Category Archives: Climate

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

One BRIC at a Time

Posted on by
Reply

One of the long-standing questions concerning national disaster policy is why a state or community needs to suffer a presidentially declared disaster in order to be eligible for federal hazard mitigation grants to help improve its resilience against storms, floods, earthquakes, and wildfires, or other possible calamities. Ever since passage of the Stafford Act in 1988, most or all federal support for hazard mitigation projects has depended on a disaster happening first, which then triggered a spigot of grants for risk-reduction projects under the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program (HMGP), run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). It was almost a perverse twist on the famous alleged Willie Sutton justification for robbing banks. Why suffer a major natural disaster? Because that’s where the money is.

But not necessarily any longer. FEMA’s new Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program is a major new source of money available on a competitive basis through applications from local governments seeking to reduce risk through hazard mitigation projects. Over the last two years, FEMA has shaped BRIC, responded to public and stakeholder feedback on its plans, and finally, released those plans earlier this summer, followed in early August by release of its Notice of Funding Opportunity for states and communities. Those jurisdictions can apply between late September and January 29, 2021, the deadline for submitting proposals. Importantly, the program continues FEMA’s decade-long march toward encouraging the integration of hazard mitigation planning throughout a community’s entire range of plans to ensure a more holistic approach with a better prospect of effective implementation. This policy dates back to a seminal 2010 report by the American Planning Association and beyond, but  it is good to see it reinforced.

Breaking New Ground

BRIC began with provisions in the Disaster Recovery Reform Act (DRRA), passed by Congress in 2018 as part of a larger bill that primarily reauthorized the Federal Aviation Authority but included miscellaneous additional measures dealing with disaster policy and sports medicine. Of such bargaining are sausages made in the Capitol, but the specific provisions authorizing what FEMA chose to label BRIC were born of years of complaints and frustration among disaster professionals about sporadic and inconsistent federal funding for hazard mitigation projects before instead of after disasters. The Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000 authorized a Pre-Disaster Mitigation (PDM) program, but for the past two decades its funding has relied on the whims of Congress. In some years, that provided as little as $25 million for a national competition. Sometimes the threat of termination hung over the program. Such minuscule funding produced both inconsistent results and great uncertainty from year to year among potential grant recipients. Almost no one was happy with the program. BRIC now replaces PDM.

Under Section 1234 of DRRA, Congress authorized a new pre-disaster hazard mitigation grant program that would no longer rely on annual congressional allocations but instead will use an annual calculation of 6 percent of annual post-disaster funding for relief from presidentially declared disasters. FEMA will determine that number from estimates six months afterwards, and annually transfer those dollars into the BRIC fund. For Fiscal Year 2020, that will amount to $500 million, of which $33.6 million will be directly allocated to the 50 states, District of Columbia, and U.S. territories. A separate $20 million set-aside will fund tribal governments for BRIC grants. The remaining $446.4 million are available through the new national grant competition. That amount far exceeds any annual allocations from Congress for PDM. While DRRA states that this money is available to states with presidential disaster declarations in the previous seven years before a specific grant opportunity, in fact, all states and territories currently qualify under that criterion.

Antelope Valley flood reduction project, Lincoln, Nebraska

A FEMA fact sheet makes clear that BRIC also establishes new priorities for this assistance by providing incentives for:

  • public infrastructure projects;
  • projects that mitigate risk to one of more lifelines;
  • projects that incorporate nature-based solutions; and
  • adoption and enforcement of modern building codes.

I will return to these goals later in this post because all are important and some deserve further explanation. It is worth noting, however, that much of the new focus grew out of extensive stakeholder feedback as FEMA solicited input, and that feedback is documented in a separate FEMA report.

FEMA has also undertaken an extensive education effort to ensure that potential applicants are well informed on their options for grant proposals. The agency produced a series of five weekly one-hour webinars in July, some of which, in my opinion, are distinctly more informative than others. But their utility may vary with the existing knowledge and experience of those watching, so what is clear to me may be new to others. The best, again in my opinion, detail issues connected with the last three goals in the bullet list above. All were recorded and are available online.

Using BRIC Funds

The very first BRIC webinar spelled out the guiding principles for the new program, which are designed to support community capability and capacity building:

  • encourage and enable innovation
  • promote partnerships
  • enable large infrastructure and projects
  • maintain flexibility
  • provide consistency

The clarity of priorities, focus on building local capacity for hazard mitigation, and streamlining of grant processes, among other factors, outline major differences from the previous PDM program, which suffered from inconsistencies that stemmed in large part from the erratic nature of its funding. The emphasis in selecting projects for support will turn toward their potential for risk reduction, innovation in planning and implementation, focus on addressing future climate, development, and demographic conditions, and support of community lifelines, among other factors as well as considering the types of populations affected by the projects and the partnerships and outreach outlined in the proposals.

Also important is that DRRA provided BRIC with a broad mandate for supporting the local adoption and enforcement of modernized building codes to better address protection against natural hazards. The new law also empowers FEMA to use BRIC to support technical assistance to communities, as well as reimbursing pre-award costs, that is, money expended for project development costs prior to grant approval, so long as the project is ultimately funded. Previously, communities could only use grant money for expenses incurred once the project had begun.

DRRA also expressed specific support for wildfire and wind hazard mitigation initiatives in Section 1205 and earthquake early warning systems in Section 1233. Projects addressing these types of mitigation will have clear support for BRIC funding approval as a result.

Building Codes

Section 1206 of DRRA addresses the need to provide stronger mitigation grant support for projects advancing the adoption of building codes that mitigate natural hazards. Codes adopted by local governments using BRIC grant support must conform to the latest published codes promulgated by organizations like the International Codes Council, which maintains a library of digital codes at the linked site. Permissible activities in this area under the BRIC guidelines include evaluation of the adoption or implementation of new codes in reducing risk; the enhancement of existing adopted codes; and the improvement of work force skills among the enforcement staff.

Building codes have assumed an increasing importance with the realization over many years of their cost-effectiveness in reducing losses. Despite residual resistance in some quarters to increased regulation through such codes, they are a clear asset in the hazard mitigation toolbox. The earthquake that struck Anchorage, Alaska, in November 2018 provided abundant illustration of the merits of mandatory building codes with dramatically shrunken damages compared to the 1964 earthquake that shattered much of the city. Likewise, experience in Florida has shown that stronger codes with adequate enforcement has driven down losses. Following the stark realities exposed by Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana adopted mandatory statewide building codes in 2006. Many other examples of improved building codes are readily available, pertaining not only to earthquake and hurricane wind damage but to wildfires and other hazards that can be mitigated through better building standards. Building and landscaping codes can be enhanced with design manuals and other outreach to builders and the public, such as the ignition-resistant design manual produced by the city of Colorado Springs, which has faced and learned from repeated wildfire events.

Grant applicants have other resources to which they can turn for information and support on building practices, including the BuildStrong Coalition, the Federal Alliance for Safe Homes (FLASH), and the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety, a research entity supported by the insurance industry that includes test laboratories for determining the efficacy of various building materials and approaches. FEMA also has web-based resources on building codes.

Community and Infrastructure Lifelines

The concept of lifelines in a hazard mitigation context may be new to some, though the name itself is intuitively simple. Simply put, lifelines are important community services that exist to alleviate threats to life and property. Emergency managers have long used the term “critical facilities” to refer to those buildings and structures that must survive disaster impacts in order to provide continuous essential services such as transportation, public safety, shelter, and power to a community. But lifelines are more than physical assets; they are also systems that must be able to continue to function in an emergency or disaster. In BRIC, these are now the targets of focused mitigation projects, which can include efforts to strengthen and build the resilience of any systems and institutions within seven categories:

  • safety and security;
  • food, water, and shelter;
  • health and medical;
  • energy;
  • communications;
  • transportation;
  • hazardous materials

FEMA introduced the concept of community lifelines in the fourth edition of the National Response Framework. The FEMA website includes a free download of its Community Lifelines Toolkit. Basically, the idea is to allow BRIC grants to support projects that reduce risk to these lifelines and help stabilize them quickly after a disaster occurs. These can include stormwater management projects,  tsunami safety measures, infrastructure safety upgrades, and retrofits to essential buildings such as hospitals and shelters.

Nature-based Solutions

I will admit that, to me, some of the most intriguing initiatives within BRIC may focus on supporting green infrastructure, which is essentially what FEMA is labeling nature-based solutions. The central idea is to use the natural ecosystem services within a community or region to ameliorate the impacts of natural hazards by letting nature do what nature has always done best. FEMA has shown similar fascination with the concept by issuing a 30-page guide for local communities that outlines what these solutions can look like and how they function. These approaches have gained popularity in part as a response to climate change, but they are larger than that because they often address at least part of the problems associated with flooding and sea-level rise at less cost, often significantly less cost, than “gray” infrastructure or engineered structural solutions. In the final BRIC webinar, Sarah Murdock, Director of Climate Resilience Policy for The Nature Conservancy, noted that coastal wetlands had prevented an estimated $625 million in property damage during Hurricane Sandy. In various states

River restoration along St. Vrain River after 2013 Colorado floods

and cities, nature-based solutions have included green roofs, rain gardens, permeable pavements, living shorelines, and a growing array of other innovative design solutions to long-standing problems like stormwater management, urban heat islands, building energy demand, and urban flooding.

A great deal of research, case study documentation, and tool development has occurred in recent years with respect to nature-based solutions. For instance, Digital Coast, a program of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, features tools such as the State of High Tide Flooding and Annual Outlook, the Climate Resilience Toolkit, and the Climate Explorer. NOAA also provides a variety of other technical assistance, for instance, through Regional Climate Centers and Sea Grant College Programs. Many states provide their own research and technical assistance, for example, through state climatologists, represented collectively the American Association of State Climatologists. Urban planners can access additional design ideas through the American Planning Association publication Green Infrastructure: A Landscape Approach. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has provided its own online atlas called Engineering with Nature that discusses the multiple benefits of these approaches. Finally, I would be remiss not to mention the stellar contribution of The Nature Conservancy with its web-based resource, Naturally Resilient Communities, an effort to which I can proudly claim to have contributed during my tenure at APA.

Outlook

The most promising feature of BRIC is that, because it was authorized by Congress in DRRA with a secure source of ongoing annual funding, it is not dependent on the shifting whims of presidential administrations. It has a solid chance of building an effective constituency among grant recipients pursuing projects that are highly likely over time to demonstrate their own worth so long as the program is administered with an eye to its goals and fundamental objectives. I am not trying here to be encyclopedic but to provide an entry point to the range of resources and possibilities that community applicants and advocates can use to ensure the success of BRIC. Given the steady rise in the costs of natural disasters, driven in part by climate change but also by demographic shifts and public policy decisions, making a difference by helping to drive down such costs is a national necessity. BRIC opens a new door toward wise investments to help achieve this goal. This nation needs some creative disaster problem solving backed by new resources.

Jim Schwab

 

The Need for Resilient Infrastructure

Posted on by
Reply

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

 

Planning Hurricane Recovery in Florida

Posted on by
Reply

An example of wind mitigation in action in Marathon, Florida: The remnants of the home in the foreground were from an older structure, while the homes in the background were built to code. The home in the foreground was sadly unable to withstand the destruction of Hurricane Irma. Photo courtesy Julie Dennis.

Once again, as with previous short blog notes introducing podcasts, I will let the podcast speak for itself but offer an introduction. It has been my pleasure to know and work with Julie Dennis for the past decade. During most of that time, she was working for the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity, formerly the Department of Community Affairs, assisting Florida communities with disaster recovery. More recently, she left to form her own consulting firm, OVID Solutions. Born in the Florida Panhandle in Bay County, she has stayed with her roots and is now working with area communities on recovery from Hurricane Michael, which struck the area in the fall of 2018. But in this podcast, she also discusses her experiences in working with communities in the Florida Keys (Monroe County) on recovery from Hurricane Irma, which struck in 2017.

What is striking in this interview is not just the knowledge she brings to the conversation, but the personal perspectives and experience she shares, particularly as a member of the communities that were affected. Such insights have made my job, as the host of the Resilience Roundtable APA podcast series, both enjoyable and exciting as a learning experience. I hope you find the podcast just as intriguing and engaging as I did.

Click here to listen to the podcast.

Jim Schwab

Costly Coastal Arrogance

Posted on by
Reply

In the days shortly after World War II, writes Gilbert M. Gaul in The Geography of Risk, Morris Shapiro and his family were busy building their own version of Levittown, the famed suburban tract housing development of Long Island, on a barrier island in southern New Jersey known as Long Beach Island. The place had largely been the preserve of fishing villages in earlier years, but Shapiro had a vision, one he passed along to his son, Herbert, in due time.

Shapiro drained and built on what we now call wetlands, but in the 1940s, environmental values were a weak reed for resisting the onslaught of developers who believed in the next big real estate trend and the willingness of small villages to grow with them. And so, Morris persuaded Herbert to buy land around Barnegat Bay, and the few hunters and watermen who understood the value of salt marsh in preserving wildlife habitat were pushed aside. The suburbanization of the Jersey Shore soon took hold.

Nature heals its own wounds when the landscape is healthy, but damage to the built environment can be another matter altogether. Gaul details the impacts of the Ash Wednesday storm that struck the New Jersey coast in the spring of 1962, providing the nation with its first television-era glimpse of disasters yet to come and the high costs of having compromised the protective dunes and wetlands and installed thousands of bungalows on a narrow, highly vulnerable strip of land along the sea. “Nearly all the 5,361 homes on Long Beach Island . . . were damaged,” Gaul tells us, “including 1,000 that were severely impaired and 600 that were destroyed.”

As always, the immediate focus was on rebuilding, with urgent reminders from legislators and others of the economic value of shoreline development (but not its costs). In the face of that Category 5 juggernaut, Gov. Richard Hughes bravely proposed a six-month moratorium on new development, supported by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and a ban on rebuilding along a 100-foot buffer along the beach. Looking back, it seems visionary for its time in anticipating the problems that would otherwise follow, and it attracted precisely the blowback we have come to expect. Federal support for rebuilding came from the Kennedy administration, and the long drift toward increased federal responsibility for recovery was underway.

Gaul goes on to detail the long tale of Jim Mancini, both developer and mayor of Long Beach Island, and cheerleader in chief for the coastal towns and what they saw as their inevitable growth. Still, governors and environmental officials in New Jersey were periodically game for a new try at restraining a situation where local officials controlled building and zoning while state taxpayers provided millions of dollars to repair storm damage and infrastructure. Gov. Brendan Byrne was next in 1979, starting with a conference on the future of the New Jersey shore, followed by initiatives from the state Department of Environmental Protection and the introduction of the Dune and Shorefront Protection Act in the legislature.

Predictably, the mayors rebelled, led by Mancini, who organized 1,500 protesters to attend a July 1980 hearing at the St. Francis Community Center in Brant Beach. Robert Hollenbeck, chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, essentially presided over an ambush in which he was repeatedly shouted down by angry homeowners. Once again, the opportunity to take a creative regulatory approach to controlling shoreline damage was driven into wholesale political retreat. By the time Superstorm Sandy delivered its legendary hit in October 2012, it was all over but the shouting. The administration of Gov. Chris Christie was not about to seriously challenge the home rule prerogatives that dominate the politically fragmented landscape of New Jersey township government. The tough questions would have to wait.

What Gaul outlines in New Jersey, of course, has occurred in other forms in other places from the Carolinas to Florida to Texas over the subsequent decades. Gaul takes us to all these locations as the book progresses. What we have seen, time and again, are the costly consequences of a pattern of coastal development that has placed increasing quantities of homes and properties in harm’s way, then begged or even demanded that states and the federal government rescue the storm-damaged communities even as they fight bitterly against regulatory measures aimed at reducing future costs by restricting unwise development.

Of course, by now there are many residents caught in the middle. But surely, it is not impossible to sympathize with their plight and be willing to assist those who seek alternatives, while refusing to continue subsidizing unwise new development or bailing out those who refuse to accept the reality of the risks they have assumed. What is clear is that tough decisions await, and the public does not have endless resources. Wiser development and rebuilding decisions are imperative.

Not surprisingly, Gaul, a veteran Pulitzer Prize-winning author and reporter, is a New Jersey native. But he is also an astute historian and researcher who writes with a well-informed passion that brings us, in the end, to the fateful season of 2017—the year of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria—and then 2018, when all looked calm on the meteorological front until Florence took its toll in North Carolina, followed by Category 5 Michael in the Florida Panhandle. Climate change, inducing hurricanes that become slow-moving rain bombs that flood cities like Houston, is still “not a thing” in the Trump White House. Neither, for the most part, are buyouts of repetitively flooded homes, even as the nation desperately needs to find ways to live more resiliently in the face of the risks it has embedded on its coastal landscapes.

But the costs keep climbing, and it is not impossible to imagine a serious political reckoning under a different administration with a more realistic handle on the stakes involved, which run into the trillions of dollars. It is not impossible, for instance, to imagine a $250 billion disaster if a catastrophic hurricane took direct aim at one of Florida’s major cities. For that reason alone, Gaul’s book may be worth a read. We need to improve the quality and depth of the conversation around issues with such drastic fiscal impact.

Jim Schwab

Details on Puerto Rico’s Struggle after Maria

Posted on by
Reply

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

Climate News from Florida and California

Posted on by
Reply

Warning to readers: This is not my usual single-focus essay. It is a collage of news from two coastal states with an assortment of serious natural hazards challenges—Florida and California. In recent years, their politics has tended to diverge widely, but perhaps we are seeing a welcome convergence to some degree around climate issues. It is about time: Both face severe and unrelenting challenges, and there is little time to waste in identifying and implementing effective solutions.

Let’s start with Florida.

For starters, they are getting significant help from The Nature Conservancy (TNC), an organization that has long performed great work in preserving open space and researching the values of green infrastructure. For years, I have heard about the merits of coastal mangroves in mitigating hazards such as storm surge and coastal erosion. Recently, TNC employed an insurance industry catastrophe model to quantity the economic benefits of mangrove forests for reducing coastal storm damages in Collier County, and from Hurricane Irma, which struck parts of Florida in 2017. For those unfamiliar with the area, Collier County is in southwest Florida running from Naples on the Gulf of Mexico coast east into the Big Cypress Nature Preserve, which lies just north of Everglades National Park.

To quote the TNC website, “Many areas in the county received over $1 million in benefits every year in flood damage reduction benefits due to the mangroves in front of them.” Moreover, “Mangroves averted $1.5 billion in storm damages, amounting to a 25% savings in counties that have mangroves. They also protected more than 626,000 people across Florida.” You can access the full report, Valuing the Flood Risk Reduction Benefits of Florida’s Mangroves, here.

While TNC could be expected to take climate change and natural hazards seriously, Florida Republican officials are another matter. It is thus heartwarming to learn in a new Associated Press article that first-term Gov. Ron DeSantis has helped turn the page, along with some Republican lawmakers, on the climate denial that prevailed under his predecessor and now current U.S. Senator, Rick Scott. It also appears that Sen. Marco Rubio has joined a bipartisan Senate Climate Solutions Caucus launched in October. While one should not expect the sort of wholehearted embrace of climate issues that one sees among progressive Democrats, that is not necessary for one to appreciate the value of a return to a bipartisan approach to an issue where Republican support (and connection to reality) has in recent years been woefully lacking, especially under President Trump. Shifting public perceptions have driven political change in both California and Florida, and it is about time. Southern Florida has been awash in nuisance flooding driven by sea level rise, and pollution has threatened the environmental viability of the Everglades. If Republicans are finding a need to appeal to voters through climate action, that is, on balance, a far better thing for the political system than a hyper-partisan battle of acceptance of reality versus denial. It is also not surprising that two highly vulnerable states with major natural hazard threats would be in the forefront.

Of course, California under former Gov. Jerry Brown went all in on confronting climate change, in part because of the motivating impact of increasingly frequent and violent wildfires and lengthening wildfire seasons. If anything, current Gov. Gavin Newsom may be picking up the pace, but it is worth nothing that even former Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has long acknowledged climate change and advocated effective state and federal action in response. But let me keep this post short and to the point. I recently taped some introductory material for new additions to the American Planning Association’s Resilience Roundtable podcast series, for which I will soon be moderating several new installments to be released in the coming year. But two new podcasts involve interviews by Prof. William Siembieda of California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, with planners from Butte County. The first is already available, in which he discusses the impact and recovery from the Camp Fire, which destroyed much of the city of Paradise, with senior planner Dan Breedon. The second interview will appear on the Resilience Roundtable page soon.

Jim Schwab

Facing Waterfront Hazards in Wilmington

Posted on by
Reply

Wilmington, a charming city of just over 100,000 on the far southern edge of the North Carolina coast, has taken some hits from coastal storms in recent years, most notably Hurricane Florence in 2018. Hurricane Dorian this year posed a minor threat but mostly left a trail of 14 identified tornadoes in its wake, a phenomenon familiar in the Southeast, though their association with hurricanes may be less well known elsewhere.

Wilmington Planning Director Glenn Harbeck, who I was told was one of the most knowledgeable people in town for the purpose, on October 8 took me on a boat tour of much of the city’s interior waterfront to let me see and photograph the area along Hewletts Creek, a stream feeding into the Atlantic Ocean behind the barrier island that includes the Masonboro Island Estuarine Reserve. Glenn and his wife have lived in Wilmington for 40 years, during which, he says, they have experienced a succession of hurricanes: Diana (1984), Bertha (1996), Fran (1996), Bonnie (1998), Floyd (1999), Matthew (2016), Florence (2018), and Dorian (2019).

Why it has taken me this long to write about it is another matter related entirely to my own obligations and distractions. At the time, however, I was in Wilmington as the invited keynote speaker for the annual conference of the North Carolina chapter of the American Planning Association. That event was at the city’s convention center, which sits along the Cape Fear River, which basically serves as the city’s western edge, with suburban or unincorporated New Hanover County on the other side. Along with the adjoining Embassy Suites, the complex boasts a boardwalk that allows people to walk to restaurants and other venues in more historic quarters of the city. I joined a party of a dozen at a nearby seafood restaurant, The George on the River, and got to see much of it. Some of the boardwalk appears to need work, but I was not clear on whether that was due to hurricane damage of work in progress. But I can give The George five stars. The food was wonderful and a credit to southern coastal cuisine. (I enjoyed crab-topped salmon with garlic mashed potatoes and spicy collards. I gladly recommend it.) Added appeal derived from the outdoor seating that made for a pleasant evening setting.

But all that followed the boat tour, which came in the late afternoon after a delayed arrival in Wilmington following a long layover in Atlanta on the way from Chicago. The weather had been uncertain, and Glenn was a bit concerned about concluding the trip before it turned rainy or inhospitable, although it never did. It was simply a bit chilly, but my photos have that overcast, gray-sky look as a result.

Compared to some prior tours I have taken of disaster sites, this one was relatively brief with modest expectations. Nonetheless, there are always learning opportunities, and I had never visited Wilmington before. Touring by boat allowed a different perspective than by land. Certain factors became readily apparent, with Glenn supplying ample explanation.

One, to be expected, was that, despite the clear dangers and mitigation challenges associated with a waterfront near the ocean in a region frequently affected by coastal storms and hurricanes, housing along Hewletts Creek remains attractive to its owners and has gained value as a result. These are people who love their boats and their access to the water, and the storms are simply part of the environment, much like a snowstorm in Chicago. Whether everyone takes all the appropriate precautions to protect those properties may be another matter, but most are at least aware of the challenges they face when hurricanes move toward North Carolina.

Because access to the water is a prized asset, most properties include piers, although shared piers are becoming more common, according to Glenn, presumably because of reduced costs and environmental impact. Those piers, however, have typically taken a beating in big storms, and Hurricane Florence contained some solid punches. One problem, he informed me, is that the buoyancy of the wood is the enemy of the piers’ survival because, as the storm surge rises and the piers rise with it, they are bent and twisted and collapse. In other words, the buoyancy of wood works against them. The photos provide ample evidence, but Glenn also told me that some had been repaired in recent months; if I had come three months earlier, the destruction would have been more evident. Past adaptation in some places was to rebuild the piers higher than before to move them above likely wave levels, but frequent storms and high storm surges have sometimes obviated the effectiveness of this approach. Instead, some pier owners are adapting with the use of Titan decking, which uses polypropylene plastic to stabilize the piers during future storms.

There were also, a year after Florence, remaining indications of the damages suffered to the boats themselves, which can easily be tossed about by winds and waves. We encountered one of those (below) toward the end of the tour.  

It should be noted that, although it is inside Wilmington, Hewletts Creek has a much more rural or suburban feel than the Cape Fear River waterfront, which is near the urban heart of the city and its downtown. The riverfront is not primarily residential but encompasses a variety of commercial uses, including hotels and a large marina. In contrast, the waterfront along Hewletts Creek consisted predominantly of private residential property.

I do not wish to leave the impression from this glimpse of Hewletts Creek that what happened there is the extent of the impact of Florence. Although I did not have time on this trip to get a thorough tour of the city, I did receive other information from Glenn and from Christine Hughes, a senior planner with the city for Comprehensive Planning, Design, and Community Engagement. From her, I learned that Wilmington’s working and low-income populations sustained a large hit on their affordable housing stock with the loss of approximately 1,200 apartment units. In September, the Wilmington City Council approved $27 million worth of bond issuances for the Wilmington Housing Authority. A big part of that involved the closure of Market North Apartments on Darlington Avenue, which will be rebuilt. That closure forced evacuation by more than 1,000 residents. Wilmington will be recovering from Florence for some time to come. The cost and numbers of people affected in this housing redevelopment underscore the solemn fact that often low-income and minority populations suffer the greatest impacts of natural disasters. Our communities are not whole unless and until we give them high priority in recovery planning.

It is also worth knowing that the quest for coastal resilience is not new to Wilmington, which has engaged with federal and state agencies for some time, as illustrated in a 2013 report on a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency pilot project on community resilience. Glenn Harbeck has been in his current position for more than seven years after a long period of consulting and knows well the direction the city needs to take, but it is a long road. Residents can learn a great deal about the progress of infrastructure recovery projects from the city’s online map tracking such efforts, which include street and sidewalk repairs and stormwater management. Recovery is a complex process, as Wilmington knows well, and future storms, climate change, and sea level rise will all surely add to the challenges that lie ahead.

Jim Schwab

Great Lakes Merit Protection

Posted on by
Reply

I grew up near the shores of Lake Erie, in suburban Cleveland. After a seven-year stint in Iowa and Nebraska, I ended up in Chicago, where I have lived since 1985. The Great Lakes have been part of my ecological and geographic consciousness for essentially 90 percent of my lifetime. As an urban planner, that means I am deeply aware of their significance on many levels.

It will surprise no one, then, that as a planner who has focused heavily on environmental and natural hazards issues, I have been involved in projects aimed at protecting that natural heritage. As manager of the Hazards Planning Center at the American Planning Association (APA), I involved APA as a partner with the Association of State Floodplain Managers (ASFPM) as ASFPM developed its Great Lakes Coastal Resilience website with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) support. Later, I prepared a successful grant for support from NOAA’s Sectoral Applications Research Program for a project on integrating climate change data into local comprehensive and capital improvements planning. In that project, APA collaborated with the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning and the University of Illinois. That project, which involved work with five pilot communities in the Chicago metropolitan area, was (and still is) ongoing when I left APA at the end of May 2017. The aim was to develop applicable models for such planning for other communities throughout the Great Lakes region.

It is thus always encouraging to see others pick up the same mantle. It was hardly surprising that the Environmental Law & Policy Center (ELPC), a long-time Chicago-based staple of the public interest community, would see fit to do so. On March 20, in concert with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, ELPC released “An Assessment of the Impact of Climate Change on the Great Lakes,” with 18 scientists contributing to the 74-page report. I spoke two weeks later with Howard Learner, the long-time president and executive director of ELPC, about the rationale and hopes for the report.

The impact of adding one more report to the parade is cumulative but important. Learner explained that national studies, particularly the National Climate Assessment, mention regional impacts of climate change, but that drilling down to the impacts on a specific region and making local and state decision makers aware of the issues at those levels was the point. Thus, he asked Don Wuebbles, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Illinois and a science adviser to ELPC, to assemble a team of experts for the purpose. Wuebbles recruited most of the team, with the goal not only of identifying problems but of developing or pinpointing solutions. Repeatedly, Learner emphasized the public policy role of ELPC as a “problem-solving” institution. The intended audience was governors, provincial ministers, congressional delegations from Great Lakes states, and other public officials, providing them with an assessment of the state of the science concerning the Great Lakes.

I won’t even attempt to review all the data in the report, but certain points are essential to an adequate public understanding. For one, the Great Lakes are simply huge and constitute a very complex ecosystem in a heavily populated region of more than 34 million people in the U.S. and Canada, the vast majority of whom repeatedly express support for protection of the Great Lakes in public opinion polls. It is the largest freshwater group of lakes on the planet, and second largest in volume. It is a binational ecosystem that demands cooperation across state, provincial, and national boundaries. It is home to 170 species of fish and a $7 billion fisheries industry. It has long been home to one of the most significant industrial regions of both nations. What happens here matters.

The term “lake effect” is most often associated with the Great Lakes because their sheer mass has a measurable impact on local and regional weather patterns. Winds pick up considerable moisture that often lands downwind in the form of snowstorms and precipitation. For instance, any frequent visitor of farmers’ markets along the Great Lakes is likely to be aware of western Michigan’s “fruit belt” offerings of apples, cherries, pears, and other crops dependent on the lake effect.

Figure 3. Observed changes in annually-averaged temperature (°F) for the U.S. states bordering the Great Lakes for present-day (1986–2016) relative to 1901–1960. Derived from the NOAA nClimDiv dataset (Vose et al., 2014). Figure source: NOAA/NCEI (Both images reprinted from report courtesy ELPC.

Figure 4. Projected change in annually-averaged temperature (°F) for U.S. states bordering the Great Lakes from the (a) higher (RCP8.5) and (b) lower (RCP4.5) scenarios for the 2085 (2070-2099) time period relative to 1976-2005. Figure source: NOAA/NCEI

The lake effect, of course, is a part of the natural system in a region carved out of the landscape by melting glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age. Recent climate change is another matter. The region has already experienced a 1.6° F. increase in average daily temperatures in the 1985-2016 period as compared to the 1901-1960 average. Those increases are expected to accelerate over the remainder of this century. It is not just temperatures that change, however, because changing weather patterns as a result of long-term climate change result in altered precipitation patterns. Summer precipitation is predicted to decline by 5 to 15 percent, suggesting some increased propensity for drought, while winter and spring precipitation will increase, producing an increased regional propensity for spring flooding. Increased intensity of major thunderstorm events will exacerbate the vulnerability of urban areas to stormwater runoff, resulting in increased “urban flooding,” often a result of inadequate stormwater drainage systems in highly developed urban areas. That, in turn, has huge implications for municipal and regional investments in stormwater and sewage treatment infrastructure. In addition, heat waves can threaten lives and public health. Public decision makers ignore these implications at the fiscal and physical peril of their affected communities.

Among those impacts highlighted in the report is the increased danger of algal blooms in the Great Lakes as a result of changing biological conditions. The report notes that the largest algal bloom in Lake Erie history occurred in 2011, offshore from Toledo, Ohio, affecting drinking water for a metropolitan area of 500,000 people.

There is also danger to the stability of some shoreline bluffs, an issue highlighted on the Great Lakes Coastal Resilience website, as a result of reduced days of ice cover during the winter. While less ice cover may seem a minor problem to some, in fact it means changes in water density and seasonal mixing patterns in water columns, but it also means the loss of protection from winter waves from storm patterns because the ice cover prevents those waves from reaching the shore until the spring melt. The result is increased shoreline erosion.

All of that harks back to the central question of my interview with Learner: What do you hope to achieve? “The time for climate action is now,” he insisted, noting that the Trump presidency has been “a step back,” making it important for cities and states to “step up with their own climate solutions.” Learner hopes the report at least provides a “road map” for governors and Canadian premiers to focus their actions on the impact of climate change on the Great Lakes, such as “extreme weather events.”

Curiously, one arena in which new action may be possible is the city of Chicago itself, which on April 2 elected a new mayor, Lori Lightfoot. Media attention has focused on the fact that she is both the first gay mayor and the first African-American female mayor in the city’s history, but equally significant is her history as a former federal prosecutor who campaigned against corruption. Learner notes that outgoing Mayor Rahm Emanuel convened a Chicago Climate Summit in November 2017, and that ELPC is now “looking to Mayor Lightfoot to step up Chicago’s game” to benefit both the local economy and environment with a stronger approach to climate change.

The same can be said, of course, for numerous other municipalities choosing new leadership and for the new governors of the region, including J.B. Pritzker in Illinois. They all have much work to do, but an increasing amount of research and guidance with which to do it.

Jim Schwab

Reducing Risk from Natural Hazards

Posted on by
Reply
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