Category Archives: Disaster policy

Discussion of all aspects of disaster issues and public policy concerning disasters, including planning for hazard mitigation and disaster recovery

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

 

Plotting Post-Pandemic Recovery

Posted on by
Reply

Photo by Carolyn Torma

In recent years, the development of local or regional recovery plans following major natural disasters has become increasingly common. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has long encouraged such planning, and I led the production of two major FEMA-funded reports from the American Planning Association on the topic—Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery and Reconstruction (PAS 483/484, 1998) and Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery: Next Generation (PAS 576, 2014). I’ve spoken repeatedly on the topic, trained planners, and valued the collective knowledge of the two teams we assembled to make those projects happen. The underlying idea is to help a community assess its losses, reassess its goals, and find the silver lining in the dark cloud of the disaster that will allow it to rebuild better and stronger than before. This is the central concept of community resilience: the capacity to learn from such events, adapt to the changes they require, and move forward.

The idea of natural disasters has generally encompassed those caused primarily by meteorological and geological disturbances, such as storms and earthquakes, though it includes impacts exacerbated by human mistakes in building and planning. Disasters necessarily involve the collision of natural forces with the human and built environment, which has caused some people to question the very use of the word “natural” in connection with disasters. Personally, I am comfortable with the term “natural disaster” so long as we understand that no disaster exists without this interaction.

But there are those disasters where damage to the built environment is a secondary consideration, and the loss of lives is primary. Drought is somewhere in the middle. Damage to structures can occur, but only as the result of the slow, nagging loss of moisture in the air and soil. Heat waves can take hundreds of lives without affecting a single structure, though they can put enormous stress on energy and transportation infrastructure.

Pandemics, however, fall into another category entirely as biological disasters. They occur when bacteria or viruses emerge in the environment and attack humans before we have developed any effective immunity or vaccines. The current COVID-19 crisis fits this mold precisely. It can be far more devastating than a natural disaster simply because it can roam far more freely across the planet, as did the 1918 influenza pandemic, striking down hundreds of thousands if not millions of people. Before the era of modern medicine, pandemics like the bubonic plague in the Middle Ages could kill half of the affected population. Even without vaccines, we at least have the huge advantage of understanding how such microbial threats spread. Our disadvantage in the U.S. has been national leadership, starting with the President, that has been psychologically allergic to scientific advice. The result has been needless loss of life on a colossal scale.

It was a matter of time before some community, even without such federal leadership, applied many of the principles of recovery planning to the coronavirus pandemic. One critical question related to recovery is identifying the point at which the crisis is over, or at least waning. In natural disasters, drought being again the exception, this point becomes clear within a matter of days, or even hours in the case of tornadoes, as the storm passes. However, weather systems such as that which produced the 1993 Midwest floods, can last for weeks or even an entire summer. But at some point, it becomes clear that the emergency is over, and planning for long-term recovery can begin. In the absence of a vaccine, however, it is less clear when we can use the “all clear” signal for a pandemic. Right now, in the U.S., it is painfully clear that the rush to reopen is producing unconscionable and shocking consequences across the South and Southwest, and in a few other locations as well. It is incredibly hard, perhaps even impossible, to plan meaningfully for recovery when you are still stoking the fire by facilitating the spread of the virus.

Nonetheless, some states, notably including New York, much of New England, and Illinois, have fought hard against the odds to bring down infection rates, which are now a fraction of what they were in April or May. Their victory remains tenuous, considering the larger national crisis that remains a growing threat to public health, but Chicago under Mayor Lori Lightfoot has announced a list of states whose residents must quarantine for 14 days upon arrival, notably including Florida, Arizona, and Texas. Later, Iowa was added. By July 17, the Cook County Department of Public Health expanded that quarantine area to include all of suburban Cook County except a handful of suburbs that maintain their own health departments, and 17 states are on the list with new case rates exceeding 15 per 100,000 people per day. While it is nearly impossible to monitor all arrivals, the message is clear: We don’t want to re-create the problems we so recently overcame.

That is the context in which a large Recovery Task Force the city assembled released a recent report, Forward Together: Building a Stronger Chicago, which examines how Chicago could build a vibrant recovery from the coronavirus experience. Because such reports, especially those involving dozens of contributors and participants, are never crafted overnight, it is worth noting that the effort was launched on April 23, at a time when the outcome was far from clear. Neither the city nor the state could be certain then how long the problem would last or whether the stay-at-home orders and other measures would succeed at all in the near term. As of July 18, Illinois had dramatically increased its testing rate and brought its positivity rate for coronavirus tests down to 2.9 percent, well below most rates elsewhere, although it remains higher in Chicago at 5.4 percent.

So far, the strict measures announced in March have produced measured success, and the task force used that time to look farther down the road to the kind of city that might emerge from this ordeal. Forward Together is, to be clear, not a true recovery plan; it is billed as an “advisory report.” But it is the closest thing to a recovery plan that I have seen so far, and merits scrutiny and consideration for what it offers. (New York Mayor Bill de Blasio promised his own “road map to recovery” on April 26.)

The task force itself was broadly based. Lightfoot co-chaired it with Samuel Skinner, a businessman, lawyer, and political operative who served as both Secretary of Transportation and White House Chief of Staff under President George H.W. Bush. He has a long track record in public affairs. Committee chairs and members included elected officials, among them Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, who was Lightfoot’s run-off opponent in the 2019 mayor election, labor and community representatives, business leaders, academicians, and civic leaders, including some prominent activists. The task force was broadly inclusive, which bodes well for public buy-in on the resulting recommendations. Moreover, the report shows significant evidence of wide community outreach, including a youth forum that tapped the ideas of teens and young adults.

Like all big cities, Chicago has witnessed significant disparities in impacts of the pandemic on specific disadvantaged groups, including the elderly, but also Blacks and Latinx residents. While these two groups each comprise 28 percent of Chicago’s population, they respectively comprise 30 and 48 percent of the cases of coronavirus and 44 and 32 percent of the resulting deaths. This is an important backdrop to the discussion of goals in the report.

The report discusses four specific initiatives to move the city forward and address many of the inequities and vulnerabilities exposed by the coronavirus. Invest South/West aims to bring public and private investment to those neighborhoods in the city that have suffered historic disinvestment, and where COVID-19 rates have generally been highest. Racial and ethnic inequities in coronavirus impact have been notably more severe among both Blacks and Latinx residents, in large part because of lower levels of insurance coverage but also because of differences in job exposures, poverty levels, and living conditions. Solutions Toward Ending Poverty (STEP) is a new program, announced in February by Lightfoot, that is attempting to identify evidence-based metrics that can plot a road map toward reducing urban poverty in Chicago. We Will Chicago—Citywide Plan aims over three years to develop what amounts to a comprehensive plan, something lacking in Chicago until now. The report says We Will Chicago “will encompass all elements of citywide planning.” Finally, Chicago Connected will aim to shrink the digital gap between more affluent and poorer neighborhoods by making broadband more readily available, a need whose urgency has clearly been exposed by the closing of schools and the challenges of assisting children from poorer households with remote learning.

A significant part of the report focuses on the economic development opportunities that Chicago can pursue to restore prosperity as the pandemic recedes. It is clear that certain categories of jobs—food service, retail, administrative, and manufacturing, but also arts and entertainment and personal services—have suffered the brunt of economic displacement from the pandemic. The report notes the opportunity for Chicago, as a result of some economic changes wrought by the pandemic, including shifts to online retail, to focus on transportation, distribution, and logistics (TDL) segments of the economy. These would take advantage of a longstanding Chicago advantage as a transportation hub.

TDL, however, faces its own challenges of inequitable opportunity. Food insecurity represents a serious challenge in “food desert” neighborhoods. Resolving those inequities is the intended purpose of the four initiatives, but it is hardly a challenge that will be resolved overnight. It has taken years of unequal opportunity, to say nothing of deliberate discrimination, to create the current dilemma. Failure to address these problems will slow down or even stagnate Chicago’s recovery from the current crisis.

The report makes what strikes me as an honest effort to address social services gaps that, if anything, grew under the previous administration of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who closed some mental health centers in a bid to reduce budget deficits. The problem is that such reduced access to services only exacerbates problems among those needing such help and may increase other costs as a result. For example, a significant proportion of the inmates at the Cook County Jail (and many others around the nation) suffers from mental illness.

There is an urgent need to restore those services, but more importantly, the report shows that mental health services are far more prevalent on a per-person basis in more affluent, whiter neighborhoods than in poorer areas. For instance, 48 percent of whites with mental illness were receiving services in 2015, but just 31 percent of both Blacks and Latinx with mental illness were doing so. A map toward the end of the report shows differences shows a variation in presence of mental health providers ranging from zero or well below 0.25 per thousand residents in certain poorer areas of the city to well over 2 in predominantly white, middle-class areas and hundreds per thousand in downtown Chicago, a district well-nigh inaccessible to many South Side residents.

This may reflect, among other things, a disproportionate presence of white professionals in mental health and a need to bring more minority psychiatrists and psychologists to those neighborhoods. Reopening clinics in the neediest areas of the city would be a major step forward. As for the connection to coronavirus, the stress induced by greatly increased unemployment, to say nothing of job pressures within health care, can contribute to mental health challenges. Perhaps the most noteworthy proposal in this section of the plan is the recommendation to create a dedicated 211 line whereby residents can access a wide range of social services. It strikes me as essential, also, to reduce pressure on police to respond to personal mental health crises by instead responding to such incidents, to the extent possible, with mental health professionals and social workers.

As I noted, this is framed as an “advisory report.” I strongly suspect, however, given the tenor of the moment, that its recommendations will find widespread support among Chicagoans. What remains to be seen is how well voters and aldermen hold the administration’s feet to the fire to make it all happen. It is not enough to have confidence in a mayor who seems determined to make it happen. Implementation will require broad-based commitment to achieving the goals the report lays out. That includes embedding those goals in the comprehensive planning process that We Will Chicago envisions, and enacting measures to move them forward.

What is important about this effort for the rest of the country is the very idea of mounting such a broad-based effort to produce a forward-looking analysis of how our cities can recover from the coronavirus pandemic. Many may first have to learn how mayors and governors can exert the leadership, and evince the humility to consider the science, necessary to get the virus under control, as many other countries in Europe and Asia have done. These leaders must also be open to hearing from a widely representative cross-section of their citizens in preparing similar reports. Pandemic recovery planning is for all of us an experiment that can build on the foundations of other kinds of recovery plans while recognizing and thoroughly exploring the unique features of this monumental public health challenge. It is no small matter, and should not be treated as such, politics notwithstanding.

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

“We’re Yesterday’s News”

Posted on by
Reply

That headline is a quote from Mayor Tommy Muska of the town of West, Texas, in the Dallas Morning News of November 21, regarding the Trump administration’s rescission of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standards for disaster prevention in chemical facilities, issued that day.

Aerial photo of the west explosion site taken several days after blast (4/22/2013). By Shane.torgerson – Aerial photo taken from my plane Previously published: Facebook and Flickr, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25727808

So much news passes under the bridge in one month these days that readers can be forgiven if they do not immediately recall what happened in West on April 17, 2013, but my guess is that many do. Or they may if I nudge them by noting that the West Fertilizer Company suffered an explosion in a storage facility at the edge of this small city of 2,880. The explosion resulted from the combustion of ammonium nitrate, a common ingredient in fertilizer, which is notorious for its chemical instability. Still, the facility had been there since the 1960s, but West had over the years allowed a middle school, an apartment building (which was destroyed), a nursing home, and other structures to be built nearby. When the explosion occurred, 160 people were injured, 14 first responders (mostly firefighters) were killed, and one elderly man died of a heart attack as the nursing home was evacuated. All that triggered a bit of soul searching about loose regulations at all levels of government regarding the operation of such facilities, their disproportionate environmental impact on vulnerable populations, and how better to prevent future disasters.

One year later, in May 2014, I wrote in this blog about West following my own involvement on an expert panel for the federal Chemical Safety Board, which held a hearing in West on the anniversary of the disaster. I raised some pertinent questions about Texas chemical and fire safety regulation that were of interest to the board.

In the meantime, however, moves were afoot in the Obama administration to respond to the larger questions of chemical facility accidents. According to Earthjustice, an environmental advocacy group, in the decade up to the West accident the U.S. had experienced 2,200 chemical accidents at hazardous facilities, two-thirds of which caused reported harm, including 59 deaths and more than 17,000 people injured, hospitalized, or seeking medical care. As a result, President Obama signed on August 1, 2013, Executive Order 13650, “Improving Chemical Facility Safety and Security,” which set in motion a rule-making procedure at the U.S. EPA. By July 31, 2013, EPA issued a Risk Management Program request for information in the Federal Register, proposed new rules on March 14, 2016, and finalized the new rule, known for short as the Chemical Disaster Rule, on January 13, 2017, with one week remaining before President Trump took office.

The final rule is a bit complex, using 112 pages of the Federal Register, but among other items specifically required a “root cause analysis” as part of an incident investigation to determine what “could have reasonably resulted in a catastrophic release.” It would also require compliance audits after reported incidents and required all facilities with certain processes to conduct annual notification exercises to ensure that emergency contact information was complete. The overall idea was to improve effective coordination with local emergency responders. One problem that caused fatalities in West was a lack of firefighter awareness of the precise contents and dangers of the facility that exploded. Thus, the requirements in the rule for field and tabletop exercises. Finally, the rule aimed to enhance the availability of information about chemical hazards in these facilities including sharing such information with local emergency planning committees.

The rest is almost entirely predictable. With little grasp of public policy but considerable animus toward anything with Obama’s name on it, Trump put his appointees to work undoing his legacy. That included action by then EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt on March 16, 2017, in response to an industry-sponsored petition, to announce a 90-day stay of the Obama-era rules, followed by an extension to 20 months shortly thereafter. In the meantime, Louisiana and 10 other states, including Texas, petitioned for reconsideration of the Obama rules. The delay would last until February 19, 2019. However, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, responding to a petition from environmental groups, vacated the Trump rulemaking. But now we have a final rule from the Trump EPA officially rescinding the Chemical Disaster Rule.

The public information aspect of the rule became a target, with the Trump administration claiming it was responding to homeland security and emergency management experts who feared that such information would become a target for terrorists. However, it would seem to me that far more people have been affected by routine chemical accidents than by any terrorist incidents at such facilities. The U.S. EPA also noted that the rules would not have prevented the accident at West because it was ultimately determined to have been caused by arson. It is worth noting, however, that most of the first responder fatalities in that incident were more credibly the result of a lack of training and information on the potential explosiveness of the materials involved, which might have prompted greater caution and different tactics by firefighters. And none of this answers the questions I raised in my 2014 blog post about land-use practices and limitations on fire safety codes in Texas.

So, back to Mayor Muska, who is reportedly disappointed with the outcome, and for good reason. His town has to live with the results of the 2013 explosion, which decimated the volunteer firefighter staff and obliterated a local business (and employer). Muska was mayor when the disaster happened and is now serving his fifth term. I think it is worth sharing the comments he made in the final two paragraphs of the Dallas Morning News story:

“The American people and American politicians, they have a short memory,” Muska said. “They’re going to say everything is fine, and every few years something like this is going to happen again, and ‘Oh, yeah, we need to look at this again.’

“We’re yesterday’s news. It’s not on anybody’s minds as it was in ’13 and ’14.”

Jim Schwab

Gratitude on Parade #9

Posted on by
Reply

GRATITUDE ON PARADE
#gratitudeonparade

Kristin Hoskin had been on my list for these tributes, but I thought it wise to let the dust settle after the Christchurch terrorist attack before saluting her in Gratitude on Parade. Most certainly, however, her gracious reaction to my blog post about the incident two weeks ago confirmed the very reason for including her here. She reaffirmed the New Zealand commitment to human decency.

I met Kristin in late 2007 after speaking on a panel in Reno, Nevada, at a conference of the International Association of Emergency Managers. Her question was whether I might entertain an invitation to New Zealand as a Visiting Fellow of the Centre for Advanced Engineering in New Zealand (CAENZ) at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch. Over subsequent months, arrangements were worked out between CAENZ and the American Planning Association, and my three-week absence in July and August 2008 was approved by Paul Farmer, APA’s CEO at the time. The reason for choosing me for this annual honor was my expertise in land use related to natural hazards. CAENZ wanted to inject that element into the national debate in New Zealand on natural hazards policy making.

Kristin was assigned to escort me around the country as I conducted seven workshops and seminars in both North and South Island cities, ending with a few days in Christchurch crafting a white paper before I returned home. She was a gracious host, and from her I learned a great deal about her country even as I shared detailed knowledge with New Zealand planners, emergency managers, and others about how we address those issues in the considerably more complex U.S.

For me, it was a wonderfully educational exchange of insights and information that I will never forget. It was what mutual learning should be. I would happily return to New Zealand, but life has included more than a few other adventures in the meantime. And I was at least able to include what I learned–and more–in the long article I published in January in the hOxford Research Encyclopedia of Natural Hazard Science, on “Planning Systems for Natural Hazard Risk Reduction.”

Kristin Hoskin, this tribute is for you. Bask and enjoy.


Photo taken during our fun visit to the Stansborough wool factory north of Wellington, which manufactured costumes for the Lord of the Rings movies.

Posted to Facebook 3/29/2019

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

Gratitude on Parade #2

Posted on by
Reply

GRATITUDE ON PARADE

#gratitudeonparade

Today’s late-night entry has no photo because I have none from so long ago, certainly not digitized, anyway–or easily found. That makes Lynn Saunders’s contribution to my career no less seminal or memorable. An English teacher at Brecksville High School, she was the willing and required faculty member who became the adviser to our budding Writers Club, a new entity in 1967 that was the brainchild of a handful of aspiring student writers, including me as I entered my senior year. With her encouragement, we produced our own literary journal, “The Tenth Muse Recently Discovered in Brecksville.” We young literati were probably not the most popular types in our Ohio school, but we may have been among the most visionary. I have spent the last half-century refining those writing skills, and for this foundation I express today’s moment of gratitude.

Posted on Facebook 1/6/2019

GRATITUDE ON PARADE

#gratitudeonparade

Shhh. I’m waiting until she goes upstairs so she doesn’t see this now and can be surprised in the morning.

It is hard to find a more devoted mother and grandmother than my wife, so here’s to Jean Schwab. Whatever parenting mistakes we made, individually or combination, like every human being out there, Jean nonetheless remains committed wholeheartedly to the welfare of her family. Over time, she has learned how to make the tough decisions and say the tough things to say when we needed to, all while making clear she is doing it out of love.

Most people who know us know that we adopted children out of foster care. This was mostly because Jean expressed early in our marriage the feeling that we had too much to share not to reach out to children who needed a home. I am not sure either of us envisioned that future when we married, but it became a big part of what we will leave behind. And we have learned so much along the way. We have embraced the challenge. Here’s to the future, and a salute to my life partner.

Jean with grandson Emanuel James, aka EJ Schwab

Posted on Facebook 1/7/2019

GRATITUDE ON PARADE

#gratitudeonparade

Tonight I was in downtown Chicago at the Harold Washington Public Library for a Society of Midland Authors presentation of women authors writing about the Vietnam war. Their interesting perspectives caused me to think about my own experiences during that time. I attended Cleveland State University from 1968-1973, the heart of one of the most tumultuous periods in U.S. history.

I started college with a student deferment just before President Richard Nixon introduced the draft lottery. My number was 135, but the year I gave up my student deferment they went to 125, and so I was out of the draft forever. Fighting a war I did not respect was not part of my future. But it does not mean the events did not affect me.

Tonight’s tribute is to someone I have not seen in 45 years. I have no idea if he is alive or dead, or where he is living, but I would not mind hearing from Peter Damok. By 1970, I think, I had founded the first student environmental group at CSU, right after the first Earth Day. Peter, a Vietnam veteran attending college on the GI Bill, joined us at some later point. This was during a time when Vietnam veterans often returned to an uncertain welcome. Peter, I think, was drawn in part to my lack of judgment, open mind, and willingness to listen and learn. He had much to share.

One thing I distinctly remember made a permanent impression on me. There were often anti-war marches down Euclid Avenue, past the CSU campus, in downtown Cleveland. I joined more than a few (though I seldom shared that information with my more conservative parents). Peter, who hoped to become a journalist, had some friends in the news media and joined some in watching one of the demonstrations from the upper stories of one of the buildings along the march route. Later he told me that one of his reporter friends scoffed at the protesters and asked, “How many of them have ever been to Vietnam?”

Peter stopped him cold in his tracks. “How many more do you want to send over there before you listen to them?” he asked.

I learned to separate service in the military from the automatic assumption that a veteran supported the war. Many came home embittered by what they saw and determined to end the madness. And I learned it straight from the mouth of one veteran–Pete Damok.

Posted on Facebook 1/8/19

GRATITUDE ON PARADE
#gratitudeonparade
There are those who quietly do the less glamorous tasks that make things run. Being the secretary/treasurer of a member division of the American Planning Association is among those tasks. As the chair-elect of the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division, thrust into an acting chair position because of Chair Allison Hardin’s unfortunate accident, I have come to appreciate the value of Jennifer Ellison, a Polk County, Iowa, planner who is also our secretary/treasurer. We have responsibilities to hundreds of members who work at making our communities safer and helping them recover from disasters, but Jennie makes sure the bills are paid, the dollars add up, and the proper reports are filed, all without asking for any special attention or credit. But I couldn’t do it without her, and so she is tonight’s focus of gratitude.

Jennifer Ellison

Posted on Facebook 1/9/2019

GRATITUDE ON PARADE
#gratitudeonparade

When I first met Richard Roths, he was a planner working for FEMA. As I recall, he was detailed to southern Ohio for flood recovery sometime in the late 1990s, and I was completing work with my team on Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery and Reconstruction, a path-breaking FEMA-supported guide published by the American Planning Association in 1998 as a PAS Report. I learned that Rich was among dozens of FEMA personnel asked to review it, many of whom were similarly on duty away from home and living out of a suitcase in a hotel room. Rich was doing his reviews, he told me, while washing his clothes in the laundromat each week. Other people might have idled the time with a good book, watching television, but not Rich.

It did not take long with further encounters back in Chicago for us to team up teaching a graduate course on hazard mitigation and disaster recovery in the spring semesters of 1997 and 1999 at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s urban planning program, part of the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs. Over subsequent years, Rich attended a number of my infamous backyard barbecue parties, usually bringing some beer to help out. It is amazing to think we have known each other now for well over 20 years. During that time, Rich moved on to URS Corp. as a consultant and then retired. He is now active as a volunteer with the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division, of which I am Chair-Elect. In that role, I recruited and organized the division’s Professional Development Committee.

Sure enough, Rich has become a leading player in the committee’s endeavors. When Kehla West was unable to take on the role of interviewer for a series of podcasts on recovery in major recent disasters, Rich stepped up and did a fabulous job. He has completed three since last fall and is not done yet. These are all now on the APA website as part of APA’s Resilience Roundtable series. Rich is also heading up an effort to develop a program of outreach from the division to university planning schools. In his semi-retirement, he has carved out a meaningful role that has made the rest of us proud. He is a model of productive volunteerism in retirement.

Richard Roths in the APA broadcast booth recording his first podcast.

Posted on Facebook 1/11/2019

GRATITUDE ON PARADE
#gratitudeonparade
I have lost the name of my sixth-grade teacher in the mists of time and do not wish to ask anyone to search the archives of the elementary school to find it. Her name is beside the point. What matters is what I and others learned.

The school year was 1961-1962. Unlike other teachers at that level at that time, she believed that young people our age could understand and digest more than her contemporaries thought. During reading time each day, she introduced us to the works of Dr. Tom Dooley about Vietnam and Indochina. I am well aware of the mixed and ambiguous history of Dooley before his untimely death of cancer. He may well have exaggerated descriptions of Viet Minh atrocities and fed intelligence to the CIA. But when one student questioned whether some of Dooley’s stories were propaganda, our teacher concede the possibility.

Still, we gained a vivid mental image of a part of the world that soon would dominate the news of the 1960s, yet of which most Americans had only minimal awareness. The moral ambiguity of the mess that became the Vietnam War was illuminated in my teenage and then college-age mind by the memory of what she had read to us. It took some courage and imagination to think we could digest all this and that somehow, within a few years, it might deepen our perspectives on the world. Her own views may have been equally ambiguous, for all I know, and I will probably never know. But I can be grateful that her audacity at the time left an indelible impression of the importance of learning about faraway places and the moral and developmental challenges they face–and which we face along with them.

Posted on Facebook 1/12/2019

Building Codes Matter

Posted on by
Reply

Ask Anchorage after last Friday’s 7.0 earthquake. Admittedly, this is not the biggest earthquake the area could have suffered. The famous 1964 earthquake registered at 9.2, triggered a tsunami, and killed an estimated 130 people. Still, by and large, things seemed to work as planned.

Ask the mayor. And the governor. Mayor Ethan Berkowitz says building codes and good preparation minimized structural damages. No one died. Berkowitz even stated to PBS that other cities would want to emulate Anchorage “because Anchorage did this right.” Alaska Governor Bill Walker admitted to sometimes grousing about strict building codes but conceded, “Building codes mean something,” stating that his own home suffered only minor water damage.

What worked? According to the same PBS report, “Sterling Strait, a member of the Alaska Seismic Hazards Safety Commission, said the states [Alaska and California] use the International Building Code,” which he deemed the “best available standard for seismic safety.”

This good news comes while some states and jurisdictions, in some parts of the country, still resist more stringent building codes, and when some voters still resent what they view as an imposition, sometimes even after the damage from a hurricane, flood, wildfire, or earthquake. But the higher standards matter in saving lives and preventing building collapse, which also prevents injuries. Tellingly, Anchorage hospitals reported a normal day, with no dramatic upsurge in injuries from the earthquake.

Collapse of Fourth Avenue near C Street in 1964 earthquake in Anchorage. USGS photo.

One factor working in Anchorage’s favor is its relative newness as a big city, now about 300,000 population. A city of only 3,000 as late as 1940, Anchorage grew rapidly during and after World War II, still claiming only about 100,000 at the time of the 1964 earthquake. The salient result is that, between its late start as an urban center and the destruction of many older buildings in 1964, Anchorage has far fewer legacy buildings predating modern seismic construction standards than some other cities in states like California. Many California cities, including Los Angeles and Berkeley, have spent considerable sums to subsidize seismic retrofits for older structures including highly vulnerable unreinforced masonry buildings.

As an urban planner, my own expertise lies with land use and not structural engineering, so I will not elaborate on the details of building codes as if I were an expert, but the evidence is compelling. I will note one handout I found on the Anchorage city website, however, on geotechnical investigations. It concerns a requirement for a report from a geotechnical expert and inspection requirements for structures in what are known as Hazard Zones 4 and 5, which define high levels of geological susceptibility to ground failure as result of seismic shaking. The applicable handout dates to 2006, and references a June 1989 report by Shannon & Wilson, a Seattle-based engineering firm. Those dates indicate that Anchorage has been steadily at work on this problem ever since the 1964 earthquake, not wishing to repeat or continue the vulnerabilities exposed by that event.

Without delving into technical details, the bottom line is that, in the designated areas, a civil engineer with experience in geotechnical engineering must perform an investigation of the potential extent of ground movements and soil loadings on the structure proposed, and must prepare and sign a written report showing calculations, conclusions, and recommendations for how the building will be able to withstand seismic displacements without collapsing. The work must then be performed in accordance with those recommendations, and the engineer must ensure compliance through special inspections and a signed statement that his design was followed.

This approach is hardly new but is also far from universal. I learned a good deal about it in the context of municipal requirements in Utah cities around 2005 in the process of completing production of a Planning Advisory Service Report, Landslide Hazards and Planning, by the American Planning Association, with support from the U.S. Geological Survey. Such surveys cost money, but so does wanton damage from a failure to comply.

Alaska did experience problems, but not primarily with buildings. It is still far too early for a complete survey of the damage suffered by the transportation system, and the city and state need to assess the losses due to highway collapses, structural stresses on bridges, and the like. Currently, a railroad between Anchorage and Fairbanks is not functioning. There are always challenges, and every disaster is an opportunity for reassessments and lessons learned. But one clear lesson has already emerged: Building codes matter.

Jim Schwab