NEWS

Integrated Planning to Reduce Disaster Risks

As manager of the new APA Hazards Planning Research Center, part of the American Planning Association's Research Department, I am managing what I consider an exciting new project funded under a contract with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The aim of this project is to produce a report for the planning community on Integrating Hazard Mitigation into Local Planning. What does that mean?

For many years, hazards experts have urged communities, and the federal government, to pay as much attention to undertaking measures prior to disasters to reduce disaster losses as to trying to respond to disasters after they happen. The nation has faced growing costs of responding to natural disasters and helping to restore communities, but there are ways to make communities less vulnerable and restrain those growing costs. They include structural mitigation measures, which include projects to secure our infrastructure from disaster damage (for example, seismic retrofitting of buildings and bridges to prevent failure during earthquakes), and nonstructural measures, such as zoning restrictions to limit development in hazard-prone areas such as floodplains.

Efforts to increase the accountability of communities for the disaster assistance they receive took on new force with the passage in 2000 by Congress of the Disaster Mitigation Act. It requires that communities prepare local hazard mitigation plans in order to be eligible for FEMA hazard mitigation grants both before and after disasters. However, many of these plans are prepared either without input from local planners and planning departments, or without reference to local comprehensive plans and their implementation tools (such as subdivision and zoning ordinances), or both.

The rubber will only hit the road in this nation with regard to serious mitigation of natural hazards to reduce future losses when such integration occurs. Planners, emergency managers, public works directors, and safety personnel must all talk to each other and collaborate on such plans. Mitigation plans need to be part of, or at least referenced in, other local plans, particularly comprehensive plans, but also local land-use ordinances and other measures, including capital improvements budgeting.

How to make that happen will be the focus of this new study. Get more information at the project's APA web pages at www.planning.org/research.

Teaching

For a number of years, I have said that one problem with planners' ability to respond to the challenge of natural hazards and recovery from natural disasters is that most urban planning schools still do not incorporate these subjects into their curricula. Now, in collaboration with Richard Roths, a senior planner at URS Corp. who is also a former DeKalb County planning director and mitigation specialist for FEMA, I am putting some effort where my mouth is. Although many current urban planning faculty are not themselves trained in this area, one solution is to use practitioners with disaster experience as adjunct faculty.

In the fall of 2006, Roths and I were appointed adjunct faculty at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In the Spring 2007 semester, we co-instructed a course on hazard mitigation and disaster recovery, UPP 594. The course was open to all Master's and Ph.D. students in the program. It will cover topics like hazard identification, risk assessment, the development of hazard mitigation plans, and the management of the disaster recovery process, including preparation of long-term recovery plans. Both of us have been truly excited to embark on this venture and hope that it becomes an ongoing feature of the UIC curriculum. Presently, we expect to teach the course again in the spring of 2009.

The Story of the Floods

At long last, I am undertaking a new book project that will probably require two or three years of spare-time effort outside my full-time work at APA. I have decided to construct a planning-focused history of the 1993 Midwest floods-what happened, why, the historic background of floodplain management in the U.S., and what our nation did and did not learn from the entire experience.

The 1993 Midwest floods affected nine states, including hundreds of copies and millions of Americans, with prolonged inundation over an entire rain-drenched summer. It was a disaster that, at one point, cost the city of Des Moines, Iowa, the functioning of its water treatment plant that served a metropolitan area of 250,000 people. It cost railroads hundreds of millions of dollars to reroute traffic around flooded tracks. It cost property owners more than $12 billion and constituted the first national emergency under President Clinton's new but eventually heralded FEMA director, James Lee Witt. The entire story deserves a sophisticated, knowledgeable, but lively treatment that covers both the human interest and the public policy issues.

I plan many trips to the areas of Missouri, Iowa, Illinois, and other states that were heavily affected. I need informed and experienced contacts in these areas, or those who worked on disaster recovery at the time, and would like to hear from those who would be willing to provide information, documents, or interviews to assist my task, and I hope to acknowledge everyone who helps. Please contact me at jschwab@planning.org. I hope that I can put the information to use in multiple ways, and I look forward to hearing from you.

Personal

Despite numerous delays and distractions, it is my goal eventually to return to work on a substantial memoir about the experiences my wife, Jean, and I have shared as adoptive parents. Much work lies ahead before the book reaches completion, so it is still much too early to offer predictions about it. However, I am delving into background research on various aspects of the foster care and adoptive systems in order to gain some new perspective and to ground my comments more solidly. I am certainly interested in hearing from those who have themselves participated in this process, particularly what they have learned along the way, and how it has changed them personally.

APA

I have over many years effectively become the resident expert on disaster recovery on the American Planning Association Research staff. That has made the last three years very interesting. In addition to the activities noted above, I have been involved in the following:

As part of an eight-member, interdisciplinary team, I was sent to Sri Lanka to help develop recommendations for long-term reconstruction following the December 26, 2004, tsunami. The organizations supplying expertise in addition to APA were the American Institute of Architects (AIA), which organized the tour, the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA), and the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). An account of the trip appears on the APA website at www.planning.org/features/2005/srilanka.htm, along with a PowerPoint slide show at www.planning.org/tuesdaysatapa/2005/RecoverySriLanka.ppt, presented for Tuesdays at APA on November 15, 2005. The final report can be found at www.aia.org/liv_disaster_tsunami.
Hurricane Katrina supplied an overdose of work along the Gulf Coast. APA swung into motion in a number of fronts. I was involved in organizing a 90-minute audio conference, free to Gulf Coast urban planners, which we produced on September 19, as well as a one-day training workshop on “Basics of Recovery Planning,” for the Louisiana APA chapter conference in Shreveport, October 7-8.
I was also involved on behalf of APA in the development of a three-day visioning conference in New Orleans for the Louisiana Recovery Authority, an event co-sponsored by APA, AIA, ASCE, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and other activities supporting the city of New Orleans. The full roster of APA efforts in support of post-Katrina redevelopment are available by linking to the APA home page at www.planning.org and following all the Katrina links as they evolve.

Green Congregations

A blessed event occurred recently on Saturday, October 13, to be specific. The Environmental Concerns Working Group, which I chair for the Metropolitan Chicago Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, was involved in a Green Congregations Training Workshop co-sponsored by the synod and the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago (LSTC). LSTC New Testament professor David Rhoads was the lead presenter for the event, which began at 8 a.m. and ended at noon, immediately followed by a lunchtime presentation by me about our Energy Revolving Loan Fund, through which we finance zero-interest loans for church energy efficiency projects, and a tour of the site, Our Saviour's Lutheran Church in Arlington Heights, Illinois, which benefited in recent years from a synod-funded lighting retrofit.

What made the event blessed was the remarkable and totally unexpected level of attendance. Where such training efforts had drawn perhaps 25 or 30 people in the past, this one drew nearly 150 people from 51 different congregations in the area, plus a handful of visiting Methodists and Catholics. I believe that this remarkable upsurge in interest is symptomatic of a turning of the tide in the larger society in attitudes toward energy conservation and the looming crisis of climate change triggered by the ongoing increase in greenhouse gas emissions. Former Vice President Al Gore was announced as a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize just two days before the workshop because of his work on climate change, but I do not believe that was the primary factor in our success. If we had not had a program in place to which people could turn, Gore's award would not have mattered. It is the fact that many people like us are working on these issues in practical ways at the grass roots that affords the opportunity for such an outpouring of active interest at this time. We hope it continues.