claims of those suffering losses or injuries from the storm, was how he felt that the county would have been better off having created such a group before any disaster had hit, and how those from neighboring counties echoed that sentiment by indicating they would like to take that step before enduring the ordeal facing Van Zandt. His group was activated in mid-May, and he felt they could have saved weeks of valuable time in advancing recovery in the community if they had been established before the disaster. From my own research and experience, it is clear Hopkins is entirely on the right track, yet few communities think about such contingencies until disaster strikes. Hopkins is also director of Public Health Emergency Preparedness for the Northeast Texas Public Health District.

Much of what TPHA and Texas APA learn from this project will be compiled in a tool kit designed to assist rural communities with recovery planning. Rural communities often face different challenges in disasters from urban areas because local government is small, staff and resources are limited, and training is sometimes less available. The workshop aimed to help shrink that gap. The two sponsoring organizations marshaled important academic resources to advance this mission, including the help of faculty and graduate student interns from the public health program at University of North Texas (UNT), in Fort Worth, and the planning school at the University of Texas campus at Arlington. Six of them were helping to manage the workshop, led by Melissa Oden, a public health professor at UNT and a recent president of TPHA. Also involved was the Northeast Texas Public Health District, based in Tyler. It is expected that the tool kit will become available online early next year.

Ultimately, in my opinion, what matters most in these situations is the peer-to-peer learning between local professionals and recovery volunteers. The latter group had already donated about 20,000 hours of help since April. Some came from outside the area, as often happens, but many were local. These people also help to raise money. Hopkins noted that the recovery effort had raised about $530,000, which was being used to help people rebuild, many of whom had lost a great deal, if not everything. A little more than half were either uninsured or underinsured, according to McAlister. There can be many reasons for this, including poverty and poor health, which can easily lead to financial stress.

I had noted that rural areas and small towns can have advantages in recovery because of greater social cohesion, but it is also easy to wear out a limited pool of civic volunteers. Hopkins noted that he was “not sure” the members of the Long-Term Recovery Group “knew what they were getting into.” While pointing out the need to make sure claims for assistance are legitimate and that the group was “doing the most good for the most people,” he added that, “We’re frustrating our citizens and ourselves because of the slowness of our work.” The committee spent “long hours wordsmithing” its mission statement to ensure flexibility in responding to people’s needs and was finally ready to distribute money in late June. That circumstance led to his observation that a previously appointed, standing recovery group could have put assistance in motion much sooner. This point surfaced repeatedly when we heard from attendees from neighboring counties. Hopkins’s observation did not go unnoticed. I tried to reinforce it in my lunch presentation by directing people to a Model Recovery Ordinance APA had developed nearly two decades ago, and updated and refined more recently, to help communities accomplish precisely this objective. I suspect that my suggestions did not go unnoticed, either.

If anything, other speakers throughout the afternoon continued to reinforce everything said earlier. My long-time friend and colleague David Gattis, formerly the planning director in Benbrook, a Dallas suburb, concluded the afternoon by discussing planning needs in post-disaster recovery. Gattis served just a few years ago as the chair of an APA task force that developed an APA policy guide on hazard mitigation. It built partly on work from the Hazards Planning Center, which I then managed, so we have collaborated a bit over time. He is now applying his expertise in Bastrop, a Texas community that, in recent years, has been afflicted by wildfires (2011), floods (2015), and other events, including impacts this year from Harvey. One issue he emphasized was that, “Short-term responses can have long-term recovery implications.” We do not want to put people back in harm’s way. It is less clear in the case of tornadoes exactly where that is because tornadoes are much more random events geographically than floods or wildfires, but there are lessons to learn, nonetheless, including improved building codes and ensuring access to safe rooms, either within a house or in a nearby community facility. It is particularly important to pay attention to such needs with disadvantaged populations, such as the elderly, children, or the disabled. There is almost always room for improvement if we are looking to build greater community resilience. That includes attention to climate change, even if there may be greater skepticism in some areas. I made my own point very simply regarding climate issues: We cannot solve a problem if we don’t talk about it.

But much of Texas, I believe, is talking about a variety of post-disaster issues, and many communities have sought assistance since Hurricane Harvey. A new normal of public debate may emerge from those discussions, and many of those communities may never be quite the same again. In time, they may be healthier and more resilient as a result.

Note: All photos above provided by TX APA and TPHA (thanks).

Jim Schwab

The Next Generation of Disaster Recovery Guidance

Posted on by
Reply

It is always an honor to be able to lead an effort that advances the state of practice with regard to a subject as critical to the nation, and the world, as planning for post-disaster recovery. As readers will have noted from this blog and website, for the last four years or so I was in that position as both the manager of the APA Hazards Planning Center and project manager for Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery: Next Generation, a project that has included the production of an APA Planning Advisory Service Report (No. 576) of the same name. We wish to acknowledge the support of the Federal Emergency Management Agency through an agreement with APA, which made the project possible. I personally wish to thank the members of the project team who contributed to the report and the project overall, who are noted in the acknowledgments page of the report. Particularly, these include my co-authors: Laurie A. Johnson, Kenneth C. Topping, Allison Boyd, and J. Barry Hokanson.

The report came off the press at the end of last year, and became available online last week on the APA website. With it have come some other resources we were able to create:

  • A model pre-event recovery ordinance to help communities guide the recovery process
  • A new resource list of federal programs for assistance with local disaster recovery needs
  • Still to come, a series of briefing papers on subtopics of disaster recovery (stay tuned)

The purpose of this posting is simply to link interested readers to these resources, which include a free PDF download of the 200-page report, which we believe will set the standard in coming years for best practices in the arena of preparing communities beforehand for potential disasters and for planning afterwards for effective recovery. Please use the link above to access all of these resources.

 

Jim Schwab

Trees in the Disaster Recovery Equation

Posted on by
Reply

For the last two or three years, if not longer, I have been engaged in an ongoing discussion with people from the U.S. Forest Service and the International Society of Arboriculture (ISA) about the role of trees in post-disaster recovery. Phillip Rodbell, an urban and community forestry program manager with the Forest Service’s Northeast office in Philadelphia, has been particularly diligent in pursuing the question of how we can better protect trees in urban areas from storms and other major disasters as well as how to reduce the loss of trees in the process of removing debris after disasters. Too often, in the absence of qualified arborists or other forestry professionals, the existing incentives for debris removal cause more, rather than fewer, trees to be cut down and hauled away than is truly necessary. The question is how to change that.

The fact that some trees, sometimes many trees, do in fact get blown down in storms, crushing cars and occasionally people, snapping utility lines, and blocking roads, fosters the false perception in some minds that trees are inevitably hazards in themselves. In fact, inadequate maintenance of the urban forest, including inadequate attention to those trees that really do pose hazards, creates problems that can be prevented with better municipal tree pruning cycles and pre-planning for more appropriate vegetative debris removal after big storms. However, local resources, including professional expertise, can be overwhelmed in a more catastrophic disaster such as a severe tornado or hurricane. The sheer number of trees blown down by Hurricane Katrina, for instance, was staggering, well into the millions.

Phil and I ultimately decided that, if the Forest Service could provide a modicum of money to help sponsor what we decided to call a scoping session, and if ISA and the American Planning Association (APA) could contribute more modestly to support the project, we could perhaps bring together a team of subject matter experts, representatives of relevant local, state, and federal agencies, and people from interested nonprofit associations, and we could foster a meaningful discussion of how to address this problem. In the process, we might help save federal, state, and local governments millions of dollars annually in avoidable debris removal costs.

This spring, we succeeded in bringing that package together and initiating a contract between the Forest Service and APA. The result was a two-day discussion held June 16-17 in APA’s Washington, D.C., offices, involving more than two dozen people, mostly in-person, but with a handful joining by conference call from remote locations in New York and Mississippi. A summary of that discussion, and the issues it addressed, is now available on the APA website, along with a bibliography of resources on the topic, and a series of briefing papers prepared by the invited experts. I invite my readers to check it out. To learn more, click here.

 

Jim Schwab

Close Enough to Get Your Attention

Posted on by
Reply

 

This was a day that got me thinking about how we react to disasters. I’ve certainly had the opportunity to work on other people’s disasters, not so much in the direct sense of being involved daily for months on end, but at least in supplying training on recovery, advice on plans, and the other types of bits and pieces of aid that a researcher or consultant is often able to provide. And I’ve studied other people’s disasters in great detail in order to distill the selective wisdom that finds its way into reports and articles and presentations that share the knowledge thus accrued. But there is always some sense of distance, even when one knows personally some people who live and work in the communities affected, or who were directly affected themselves.

 

I cannot say that what happened in northern Illinois today brought things all the way home to an intense personal experience with disaster. Not even close. The worst that happened to me is that I will fly to Washington, D.C., tomorrow after United Airlines canceled my flight this afternoon at the height of the storm. But there was the threat for a while. High winds and drenching rain dominated the skies outside, but I was always safely inside—except for the brief moment when I went outside to induce my wife and one daughter and her four-year-old son to come inside after they parked on the street in the rain. Our neurotic Springer Spaniel ran out after me when our grandson failed to hold on to him, then jumped inside the car onto the front seat to accompany my wife to the garage. He has panics in storms that make him do things like that, things that seem counterintuitive considering that he is afraid of storms. Inside the house, he shakes in fear and nestles alongside you for reassurance. Dogs are as strange and as irrational at times as people, which may be why they bond with us so well.

 

But for two hours—roughly the period during which the Bears/Ravens game was suspended on Chicago’s Channel 2 (CBS) because of the storm—I found myself watching the storm watch to get the latest. There was a tornado spotted in Wilmington, headed northeast at 55 miles per hour, and estimated times were posted for when it would possibly arrive in Chicago and Evanston if it continued its track. It never did. But later it was reported that there may have been as many as 10 tornadoes, though some sightings may have been multiple touchdowns of the same tornado. I still don’t know six or seven hours later how many there really were. I suppose I will find out in tomorrow morning’s newspaper, or some other way. But by 8 a.m., I shall be headed to O’Hare International Airport to catch the flight I did not catch today. In the midst of the commotion, my cell phone rang, and United told me in its automated way that my flight had been canceled. I called back to rebook to find the robot voice asking if I was calling about my Monday flight. That made me wonder whether they had automatically rebooked me, so I checked my e-mail. I had been checking the flight status online, repeatedly finding that everything was on time—until it no longer was. Now United e-mailed me to say that I was on a flight for 11:05 a.m., replacing my 4:05 p.m. today. I hung up and decided to leave well enough alone. I e-mailed two people from the Georgetown Climate Center in Washington, D.C., to indicate that I would not arrive on time for the Monday workshop to which I had been invited. The workshop was to explore the leveraging of federal post-disaster money to support climate change initiatives. Here we were, being attacked in the Chicago metropolitan area by tornadoes in November. Irony? Perhaps. At any rate, I indicated, “there is no arguing with Mother Nature.” I would not be at the workshop bright and early Monday morning, but would arrive in mid-afternoon, participating only at the tail end. There was nothing I could do about it.

 

But as the day wore on, I realized that those horrific scenes of devastation I had associated with more faraway places like Greensburg, Kansas, and Joplin, Missouri, were now just a drive down the highway in towns like Pekin, Washington, Frankfort, and Coal City, all somewhere in northern Illinois, some relatively close to Chicago. That no tornado, so far as I know, found its way into Chicago itself seems now more dumb luck than anything else. The storm path could easily have brought them here.

 

Still, it is close but not really at my doorstep. I see it on television, the houses burst into splinters, the trucks overturned, cars mangled, and whole neighborhoods denuded of tree cover. But outside my door, what I see is merely a very wet lawn. Maybe there are lots of loose tree branches I can no longer see in the dark. But if I want to assess storm damage personally, I will have to drive down the road about an hour or so. Not far away but far enough. And I won’t be able to do that, if I decide it is the least bit helpful anyway, until I get back from my trip to Washington, foreshortened from three days to two. In the meantime, the emergency managers, whose job is much more immediate in such circumstances than that of planners addressing long-term recovery, will be out there doing what they are trained to do. They will find bodies, if there are any, get medical aid for the injured, get the streets cleared, and assess the damages, with the help of building officials.

 

Still, I expect that we will have a lot to ponder in this region. Some people may be ennobled by the experience in ways they never expected. Three years ago, I read the excellent book by Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell, about the ways in which neighbors often rise to the occasion to build camaraderie where it is least expected. And just this past week, while traveling to St. Louis, to speak at the Sustainable Disaster Recovery Conference sponsored by St. Louis University, I was reading a book by Rabbi Niles Goldstein, God at the Edge, in which he makes the argument that we tend to find the divine presence in moments of crisis, not when sitting on a mountaintop under blue skies. It would be nice if that happened for the towns I mentioned above. They will need all the help they can get, even when it comes from people who never knew before that they had the qualities of leadership. It has happened before. Just ask the folks in Greensburg or Joplin. I had the chance to do exactly that during the conference in St. Louis. And I am sure they are busy right now praying for people in various towns in Illinois. After all, they already know what comes next in restoring life to a blown-out town.

Jim Schwab