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.”
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.
Hillsborough
County is a dense metropolitan area, anchored by the city of Tampa. Tampa and nearby
St. Petersburg, in
Pinellas County, sit on opposite
shores of Tampa Bay, a 400-square-mile
expanse of water connected to the Gulf of Mexico. Across
that gap sits the Sunshine
Skyway Bridge, a magnificent and scenic section of I-275. On a sunny day,
it displays coastal Florida in all its glory.
Eugene
Henry, like anyone else, enjoys those sunny days, but he also worries about
what may happen when the region suffers inclement weather. As Hillsborough
County’s Hazard Mitigation Program Manager, it is his job to think about how
well the area will fare under the impact of natural and other disasters, which
can include hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, sinkholes, and wildfires. At least
the first two are complicated by sea level rise, and one can easily argue that
climate change in a broader sense may well influence the damage from wildfires.
For those uninitiated in the particulars of Florida’s natural environment,
wildfires are a recurring feature. In what is ordinarily such a lush
environment fostered by rain and abundant sunshine, it takes only one drought
year amid high heat to turn dense vegetation into a tinderbox. It has happened
before, repeatedly.
But the biggest concern, by far, is the arrival of the Big
One, the high-intensity hurricane that the county readily admits it has escaped
in recent decades. In its Post-Disaster
Redevelopment Plan (PDRP), the county states forthrightly that this is
merely a matter of good fortune and that planners fully understand that the day
will surely come—and that they had best be ready for it. Disaster resilience in
the face of hurricanes is not a matter to be taken lightly with 158 miles of
shoreline along Tampa Bay, numerous rivers and streams, and numerous
vulnerable, low-lying areas. Absent serious attention to mitigation, damages
from a Category 4 or 5 hurricane, or one like Harvey that stalls and dumps
voluminous rain on an urban area, could become catastrophic.
But Tampa and Hillsborough County have been very fortunate.
The last Category 3 hurricane struck the area in 1921. What may have been a Category
4 struck in 1848, though wind speed measurements were primitive at the time,
and the U.S. had no official records yet. According to the county’s Local
Mitigation Strategy, that storm “reshaped parts of the coast and destroyed
much of what few human works and habitation were then in the Tampa Bay area.”
Tides rose 14 feet. Tampa was still a small city then, and Gene Henry wonders
about the staggering losses that might occur with a comparable event today.
I had long wanted to visit the area to see in person how
these issues are being addressed. I have known Gene for a long time, and I have
read the county’s PDRP, an extensive document laying out the county’s
preparations for recovery from disasters. But I had never been to Tampa. As the
result, however, of a personal invitation from a high school classmate, David Taylor, who now
lives in Sarasota,
my wife and I flew to Tampa February 20 and stayed with Dave and his wife,
Linda, for five days. Sarasota is about one hour’s drive south of Tampa. As
part of the trip, I arranged to meet with Gene the day after we arrived and
tour the county to see the hazard mitigation projects underway there. I also
delivered a one-hour lecture the following afternoon in West Palm Beach,
on behalf of Florida Atlantic University, as part
of a two-hour program that included a panel discussion following my talk on
“Recovery and Resilience: Facing the Disasters of the Future.” Not one to skip
a learning opportunity, Gene drove four hours from Tampa to attend the program.
But back to Hillsborough. My wife and I met Gene at the
county’s Emergency
Operations Center (EOC) around mid-morning, hopped in his county truck, and
took off. Our first stop was the Florida Center
for Design + Research, housed in the School of Architecture + Design at the
University of South Florida (USF),
Gene’s graduate alma mater. The school features an urban planning program where
he wanted us to meet Professor
Brian Cook. Planning students often take studio classes, which involve
design or research work on real-life community problems. Students learn to
define a community design or policy issue, work with clients, and try to
produce solutions that will be of some practical value to the community they
are serving. They typically work in teams. In this case, students were applying
geographic information system (GIS), or mapping, skills to determine areas of
high vulnerability to flooding and sea level rise in less affluent
neighborhoods. Gene’s county office collaborates with USF instructors to
identify areas of practical concern for the students’ work. The photos show
some of the design work the students have done, the best of which is often
displayed in poster sessions at state and national professional planning conferences.
Posters (above and below) from the USF design studio
The most encouraging aspect of that visit was, for me, the mere fact that the students are engaging with such a pressing problem. I have researched the issue of hazards and climate change in the planning curriculum for both undergraduate and graduate degree programs in urban planning, and most such programs are lacking in this respect, a situation that is disserving the planners of tomorrow who must be well trained to come to grips with these challenges in whatever communities they end up serving. But a growing number of students are getting such training—I have myself been teaching such a course at the University of Iowa since 2008—and southern Florida is as good a laboratory as they could wish for. To see collaboration between a county agency and USF graduate students and faculty is a most welcome note.
But Gene had other places to take us in the afternoon,
besides, that is, the Cuban-themed La Teresita restaurant
where we ate lunch—a place I am willing to recommend if you ever visit Tampa.
First up in the afternoon was the University
Mall area north of downtown Tampa and just east of I-275. This involves a
stormwater management and flood-mitigation project in an area subject to a
certain amount of repetitive loss, meaning that the same properties continue to
suffer periodic flood losses. The project removed structures while creating
additional areas for stormwater storage and reshaping a natural area known as
Duck Pond, thus creating a system for stormwater conveyance. This includes a
large stormwater pump that transfers slow-moving stormwater to areas further
downstream and, in due course, to a reservoir owned by the City of Tampa.
Before this project was initiated, storms used to inundate multifamily
apartment buildings, Gene says, as well as a nearby assisted living facility.
How does the county pay for all this? He credits a combination of local funds,
which is certainly not unusual, and federal money in the form of Hazard Mitigation
Grant Program (HMGP) funds. The latter are available as part of an overall
recovery package after a Presidential Disaster
Declaration, but require that purchased properties, once cleared, remain in
perpetual open space. The point is to ensure that a vulnerable area is not
redeveloped, thus perpetuating the problem.
At 132nd Street, also in Tampa, another flood-mitigation
and stormwater management project presents a very different appearance. This
too was subject to repetitive loss and required protection from urban flooding,
which is typically the result of poor stormwater drainage in developed areas. The
problems can include poor water conveyance from one area to the next—the nearby
highway provided an impediment to drainage—and high levels of impervious
surface, meaning coverage with concrete and structures that limit percolation
of water into the soil. In this case, a small subdivision suffered repetitive
flooding even with small storms. Here also, the county acquired homes with HMGP
funds, which are dispensed by the Federal
Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The streets were removed, and
stormwater ponds were added.
This was a location where the county’s partnership with USF
paid dividends. Researchers analyzed which plants were best at removing
nitrogen and other chemicals common in stormwater runoff in order to clean up
the water before it reaches Tampa Bay. Henry says this project was made
possible through a combination of local and HMGP funds in combination with
federal Community
Development Block Grant entitlement money.
I included the chain link in my photo to show that the solution may not be complete. After all, chain link fences are intended to limit access. What consideration, I asked, had been given to eventually converting this cleared area to some sort of public park and thus facilitating a public benefit? There can be challenges in part because of pollution cleanup and other public safety factors. Gene readily admitted he would love that solution, but it may take time. The adjoining neighborhood must be comfortable with that use, which can involve solving various site-related problems. A nearby church might be a potential ally, serving as a patron and watchdog, but reaching agreement about solutions and responsibilities, including ongoing maintenance and supervision, takes time. And only time will tell whether such a solution materializes with the support of local public officials.
Some projects assist a single homeowner with a stubborn
problem. This is often the case with homes that are elevated, a common site in
parts of the Southeast, where coastal and riverine flooding can wreak havoc
with homes in vulnerable locations that do not necessarily require buyouts and
relocation. That was the case near Rocky Creek,
where a homeowner rebuilt a structure elevated three feet above base flood
elevation (BFE) using a combination of private funds and a Flood
Mitigation Assistance (FMA) grant from FEMA. The result is living space
that is better protected when flood waters surround the lower level.
The same story occurred at a home near the Alafia River, where
another homeowner was elevated three feet above BFE, using the same combination
of funds.
Gene also shared with us an interesting strategy at a
frequently flooded and highly vulnerable modular home park, where an area had
been cleared of its former homes to allow repopulation with recreational
vehicles (RVs). The logic is that, when flood warnings arrive, RV owners will
be able, unlike those with more stationary modular homes, to simply drive off
the site to safer areas until the emergency subsides. The initiative, Gene
says, was taken by the park’s new owner (which owns other parks nationwide), which
identified no more permanent structures in the floodway as part of its
compliance strategy after the most recent flooding event in the area.
This area is slated for RV occupancy only.
Finally, we returned to learn a little about the EOC. We
visited what is often known in such centers as the “war room,” where designated
officials meet to discuss and establish strategies for dealing with an
emergency of any sort that activates the emergency operations plan. In the
photo, each chair is designated for a specific official, with groups of people
with related tasks seated in color-coded sections of the room. Many such EOCs
are much smaller, but Hillsborough County is very urban and populated, and the
needs are complex and interrelated. It is expected that those involved will
arrive with authority to respond to the disaster, to indicate what they are and
are not capable of doing as part of the overall response to disaster. It is not
a place where one expresses a need to go back to another office and “find out.”
Hillsborough County Emergency Operations Center “war room”
Ready to relax and enjoy a drink and a snack, we followed
Gene down the highway to the Sunset
Grill at Little Harbor, which has a beautiful view of the bay. At dusk,
numerous people followed a daily ritual of photographing the sunset over the
water. Tourist attraction it may be, as well as a local watering hole, but the
surrounding area has a significant mangrove forest and salt-bed areas that were
preserved as open space using Environmental Land Acquisition Funds from what
Gene describes as a “locally instigated preservation program.”
Hillsborough County’s Hazard Mitigation Program Manager, Eugene Henry, at rest at Sunset Grill at the end of our day-long tour.
And so, with the sun declining in the west, we sat at an
outdoor table and hashed over the world’s problems, and sometimes our own. One
point that seems clear to me is that Hillsborough County has a great deal to
offer to other jurisdictions, just as it has undoubtedly learned a great deal
as well—one reason both he and a resident scholar and Japanese graduate student
from the University of Illinois, Kensuke Otsuyama,
planned to drive to West Palm Beach the next day to hear my presentation. Although
there is sometimes a tendency for local governments to become more insular, to
allow fewer opportunities for employees like Gene to share and exchange
information in professional forums and conferences, this, I think, is always a
mistake. The growth in the value of what someone like Gene does lies in this
fruitful sharing of experience and perspectives that such opportunities allow,
and I hope that will continue, for certainly Gene made my day by sharing his
time to allow me to learn and to share with the growing readership that follows
this blog.
Supplemental Comment:
Although the hearing was held today, making live streaming a
moot point, significant written and recorded testimony on hazard mitigation and
climate resilience issues occurred before the U.S. House Appropriations
Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing, and Urban Development. Yesterday, the
following link was made available from several sources including the American Planning
Association (APA) to provide access to this testimony and information:
Representatives from APA, PEW, Houston Public Works,
Rutgers University, and the Town of Arlington, MA are delivering testimony to
the Transportation and Housing and Urban Development (THUD) congressional
subcommittee tomorrow, March 13th at 10:00 a.m. EST. THUD, a part of
the House Committee on Appropriations, writes laws that fund the federal
government’s important responsibilities. The testimony is available for
streaming here:
The size of the American Planning Association‘s loss when Stuart Meck departed can be measured easily by the size of Rutgers University‘s gain when he joined their staff, a fact immortalized by the Rutgers decision to name a lecture series after him. Marya Morris, who probably worked most closely with him at APA, got the opportunity recently to present the eulogy at the opening of that series. She shared some memorable stories, including his near death in the early 2000s when he was struck with an intestinal infection while they both were in Prague. It seems the Czech government felt it could learn a great deal about planning law reform by having Stuart Meck lead a 12-session workshop on the subject for high government officials. Pretty heady stuff.
I also worked with Stuart, though not as much as Marya. But we teamed up on hazard mitigation content for his pet project, funded by seven federal agencies and a few foundations, on statutory reform of state planning laws, known as Growing Smart. We also teamed up on a PAS Report, Planning for Wildfires. That may have been more in my wheelhouse, but trust me, Stuart was no slouch in mastering new topics and contributed very substantially to the final product.
Between all these major efforts, he found time incessantly to mentor the younger research staff at APA and was an indefatigable cheerleader for his profession. Did I mention he also co-authored a tome on Ohio Planning and Zoning Law? His productivity was a miracle to behold, as was his willingness to defend what he believed in. He died sooner than most of us who knew him would have liked, but he still deserves his day in the sun. The photos below, of various phases of his life, were provided by his daughter, Lindsay Meck. Thanks, Lindsay, for your help in this regard.
Stuart was also a jazz fan.
Posted to Facebook 2/10/2019
GRATITUDE ON PARADE #gratitudeonparade It’s been a couple of weeks, and I’ve been busy, but I have a great one today. I visited with Eugene Henry last Thursday and Friday while in Florida. On Friday, February 22, Gene’s dedication drove him across the state to West Palm Beach to hear my lecture for Florida Atlantic University on “Recovery and Resilience,” followed by a panel discussion and reception. Mind you, it’s a four-hour drive from Tampa.
But the day before, he hosted my wife and me on a personal day-long tour of Hillsborough County to show me the work they have done on hazard mitigation to reduce risks from hurricanes and floods. In a day or two, I plan to post a blog article on this subject, but Gene for some time has been the hazard mitigation program manager for Hillsborough County, a large urban area that includes Tampa. Gene is, as my friend Lincoln Walther, one of the panelists in West Palm Beach, said, “one of the best.” He has pushed the program forward, and he was a force behind the development of a very progressive Post-Disaster Redevelopment Plan that Hillsborough County pioneered several years ago. Gene is looking forward to retirement in a few years, but his contributions have been outstanding and deserve serious recognition. He is a true leader in the mitigation field. Let this tribute be a beginning, followed by the upcoming blog post.
Posted to Facebook 2/26/2019
GRATITUDE ON PARADE #gratitudeonparade Today, I’d like to thank my long-time friend and high school classmate, David Taylor, and his wife, Linda, for their hospitality in sharing their home and time with us during our recent visit to Florida. David is the person who spurred me to come to Sarasota in the first place. He is also a photographer who used his resources, time, and energy, to film the entire two-hour program that I keynoted in West Palm Beach for Florida Atlantic University on February 22.
A Purple Heart Vietnam veteran, Dave is passionate about some subjects, including respect for veterans, and shared his stories with me and others about fighting his way back from serious injuries. He’s generous to the core but wise in his years. He was the emcee for our 50-year reunion last June in Brecksville, Ohio, for the Class of 1968. There is a lot I can say. He is currently taking film and history classes at State College of Florida with both students and professors younger than us, and enjoying it thoroughly because he has so much to share.
Most importantly, perhaps, he has gotten so
excited about what he heard from listening to me that he wants to take all that
talent and use it to help document disasters photographically, even as he
gorges his brain on all that I have produced. Here’s to a good friend still
finding his energy and a new mission in life as he nears 70.
The photo below? I cropped it to show him and Linda more closely, but the larger version, well, they’re standing under the Kissing Sailor statue in downtown Sarasota, which replicates that iconic photo from the end of WWII.
Posted to Facebook 2/27/2019
GRATITUDE ON PARADE #gratitudeonparade In the year after Hurricane Katrina, I met a young professor at University of New Orleans who was teaching transportation planning–John Renne. Soon, he had invited me to provide a closing keynote at a conference with a distinct theme: Carless Evacuation. Using a federal DOT grant, John was focusing attention on the central question of emergency management in the Big Easy: How do we move those people to safety who are the most vulnerable and lack independent transportation to just get out of town?
John has continued to raise vital questions like that ever since, even after moving in recent years to Florida Atlantic University. Florida faces plenty of its own questions concerning hurricane safety, and at 44, it would seem we can expect his contributions to keep coming. Recently, he and FAU hosted me to keynote a program on “Resilience and Recovery: Facing Disasters of the Future,” and I appreciated the chance to interact with planning professionals on what is known in Florida as the Treasure Coast. Bringing a hazards focus to transportation planning has been John’s unique and valuable asset not only regionally but nationally. FAU should be, and probably is, glad to have him.
In the photo below: Hank Savitch, Alka Sapat, myself, Lincoln Walther, John Renne. Hank, Alka, and Link joined me on the discussion panel that followed my talk in West Palm Beach a week ago. John was the moderator.
Summarizing the major points from a densely factual book like Firestorm: How Wildfire Will Shape Our Future, by Edward Struzik (Island Press, 2018), is about as challenging as understanding precisely what is happening in the midst of a rapidly moving massive wildfire. While California is not the focus of Struzik’s book, I might note that confronting such fires in November, such as we have seen on the news in recent weeks, ought to prod more interest in the recent National Climate Assessment and similar climate change science. The wildfire season most decidedly used to be shorter in California, a point Gov. Jerry Brown has made repeatedly. Put more bluntly, it is time to drop the political knee-jerk reactions and study the findings.
Horse Fire at Fort McMurray, Alberta, 2016. Photo from Wikipedia
In Firestorm, Struzik takes us north, much farther north. He starts his story by focusing on the utterly hellish nightmare of the May 2016 scene surrounding Fort McMurray, Alberta, during what became known as the Horse Fire, or among firefighters simply as “The Beast.” People with moderately long news memories may recall following this fire for several days and nights on television, as the fire swept through an area dominated by oil sands development, the heart of Canada’s energy sector. As Struzik notes, megafires (defined as exceeding 100,000 acres in size) are nothing new or unusual in the boreal forests of Canada and Alaska. Three fires bigger than The Beast had occurred in Canada since 1950.
Not so long ago in human history, however, the consequences would have seemed less catastrophic because of the lack of large human settlements in the area, which is not to say that such fires would not have affected native villages and smaller towns. But energy development has brought urban development, and Fort McMurray in 2016 was a city of 88,000 people. As the wildfire attacked and surged through the area, generating massive confusion, it destroyed an estimated 2,800 homes and buildings, burned nearly 1.5 million acres, and produced nearly $9 billion in total losses, including predicted insurance losses of $3.77 billion. The book does not state whether these are U.S. or Canadian dollars (worth about 10 percent less), but I am assuming U.S. given its publication in the states. Either way, it is a massive impact. It is certainly a staggering economic impact on a province like Alberta, home to such facilities as the Imperial Oil plant, which according to Struzik produces 220,000 barrels per day of the bitumen that helps fuel Canadian energy exports.
Much of Struzik’s book, which often starts chapters with quotes from Dante’s Inferno, tours us through the ground-level experience of the fire in and around Fort McMurray in early May 2016. We follow police who worry about family members evacuating, police who work door to door warning people to evacuate, hospital workers preparing for incoming casualties, and highways filled with bumper-to-bumper traffic including people in SUVs abandoning their vehicles in ditches after running out of gas, with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) ensuring that such people found alternative rides to safe destinations. Air tankers fly low over the fire to drop their loads of retardant, and helicopters scoop water from nearby lakes in 180-gallon buckets to disperse as strategically as possible. Wildfire response is no less sophisticated or expensive than in the U.S., although Struzik notes some Canadian pride in protecting firefighter safety and eschewing the “hotshot” approach that can lead to heroic but tragic deaths. He paints a realistic but deeply troubling portrait of the human elements of confronting a massive wildfire.
RCMP responding to wildfire in northern British Columbia. Photo from RCMP website
If such fires in the far north are not new, then what, if anything, is the impact of climate change? As has been pointed out many times, it is folly to link any one event directly to climate change, tempting though it may be for many people. The reality is more profound and concerning. Since the 1970s, in Canada, the area burned has doubled, with the prediction that it may double again by mid-century and possibly triple by 2100. In short, the connection to climate change is not any one fire, a natural phenomenon in a fire-adapted environment, but in increased frequency.
Ashes and devastation after the fire at Fort McMurray. From RCMP website
As California has learned, that frequency can also be abetted by a longer fire season, itself a product of climate change. Struzik explains the fire triangle, a combination of heat, dryness or low humidity, and oxygen. On May 3, 2016, the temperature around Fort McMurray was 91°F. The humidity was only 13 percent. For those unfamiliar with the boreal forest, it may be surprising to learn that such temperatures are not entirely unusual in the summer, even in Alaska, with much longer days than in southern latitudes, just as winter brings deeper freezes and very short days. It is a climate of extremes. But climate change is warming the far north faster than almost anywhere else, producing the loss of polar ice caps and the melting of glaciers. Montana, Struzik says, may see average temperatures rise by 5° F., and Montana has major wildfire issues already. Melting ice caps and glaciers are factors in sea level rise, which in turn affects major cities like New York and Miami much farther south, but Struzik notes that we are all connected in other ways to the fate of the northern forest. In a major wildfire like that in Alberta, air quality has been shown to suffer in places like Chicago because of the upper atmospheric drift of ashes and pollution. Northern Alberta may seem a world away, but it will never be distant enough to have no impact below the border.
Personally, I find the science behind all this intriguing, at all levels. Most people, for instance, may not know the origin of the term “firestorm,” which grew out of the cataclysmic 1871 wildfire in Peshtigo, Wisconsin, which took more than 1,500 lives, the deadliest in American history. The term refers to the behavior of lightning storms in pyrocumulonimbus clouds (aka pyroCBs), which involve an updraft “that sucks smoke, ash, burning materials, and water vapor” high into the sky. As these cool, they perform like classic thunder clouds. But a chemical reaction forestalls any rainfall, allowing the lightning strikes to stoke and expand the fire. The phenomenon remains a mystery and subject of intense study for meteorologists. It is also obviously terrifying and deadly for those beneath it.
Ultimately, in such a book, the question is what we are going to do about the problem. Both the U.S. and Canada have struggled to find appropriate ways to fund wildfire response and suppression, although it is clear also that more money needs to be directed to mitigation and preparation. Firefighting by itself is a completely futile approach. Struzik emphasizes a need in both nations to invest more in scientific research and in developing a “holistic plan” to deal with wildfires when they occur. The price of not developing a better approach, he says, includes the loss of clean water, of birds and animals who will lose their habitat as the problem intensifies, and the loss of jobs afforded by the forest environment. That research must inevitably account for the impacts of humanly generated climate change in coming decades, a task that should never be underestimated because, as one scientist notes in Struzik’s last chapter, keeping up with climate literature is like “drinking from a fire hose,” a curious metaphor in light of the problem. We must also be realistic. Nature has always provided for natural recovery because fire is a natural phenomenon, but it is the pattern of recovery that may change significantly in a changing natural environment.
Just nine days ago, on November 15, I stood in front of two successive audiences of long-term health care practitioners to present workshops at a conference in Wisconsin Dells discussing, of all things, “Fundamentals of Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery.” Where, some might ask, is the nexus between these two subjects?
Patients who survived evacuations from New York City area hospitals, six in the city itself and one just outside, during Hurricane Sandy would know. People with disabilities, the elderly, the ill are especially vulnerable during disasters, and moving them out of harm’s way is no picnic. They cannot just grab the keys to their cars and drive out of town ahead of the storm. Evacuating them is a major undertaking that must be well-planned.
And so, our fields of expertise converged. I discussed what I knew from urban planning, but I invited input from their experiences in handling such situations. Some had not yet experienced a disaster, but others had, and their numbers in the health care field are growing, as doctors and nurses find clinics and hospitals impacted by wildfires in California, and hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes elsewhere. Mine was not the only presentation related to such concerns. The keynote by Desiree Matel-Anderson, founder of the Field Innovation Team and a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) advisor, detailed personal interactions with disasters. Others focused on emergency management. The audience needed to know about new regulations and laws, such as those promulgated in 2016 by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) or the Disaster Recovery Reform Act (DRRA), passed in October as a
Photo by Kristina Peterson
rider on the FAA Reauthorization Act. DRRA outlines new responsibilities for the FEMA administrator in providing training to local officials and utility providers in planning for emergencies for nursing homes, clinics, and hospitals, and for the Federal Highway Administration regarding evacuations for these facilities, prisons, and certain classes ofdisadvantaged persons. I told the nurses and administrators in my audience they needed to prepare for these new responsibilities. There seems to be a growing conviction in Congress and federal agencies that health care institutions need to be better prepared to protect their patients during disasters. In the light of events dating back to Hurricane Katrina, that does not seem unreasonable.
To some extent, I believe it is the growing engagement of the urban planning profession with natural hazards that is facilitating a re-engagement of the profession with public health practitioners. I say “re-engagement” because the two fields grew up together, at least in North America. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, industrializing, rapidly growing American cities were often festering incubators for diseases because of pollution, overcrowding, and fire and other hazards. The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 laid the groundwork for major reforms related to building codes, helping to create the largely masonry-based architecture now predominant in the city. Activists like Jane Addams inveighed against oppressive health conditions for the working class. There was an urgent need for both better planning and public health measures that would prevent the spread of disease, and the two professions matured accordingly. At the same time, civil engineers took growing responsibility for developing the sanitary infrastructure cities needed, such as sewer treatment systems and effective drainage, a topic I addressed in a keynote in September 2015 in Boston for the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Coasts, Oceans, Ports and Rivers Institute (COPRI) annual conference. All three professions grew up in the same cradle, addressing urgent societal needs for health care, better urban design, and public sanitation.
Scene on the Jersey Shore after Hurricane Sandy.
All of this is a long, but I think crucial, introduction to a book by Michael R. Greenberg and Dona Schneider, Urban Planning & Public Health: A Critical Partnership, published by APHA Press. I had planned to review it earlier, but recent events expanded the context for its importance. Greenberg, a long-time planning colleague and professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, previously authored Protecting Seniors Against Environmental Disasters(Routledge, 2014), a book inspired in part by his own experience with elderly parents during Hurricane Sandy. He is certainly familiar with the territory. Schneider, also at Rutgers, brings the perspective of a public health expert.
The book reads mostly like a textbook and thus may be of most valuable to instructors willing to acquaint students in both fields with their organic relationship to each other and why the partnership is important today. Admittedly, the problems are not the same. We no longer face the scourge of tuberculosis, and smokestacks no longer belch particulates as freely as they once did. The water is less polluted. But our society is creating other problems of a momentous nature, including climate change and the resulting increased severity of weather-related disasters. Under the Trump administration and various less environmentally friendly state administrations, there have been concerted efforts to retreat from previous initiatives aimed to clear the skies and foster environmental justice. It is thus imperative that we have trained, knowledgeable, and articulate professionals who can advocate for the public interest when powerful political forces push in other directions.
The book makes powerful arguments in this context for the salience of a collaborative assault on the threats posed to our communities by natural hazards, using the tools of both public health and planning to analyze the threats and identify meaningful solutions. Not everything needs to happen at a macro level, either; in fact, planners and public health officials often are at their best in examining trends at the neighborhood and community level to find very geographically specific solutions to localized but persistent problems.
The authors are methodical, laying a groundwork in the first three chapters for understanding the building blocks of the two professions and their integral relationships. One can easily detect the influence of Greenberg’s long and distinguished career on both a practical and theoretical level as he discusses the impacts of various approaches to zoning, such as the use of downzoning to protect open lands and natural resources and the use of special districts, as in Austin, Texas, to protect the environmentally sensitive Edwards Aquifer through measures such as integrated pest management practices, which reduce the use of toxic chemicals that can enter the water supply. And the connection to natural disasters? Even recent history has revealed the vulnerability of Texas to prolonged drought, making the protection of water supplies essential to public health and welfare.
Recognizing the modern context for their focus on this “critical partnership,” the authors have included significant material on the role of risk and hazard mitigation analysis in planning, with a whole chapter on “Keeping People Out of Harm’s Way.” As with much of the book, it leads students on a path through the critical minutiae of planning and public health analysis, including case studies at various levels of analysis—for example, a brief but close look at the Galveston City Hazard Mitigation Plan.
Other sections address critical current issues such as the availability of healthy foods in poor communities, and how that can be addressed through laws, community organizations, and better resources; how to redevelop safe community assets from former brownfield sites; and potentially evaluating the benefits and drawbacks of major regional development proposals. In short, this is not bedtime reading for most laypeople, but it is solid instructional material for aspiring young professionals and may be useful as well to community advocates who are willing to learn the nuts and bolts of using planning to achieve better public health results in their neighborhoods and communities. As such, it is a timely and needed addition to the literature.
Explaining the frustrations of first responders in searching Mexico Beach, Florida, for survivors after Hurricane Michael, Brock Long, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told Associated Press, “Very few people live to tell what it’s like to experience storm surge, and unfortunately in this country we seem not to learn the lesson.” Mexico Beach was ground zero for landfall of the hurricane a few days ago.
But then Long was much more direct: “When state and local officials tell you to get out, dang it, do it. Get out.”
The desire or willingness to “ride it out” among people who think the storm will never be as bad as they are told is unquestionably one of the most troubling facets of disaster response, especially when there is adequate warning.
There are disasters, of course, where adequate warning is either extremely difficult or nearly impossible. I still vividly recall one evening in 1979, when, living in Ames, Iowa, I was awakened from a second-story bedroom at about 3 a.m. by the loudest roar I had ever heard. I turned to the window to see total darkness, and aside from the howling winds, no clue of what was unfolding. When it finally passed, I went back to sleep. The next morning, I learned from the newspaper that a small tornado had struck about a mile away, lifting the roofs from seven homes before skipping off into the sky again. On the other hand, we had no cell phones and no reverse 911 in 1979.
Wildfires often give but a few minutes of warning, and earthquakes generally none at all. Hurricanes are different, at least today. In 1900, when more than 6,000 residents of Galveston were swept to sea in the deadliest storm in American history, they had no meaningful warning. In 2018, we have the best satellites the federal government and private money can buy, and we typically know at least 48 hours in advance that a coastal storm is coming, although its strength can change quickly. What we surely know in any case is that, if you live on the Gulf Coast or the Atlantic Coast in the U.S., you can expect hurricanes. Only the frequency and severity vary, and they are not always predictable. But people generally have plenty of time to learn what to do when the time comes. The rest is a matter of cooperation.
There is, of course, the question of why people choose to live in the most vulnerable locations. Early in my quarter-century of involvement in hazards planning, I borrowed
No question about it. The seashore can be a profoundly attractive place in calm weather. The question is both how we build and where we build, and, in the process, what burdens we place on first responders.
the title of a 1987 mystery thriller, The Fatal Attraction, to describe the psychology of our very human attraction to seashores, wooded mountains, and beautiful sunrises. Living on the seashore can be indescribably beautiful under blue skies and balmy breezes. There is nothing wrong with enjoying all that under the right circumstances, but it is critical that we begin to learn our own limitations in adapting to such environments, the need to build appropriately in such locations, and when it is time to simply “get out,” as Long suggested. If we don’t do these things, we are often placing inexcusable burdens on first responders who must dig our dead or injured bodies from the wreckage or save our homes from raging wildfires.
In short, there are times in life when we must be willing to think about more than ourselves. Saving our own skin in the face of oncoming natural disaster is not only not selfish; it is downright thoughtful with regard to the burdens otherwise placed on police, firefighters, and emergency medical personnel.
I am aware that the issue is bigger than I have just described. In another month, I will be speaking about post-disaster recovery to an audience of long-term care health professionals. As a society, we also have obligations to ensure that the elderly live in homes that are removed from floodplains and other hazards, that children attend schools that are as safely located as possible, and that we do not force the poor and disadvantaged into neighborhoods that are at risk and where no one else would wish to live. In New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, the system failed thousands of poor people who did not own cars by failing to provide means for carless evacuation. The sheer number of such people was never a secret to officials in Louisiana, but good planning never happened before it was too late. All that said, those who have the means should have the willingness to consider both where they choose to live or build and to evacuate when told to do so.
We can all hope that the body count from Hurricane Michael remains low. As of the moment I am writing this, authorities have counted 17 deaths, but it may rise.
Long-term recovery awaits communities affected by either Florence or Michael. As always, serious questions can be posed about where and how to rebuild, whether we can make communities more resilient against future disasters, and what vision states and communities should have as they move forward. In its Influencers series, the Charlotte Observer asked what leaders thought North Carolina could do for coastal and inland communities affected by flooding from coastal storms. Interestingly, many cited setbacks from the coast, accounting for climate change (something the Republican-dominated legislature has explicitly chosen not to do), and keeping new development out of floodplains. All these efforts would make it easier to plan evacuations in the first place. The issue is whether North Carolina, or any other state in the path of such storms, can muster the political will to do what is right.
And whether people who live in highly vulnerable locations can heed the call when told to evacuate.
