I Can See Clearly Now

Posted on July 4, 2019 by admin

Some readers may have noticed that it has been seven weeks since I last posted to this blog (May 13). That delay was not by design but resulted from circumstances. For two weeks immediately after that last item, I was largely on the road, but that has happened before without slowing my pace. What followed most certainly did.

In early April, after sensing some eye strain in late winter, I responded to notices from Pearle Vision that it had been more than two years since my last eye exam. My last prescription for glasses was in 2016. I figured an updated prescription would cure the problem, as it had before.

This time, the optometrist noted some indications of cataracts, though he stated that an ophthalmologist would have to determine whether they were serious enough to require surgery. I took note and arranged for such an exam. There was a little discussion of floaters, and I indicated they had not been a problem. He ordered new lenses, and by late that week, they were installed in my existing frames. I thought I was good to go.

I was dead wrong. Before the weekend was out, I returned to complain that the new lenses had done nothing to cure some blurring, which I attributed to a long-standing combination of astigmatism with my well-defined myopia. I had been near-sighted since childhood and had glasses since I was ten. I am now 69. Glasses have been part of my existence for six decades. The optometrist conceded that he had not tested for astigmatism, noting, to my surprise, that the 2016 exam had shown no sign of it. Astigmatism, which causes blurred vision, can wax and wane over one’s lifetime. In mine, apparently, it had become much less pronounced than I had realized. But he conducted a free second exam and made minor adjustments to the prescription to solve the problem.

By then, there were only two days before I left for San Francisco for the annual National Planning Conference of the American Planning Association. I had to leave with the existing lenses and wait for the new ones to arrive. Pearle called while I was still in California to say that they had arrived, and I visited their store the very evening I returned. I tried on the new lenses. There was still no benefit in clarifying my vision. I decided to be patient and see what would happen—but nothing. I began to realize other factors might be at work.

In scheduling the ophthalmology exam, I contacted the highly regarded clinic at Northwestern Medical Center, part of the Northwestern University hospital system. They first offered an appointment for May 14 because they were booked for a few weeks, but I was already in their system because of a different issue a year before. I had to decline; I would be flying to Winnipeg that day to speak at the Manitoba Planning Conference. The following week, I would be in Cleveland for the annual conference of the Association of State Floodplain Managers. We finally settled on May 30. My own schedule produced the delays.

Dr. Pyatetsky and me during a post-op appointment.

At that appointment, I met Dr. Dmitry Pyatetsky, who conducted the exam. He quickly informed me that my right eye had a serious cataract that needed surgery. The left eye had a smaller cataract, and the wise approach would be to follow with surgery on the second eye. Cataract surgery basically involves breaking up the cataract, which clouds one’s vision, and then replacing the natural lens in the eye with an artificial lens that provides 20/20 vision. I would no longer need glasses, except for reading and computer work. For the first time in my adult life, I would spend most of my day seeing clearly without glasses. Moreover, Dr. Pyatetsky chose to waste no time. Surgery on the right eye was scheduled for June 20, just three weeks later, preceded by some preparatory appointments including a biometric exam to acquire precise eye measurements. That exam also determined that there was nowhere near enough astigmatism to justify Toric lenses, which can correct astigmatism but involve an out-of-pocket expense in the low four figures. I would have spent the money if there had been a problem to solve that insurance would not cover, but I was relieved to find out otherwise.

In fact, I was relieved by many things I learned about modern eye surgery. We live in an age that has made routine many procedures that used to be either problematic or downright dangerous for past generations. I was aware of this already on an intellectual level, but this experience made it personal.

Just a year ago, as an adult nonfiction book awards judge for the Society of Midland Authors, I had read The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine, a remarkable piece of medical history by Lindsey Fitzharris, for which our Honorable Mention was merely one of several prizes, topped by the 2018 PEN/E.O. Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing. This graphic, often gruesome story made me acutely aware of the benefits we enjoy from medical advances, for only two centuries ago, it was demonstrably dangerous to visit doctors or hospitals, who understood nothing about germs and infections and seldom bothered to clean the instruments with which they performed their surgeries. The result was a high death rate but no grasp of their cause. The story details Dr. Joseph Lister’s struggle to prove that sanitation was essential, in the face of a medical profession in the Victorian era that preferred not to believe that its own practices put patients at risk. One can, of course, read much more about this monumental shift in medical thinking that put many benighted practices behind us. Nearly 15 years ago, in reading Dark Horse: The Surprise Election and Political Murder of President James A. Garfield, by Kenneth D. Ackerman, I learned that Garfield’s death in 1881 was more the result of medical malpractice and the refusal of his doctor to accept modern bacterial science than a direct result of the assassin’s bullet. Historically speaking, we are not so far removed from the Dark Ages, yet the medical advances of recent decades have been stunning.

As someone who will turn 70 late this year, I am experiencing a growing appreciation of all that is possible with modern medical practice. Old age no longer need be the cavalcade of horrors that it once was. What is true generally is certainly true of modern ophthalmology. The time is not long past when cataracts were simply a fact of advancing age. The Bible is replete with references to lost vision as a result of age, such as “Isaac was old, and his eyes were dim, so that he could not see” (Genesis 27:1). The situation was common well into the 20^th century. Although medical history documents surgical procedures for cataracts dating back for many centuries, a close reading of the techniques mostly reveals what must seem a catalogue of horrors from the perspective of modern patients. Couching, in which the lens was pushed into the rear of the eye with a curved needle, was replaced in the 1700s, at least in Europe, by extraction, which broke up the cataract and sucked it out. Johann Sebastian Bach underwent couching but remained blind and, in his case, died four months later. Nothing about these procedures sounds pleasant or painless, or without profound side effects.

It was not until the 1940s that British ophthalmologist Harold Ridley hit upon the use of polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA), a type of plastic that lacks any inflammatory qualities (so long as it does not touch the iris) as an artificial lens implant, now known as the intraocular lens (IOL). Among the inspirations for this approach to restoring sight was the observation that Royal Air Force pilots in World War II showed no adverse impacts from absorbing PMMA when their fighter plane shields were shot out by German planes, leaving tiny shreds of PMMA shrapnel in their eyeballs. This biological tolerance for PMMA paved the way for the first transplant of an IOL in 1949 in London. Subsequent innovation introduced the use of phacoemulsification, which permits the use of ultrasound to emulsify the natural lens and eliminate the need for removal with an incision. In short, the past half century of medical improvements in this field has made a world of difference for patients like me in 2019. The surgical success rate is now somewhere around 99.5 percent. Especially considering that I had almost no other health problems that might interfere with recovery, I was happy to take those odds. In fact, by the time the second surgery was conducted, on the left eye, on June 26, I was mostly just anxious to get it all over with.

The reason was simple. Until April, I was not even aware I had a cataract and had never given the possibility of it much thought. However, by May, aware that new glasses had solved nothing but increasingly aware of my own blurred sight, I found myself increasingly limited in my ability to read or work efficiently. One turning point came while I was in Manitoba. My agreement with the Manitoba Planning Conference was both to lead a three-hour workshop on the opening day (Wednesday) and provide a keynote address on the closing day. The workshop posed little challenge because I had converted a lengthy article I had produced for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Natural Hazard Science, on “Planning Systems for Natural Hazard Risk Reduction,” into a teaching format with substantial audience participation. It was a small group in a small room, I knew the material thoroughly, and my need to rely on the screen to see my PowerPoints was minimal. Nothing challenged my visual acuity. Then, on Thursday, I was introduced to the format in the ballroom for the next morning’s keynote, in front of 250 Canadian planners. Two large screens would be on either side of me, facing the audience, but speakers should face the audience and not be looking at those screens, so another, smaller screen was set at the base of the dais, away from audience view, but allowing me to see the slide on display.

Presenting the keynote at the Manitoba Planning Conference in Brandon, Manitoba.

I quickly realized there was one problem: I could not see the slides clearly. I knew right then that I did not want to be squinting at slides in the middle of a tightly timed, 45-minute presentation. I simply had to know the slides intimately so that the broad image reminded me of what I wanted to say even if I could not quickly or clearly discern the details of a graph.

And so it was. I undertook the extra work of memorizing those details overnight because only rarely do I speak from a script. I prefer to be able to remember what I want to say about each slide, but under ordinary circumstances, I can also see that slide in front of me, on a laptop screen or, in this case, a screen sitting on the platform. In this case, I had to wing it. I did it, and all was well. The main lesson was that I realized I had a noticeable problem two weeks before the ophthalmological exam confirmed it. For some people, cataracts grow slowly and can remain small enough not to merit surgical attention for months or even years. In my case, the cataract grew quickly, and my life had to adjust accordingly.

Dr. Pyatestsky with his assistant (and sister) Julia, who plans to start nursing school.

All that said, the adjustment has changed a significant aspect of my life permanently. I have reading glasses for computer work and reading newspapers, books, and the like. But for all other purposes, including driving and physical activities, I now benefit from 20/20 vision. I am grateful to the medical staff at Northwestern, including Dr. Pyatetsky, for their outstanding care and patient services. They have been excellent. I am also simply grateful for living in the 21^st century. There was a time when people like me had few options once they had grown old “and their eyes grew dim.”

Instead, I can enjoy life, exercise safely, and continue to contribute to the world and community around me. I consider that the very essence of satisfaction with life.

Jim Schwab

Sobering Portrait of a Fiery Future

Posted on November 29, 2018 by admin

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.

Jim Schwab

Aligning Planning and Public Health

Posted on November 24, 2018 by admin

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.

Jim Schwab

Fatal Attraction

Posted on October 13, 2018 by admin

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.

Jim Schwab

The Predictable Impact of Florence

Posted on October 12, 2018 by admin

Flooding in Rosewood in Horry County, SC, September 24, 2018 (All photos by Allison Hardin with exceptions of FEMA photo from Hurricane Floyd and Charlotte image.)

It has been a few weeks of drought on this blog, but just the opposite in North Carolina, where Hurricane Florence dropped up to 30 inches of rain in some locations, and floods migrated downstream via numerous rivers to swamp cities both inland and near the coast. Now, Hurricane Michael threatens to compound the damage as it migrates northeast from its powerful Category 4 assault on the Florida Panhandle, with storm surges up to 14 feet in areas just east of the eye, which made landfall near Panama City.

The blog drought was the result of both a bit of writer’s block, mostly induced by a busy schedule that included two conference trips over the past three weeks, combined with a bit of fatigue and a few significant diversions of my personal time. But that may be okay. My intent was to write about the recent hurricane along the East Coast, and sometimes letting the subject ferment in the mind results in a more thorough and insightful perspective. I hope that is the result here.

Storms never happen in a vacuum. In a world with relatively few uninhabited places, their impact is the result more of patterns of human development and the legacy of past choices in land use and building practices than of the storm itself, which is, after all, simply a natural and very predictable event. Hurricanes were part of the natural cycle on this earth long before humans took over the planet (or thought they did).

Hurricane wind warning at bridge in Socastee, South Carolina

But they appear to be getting worse, and climate change, most of it almost surely attributable to human activity, is an increasingly evident factor. Meteorologist Ken Kunkel, affiliated both with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and North Carolina State University, stated that Florence produced more rain than any other storm in the last 70 years except for Hurricane Harvey last year. According to Kunkel, five weather stations over an area of 14,000 square miles in the Carolinas recorded an average of 17.5 inches. Harvey’s average was 25.6 inches. By comparison, Chicago averages about 37 inches for an entire year. Such heightened precipitation levels are in line with expected impacts of climate change.

What became obvious to me early on was that Florence would rehash a certain amount of unfortunate North Carolina history regarding feedlot agriculture. I am familiar with that history because 20 years ago I authored a Planning Advisory Service Report (#482) for the American Planning Association, titled Planning and Zoning for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. (In that same year, APA also published PAS 483/484, Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery and Reconstruction, for which I was the lead author and project manager.) I want to emphasize that what happened in North Carolina was not unusual. Nationwide, many states have laws dating to the 1950s that exempt all or most agricultural operations from county zoning ordinances. Most of these were intended to create a friendly regulatory environment for family farms, and they were often followed by other “right-to-farm” laws designed to shield farmers using conventional farming methods from nuisance lawsuits. Only later, as the large feedlots known also by the acronym “CAFO” became widespread, did it become clear that such exemptions, by then fiercely defended by industry groups, became giant loopholes for the detrimental environmental impacts of such operations. This story has been repeated in Iowa, Missouri, Utah, and numerous other states.

In North Carolina in 1991, State Senator Wendell Murphy, who owned a direct interest in the growing Murphy Family Farms, engineered passage of a law widening the state’s exemptions to include CAFOs. Within two years, as I noted in the report, North Carolina’s hog population shot up from 2.8 million to 4.6 million. Today, the number is at least 9 million. A public backlash at the impacts of CAFOs resulted in a new law in 1997 that included a moratorium on new waste lagoons, but by then, although the hogs were firmly ensconced in a growing number of feedlots, the figurative horse was out of the barn. Many counties in eastern North Carolina, where the industry was concentrated, were slow or reluctant to use their newly regained powers. In any case, various large operators were effectively already grandfathered into continued existence. Today, consolidation within the industry has left Smithfield Foods in possession of most of the business in North Carolina, yet Smithfield itself was acquired by the Chinese-owned WH Group several years ago.

Grenville, NC, September 24, 1999 — The livestock loss and potential health hazard to Eastern North Carolina is huge. Here volunteers have towed in dead and floating cattle from a nearby ranch at Pactolus, NC (just North of Greenville), trying to remove them as fast as possible to lower the potential health hazards associated.
Photo by Dave Gatley/ FEMA News Photo

Along came Hurricane Floyd in 1999. The low-lying plains of eastern North Carolina, always vulnerable to flooding, were deeply awash, but worse, filled with millions of pigs and poultry and their excrement in manure lagoons. Hurricane Dennis just weeks earlier had dumped 15 inches of rain on the region, and Floyd dumped even more in some areas. The Tar and Neuse Rivers, among others, badly overflowed their banks and inundated numerous farms. More than 110,000 hog carcasses, and more than 1 million chicken and turkey carcasses, floated downriver while waste lagoons were breached, creating a stench-filled public health disaster only partly solved when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency brought in huge incinerators to burn carcasses, though most animals were buried. It was a fiasco that did not have to happen at the scale on which it occurred.

Fast forward to this year and Hurricane Florence, presuming a surfeit of lessons to be learned from the 1999 disaster as well as later storms. As Emily Moon notes in the Pacific Standard, North Carolina has had opportunities over the past 20 years to introduce serious regulatory change, but various factors foiled those chances, and North Carolina remains the nation’s second-largest hog producer, having pushed aside every state but Iowa. The industry has evolved, but the problem remains. The state has bought out 46 operations since 1999 and shut down their lagoons, but the vast majority remain in operation. The numbers changed in Florence—more than 3 million chickens and 5,500 hogs dead and afloat in the flood waters—but the devastation rooted in CAFO practices continued. Coal ash landfills associated with power stations added to the environmental impacts. And the beat goes on, in a part of the state heavily populated by African-Americans, many too poor and powerless to challenge the system effectively without outside help.

I mention all this aside from the obvious human tragedies of lost lives, ruined homes, and prolonged power outages affecting some 740,000 homes and businesses.

Flooding at Arrowhead Development in Myrtle Beach, SC, September 26, 2018

Still, there are significant lessons available from Hurricane Florence outside the realm of mass production of poultry and hogs, and I want to offer a positive note. One is that, while only about 35 percent of properties at risk of flooding in North Carolina have flood insurance, which is available from the National Flood Insurance Program, neighboring South Carolina ranked second in the nation with 65 percent coverage. While I do not know all the details behind that sizable difference, it seems to me there is surely something to be learned from a comparison of these results and how they were achieved. They come in the context of a “moonshot” by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to double flood insurance coverage nationally by 2022. That will happen when South Carolina becomes the norm rather than the exception. Sometimes we can use these events to push in the right direction. Texas, for instance, has added 145,000 new flood insurance policies in effect since Hurricane Harvey; the question will be whether the new awareness wears off as memory of Harvey fades, or whether the state can solidify those gains. For that matter, can the states in the Southeast—the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida—leverage the lessons of Florence and Michael to push in the same direction?

Hidden Valley drainage restoration project, Charlotte, NC. Image courtesy of Tim Trautman.

Recently, Bloomberg Business News offered an example within North Carolina of how differently floodplains could be managed by highlighting the case of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County. I worked for several years in a series of training workshops on flood resilience with Tim Trautman, the manager for the engineering and mitigation program for Mecklenburg Storm Water Services, so I am familiar with their intriguing story. The county for many years has used a stormwater utility fee on property owners to fund its own hazard mitigation program, using the money to buy out flood-prone properties and increase open space in its floodplains. The result has been a significant reduction in flood-prone land and buildings. The question is not whether Charlotte is successful, but what state and federal programs and authorities can do to encourage and support such efforts and make them more commonplace.

Every serious disaster offers lessons and opportunities, and I am not attempting here to pick on North Carolina alone. Other states face their own challenges; Iowa, for one, is undergoing a somewhat muted debate about the impact of its own farm practices on downstream flooding and water quality, in part as an outgrowth of the 2008 floods. What is important is that we use these windows of opportunity, the “teachable moments,” as they are sometimes known, to initiate the changes that are surely needed for the long term in creating more resilient, environmentally healthy communities. What we do not need is a natural disaster version of Groundhog Day.

Jim Schwab

When School Reform Falters (if You’re Black and Poor)

Posted on May 2, 2018 by admin

Ashana Bigard. Photo by Jean Schwab

While I was in New Orleans April 19-24 for the American Planning Association’s 2018 National Planning Conference, my wife, Jean, was also there. A retired Chicago Public Schools teacher and retiree delegate for the Chicago Teachers Union, she has remained active on educational issues and in 2014, on a prior trip to New Orleans, interviewed Ashana Bigard, an advocate for students’ rights and leader in the Education Justice Project of New Orleans. Jean decided to interview Bigard again, producing the somewhat condensed interview below. At a time when Paul Vallas, former CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, and the post-Katrina architect of school reform in New Orleans, has recently declared his candidacy for mayor of Chicago, the consequences of that reform take on new importance—not that schools in New Orleans were great before Katrina (they were not), but one hopes that reform is a step forward, and Bigard’s critique suggests serious and troubling issues of racial and social equity remain unaddressed.

I wish here to add a personal mea culpa. Readers may have noticed a more than one-month gap since my last posting at the end of March. Part of that was due to travel. In addition to six days in New Orleans, I spent three days immediately prior to that at a Federal Emergency Management Agency meeting in Richburg, South Carolina. Life was also full of some other turbulence, and this blog is essentially a one-man show. Since launching “Home of the Brave” five years ago, I have always preferred, as a professionally trained researcher and journalist, to put quality ahead of speed, to produce thoughtful commentary and to dig deeper. Sometimes, time does not permit this, in which case I prefer to write nothing than to write hastily for the mere sake of publishing something. There will be much new material coming in May. I guarantee it.

Jim Schwab

Interview with Ashana Bigard

What is better and worse about New Orleans since 2014?

Bigard: It depends on from whose perspective. So, I think better for young white people in the city of New Orleans, absolutely. But if we are talking families and communities of native black New Orleans, no, they are much, much worse because the voices of the community, parents, and students continue to be unheard. We have been erased. Our mayor talks about how much better New Orleans is doing, how it has recovered, meanwhile child poverty is at 39%, mostly black poor children. The wage gap between white and black families has widened since Katrina. Of course, we had $76 billion come to the city after the storm, and the native black population has 18% less wealth. We’ve had a gigantic land grab. Things are worse in education because our city, just the Parish of New Orleans, has been experimented on. What is the problem with experimenting? First, no one has been taking data to see what works and doesn’t work. Second, the experiment was done in the only black parish. That would be a red flag to anyone. We are almost at 100% charter schools except for McDonogh 35. Parents have less choice. Parents apply for pre-school only to find that there are no pre-school spots available. One parent reported that she made eight selections and did not get any of the eight selections. Parents want a school near their homes, so they can catch one or two buses to reach the school, but the schools are not close to students’ homes. Parents with children with asthma, [who] need epi pens, or [with] special problems are literally afraid because charter schools do not have full-time nurses, or full-time counselors. Nurses are in the schools twice a week. The schools are not near their homes, so parents can’t get to them. We’ve had an epidemic of children traumatized, partly because of the storm. We had problems before the storm, but there were full-time nurses and counselors at the schools. We had children who had nervous breakdowns, and the schools were close to their homes so parents or someone could come and pick them up.

Now with the schools far away from students’ homes, no full-time nurses or counselors, there’s been an epidemic of students’ nervous breakdowns for two reasons. First, our kids have had a lot of trauma which was not addressed after the storm. Some of this is [former] Governor Bobby Jindal’s fault because, after the storm, he gutted our mental health budget and closed our Adolescent Hospital [a psychiatric facility]. Jindal gutted the mental health budget when people needed it so much. Our new Governor John Edwards is trying to repair that by opening the Adolescent Mental Hospital again. The second reason is that schools are operating like mini prisons as if they could discipline trauma out of kids. A lot of schools have no recess and quiet lunches. During quiet lunch students are not allowed to talk. So, we do the opposite of what children need after being traumatized. These children need a lot more social interaction, talking, touching, art, and music to really deal with their emotions and express themselves. Our school system is the opposite of what children need, which leads to children that are on the edge, we have mini bombs (explosive), and we continue to reinforce that. Students are in pre-school and not allowed to sing, talk, dance, play and nap. A lot of our children suffer from sleep deprivation because, if you need to be on the bus at 6:00 a.m. and you need to be out there 30 minutes in advance, then you must be outside at 5:30, and if you must be on the bus at 5:05 a.m., [that] means you must be up by 4:30 a.m. That is exactly what happened to a five-year-old girl in kindergarten that we advocated for. She arrived at school at 8:30 a.m. and was back home at 6:00 p.m. Her school had no recess, quiet lunch, and no nap. I bring this up to point out how insane the schools are. We know that children that are in kindergarten need more sleep for brain development. We know that children need from 13 to 14 hours of sleep. However, apparently schools have decided that they can go against brain development because apparently poor black children do not have human brains. The little girl got suspended off the bus for three days because she ate three crackers on the bus on her way home. We advocated for her by going to the school to discuss the suspension. At first, the school said it was a bus policy, but later admitted that the suspension was a school policy, and they offered to reduce the suspension to one day. We felt like one day was too much for eating three crackers. How about no-day suspension because a five-year-old girl ate lunch at 10:00 a.m. and was hungry on the bus home? They expect our children to be non-human. This correct behavior is not correct behavior for human beings. I asked, “Should you be running a school? Who do you want to make them into? A person who ignores their personal needs for bathroom and food like that is not healthy. If a person does not take care of their own needs, how can they have compassion for others?”

(Bigard described going to Science and Math High School to talk to the principal about bathroom privileges. “The students could go to the bathroom during lunch period every day and were given three bathroom passes each month for emergencies. We asked the principal if he had any teenage girls at that school and he answered, yes they did, and that is why the three passes were given.” I told him that three passes a month was not enough for the girls or any of the other students.”)

Why do they feel the need to be so strict?

Bigard: Conditioning and control. If you go into a school district and you believe that the people you are working with are out of control, and that they are savage and animals, the first thing you do is get them into control and compliance.

If a student has a brown belt instead of black, then that student may get a detention or after-school suspension if they have too many violations. If they lose the belt, they can’t just go out and buy another. Kids [in] k-1-2-3 grades don’t buy their own clothes. So, when you hold them responsible for what their parents put out for them, they don’t have any control. You are punishing them for being poor. The response from the school is that they are teaching them to be responsible. How many colleges have uniforms? Are students put out of college for not having a tie or black belt?

We have all these schools where they have 60% suspension rates, and when you start to dig, you come up with things like an A-B student who during tests needed to chew on a straw because he was so nervous and could concentrate better when chewing on a straw. It didn’t bother anyone else, but we had to put him on the 504 program (accommodations for lesser learning disabilities), so he could chew on a straw during tests. Or the girl that twists her hair or the student that did not track the teacher with his eyes. Many of the administrators want to greet each child with a handshake every morning. A child that was uncomfortable with touch–one-third of our children have been inappropriately touched, and others fear germs and did not want to shake the school administrator’s hand.

(The interview then shifted to the question of how schools handle students who cannot provide money for school lunches, a subject covered by The Louisiana Weekly in a very recent article by reporter Kaylee Poche about state legislation to resolve the issue of “shaming” regarding inability to pay.)

The Senate Education Committee on Thursday (April 19) voted 4-2 to reject a bill that would have prevented schools from punishing students with lunch debt even though the bill had easily passed the House earlier this month. Rep. Patricia Smith, D-Baton Rouge, authored the so-called “lunch-shaming bill,” which also was supported by Gov. John Edwards. It would have prevented students with unpaid lunch bills from being publicly identified, required to do additional chores, or excluded from any school privileges. “I’m just trying to make the change to the law so that we can continue to feed our children in our schools and make sure that the person who is actually responsible for the debt pays the debt,” Smith said. Students who owe money currently eat cheese sandwiches for lunch at school. (Bigard explained that middle school and high school students with a school debt do not receive lunch.)

The bill also would have allowed schools to notify parents that they would have to contact the Department of Children and Family Services if they failed to pay for 10 or more school meals. Also, lunch money could be collected through income taxes and the Louisiana Department of Revenue. The bill would cover only families that do not receive reduced or free lunches. Smith’s bill failed.

Disaster Guidance for Rural Communities

Posted on March 27, 2018 by admin

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

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

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

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

Photo from Texas Planners4Health

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

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

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

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

Jim Schwab

Life after Tornadoes

Posted on November 1, 2017 by admin

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

The remains of a home destroyed by the tornado.

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

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

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

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

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

Debris from the April 29 tornadoes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jim Schwab

The People Affected by Harvey

Posted on August 30, 2017 by admin

A few days ago, in my last post, I wrote that Hurricane Harvey would last a few days, but the recovery would last years. However agonizingly long Harvey appears to be taking to inflict its misery on the Texas Gulf Coast, and now parts of southern Louisiana, it will go away. And then the real marathon will begin. People will have to face the necessity of reconstruction, both as individuals and as whole communities.

In writing about this now, I am crediting readers with a longer attention span than seems to be assumed of most Americans on social media today. I truly hope, however, that the news media does not forget about Harvey or the Gulf Coast as the recovery process grinds on over coming months and years. Certainly, most residents of the Texas coast will have little choice but to bear with the process, and ideally, they will participate. Recovery needs to be as participatory as possible to succeed fully.

FEMA teams managing the distribution of water, and meals for hundreds of semi-trucks at an incident Support Base in Seguin, Texas. Photo by Dominick Del Vecchio – Aug 29, 2017 (from FEMA website)

It will not always be a pretty picture. The news media in recent days have been full of photographic and video evidence of the best aspects of humanity—people in boats rescuing neighbors and strangers alike, public safety personnel risking personal safety as they save people from flooded homes and transport them to shelters, and other heroic acts away from cameras and too numerous to count. People from other states and nations will contribute to disaster-related charities to help people they have never known and may never meet. Politics and race and religion will all take a back seat to saving lives and reducing suffering. For just a brief moment in history, we can stop shouting at each other long enough to care for each other and be proud of one another.

Several years ago, Rebecca Solnit produced an intriguing book, A Paradise Built in Hell, that explored many of the positive community-building relationships that emerge when people are challenged by adverse circumstances such as major natural disasters. It is a journalistic journey through the informal alliances and communities created by people under what seemingly are the worst possible conditions, but which challenge our humanity and force us to consider how we value those around us. It is an optimistic book that forces readers to rethink what it means to live through a disaster. I have always hoped that it would spark similar efforts among academic researchers, particularly in the social sciences, to study this phenomenon more closely. I think that is happening to some extent, but perhaps not nearly enough.

The Texas Gulf Coast communities stricken by Harvey will need as much of that spirit as they can muster to produce successful long-term recovery. Recovery takes years because, while no one wants to delay rebuilding unnecessarily, hasty rebuilding that fails to consider the failure points that allowed destruction to occur is even more undesirable. Under considerable time pressures, which researchers Robert Olshansky and Laurie Johnson, both wonderful friends of mine, have notably referred to as the problem of “time compression” in disaster recovery, planners and local and state officials will need to meet with constituents, hear their concerns, explain both the obstacles and opportunities involved in reconstruction, and ideally, inform the public process to help lead to a better outcome. During this time, minor and modest repairs may go forward while the bigger decisions, like where to buy out damaged properties, how to rebuild infrastructure and to what new standards, and how to produce a stronger, more resilient community to handle future disasters may need to undergo vigorous debate.

I point this out because, inevitably, and despite Solnit’s rosy scenarios in the context of community building, tempers will rise and people will need to iron out significant differences and widely varying perceptions of the causes of, and solutions to, the damage that occurred. There will surely be some debate about Houston’s sprawling development patterns and relative lack of development controls. There may be debates about strengthening building or zoning codes or, in Houston, the absence of zoning. If there is any echo of Hurricane Sandy, there may be discussion of a greater role for green infrastructure in mitigating hazards, though that alone would have made only modest difference in the flooding from Harvey, but it might have helped.

More importantly, people will have undergone trauma that will make them deeply and justifiably emotional about the disruption of their lives. They will bring that trauma, and a need to vent and share their fears and anger, to public meetings. Public officials will need to exhibit patience because, as Christine Butterfield, another good friend who served as community development director in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, during and after the 2008 floods, has noted, those public gatherings will be therapeutic. People may cry, they may yell, they may accuse. Most of all, they need to know that someone else wants to hear and share their pain. They want to know that someone cares. Once most have achieved that comfort level, they may be ready to move forward and discuss options for recovery. But first, community leaders must build trust.

Some people may never trust, and the rest of the community may need to move on. Life is not perfect. Human beings are not perfect. Recovery cannot wait forever, but it must demonstrate compassion and a commitment to social equity.

In a few weeks, the entire process will begin, and people will decide what role they want to play. Leaders will arise in unexpected places. Just last week, my students at the University of Iowa School or Urban and Regional Planning, during a field trip with which I launch my course on “Planning for Disaster Mitigation and Recovery” every year, heard from United Methodist pastor Clint Twedt-Ball, a co-founder and executive director of Matthew 25, a community organization that arose from almost nothing after the 2008 floods in Cedar Rapids to help rebuild 25 blocks of downtrodden neighborhoods in the city, raising money but also making tough decisions about what would work and what would not. Nine years later, his organization is still working to make a difference. Before 2008, Clint would confess, he knew next to nothing about floods or community development. My guess is that now he could nearly write a book. Who knew?

Watch Houston, and Rockport, and Corpus Christi, and all the other cities on the Texas Gulf Coast for both surprises and struggles, and mostly for deep human engagement in solving massive redevelopment problems the likes of which most of us will never have to confront. And be ready to cheer them on when good things happen. They are likely to need the encouragement from time to time.

Jim Schwab

Climate of Hope

Posted on July 8, 2017 by admin

For some time, it has been my intent to address the question of how we communicate about and discuss climate change, with a focus on books that have tackled the issue of how to explain the issue. Several of these have crossed my desk in the last few years, and I have found some time to read most. These include: Climate Myths: The Campaign Against Climate Science, by John J. Berger (Northbrae Books, 2013), and America’s Climate Century, by Rob Hogg (2013). The latter, independently published, is the work of a State Senator from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, inspired by the ordeal his city underwent as a result of the 2008 floods. I met Hogg while serving on a plenary panel for the Iowa APA conference in October 2013 with Dr. Gerald Galloway, now a professor at the University of Maryland, but formerly with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers when he led a major federal study of the causes and consequences of the 1993 Midwest floods.

Another book that made it into my collection but still awaits reading is Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change, by George Marshall (Bloomsbury, 2014), an English environmentalist. To him and the others, I apologize. Many good ideas for blog posts went by the boards in past years when my occupational responsibilities at the American Planning Association sometimes kept me too busy to implement them. Whether it is still worthwhile to go back and review these works of past years is debatable, but at least I offer them up here as contributions to the literature. It is critical that we keep revisiting the issue of climate communication because, clearly, much previous communication has failed in the face of determined efforts by skeptics to sow doubt and uncertainty, to the point where the U.S. now has a president who has withdrawn the nation from the Paris climate accords, a subject I addressed here a month ago. It is imperative that we find better ways to share with people what matters most.

From https://www.climateofhope.com/

As a result, I was overjoyed to see two heavyweight voices, Michael Bloomberg and Carl Pope, offer what I consider a serious, well-focused discussion in their own brand new book, Climate of Hope: How Cities, Businesses, and Citizens Can Save the Planet (St. Martin’s Press, 2017). Bloomberg, of course, is the billionaire entrepreneur of his own media and financial services firm, Bloomberg L.P. I confess I read Bloomberg Business Week consistently because it is one business magazine that I find offers a balanced, thoughtful analysis of business events. Carl Pope, former executive director of the Sierra Club, is an environmental veteran with a keen eye to the more realistic political opportunities and strategies available to that movement and to those anxious to address the problems created by climate change. Theirs is an ideal pairing of talents and perspectives to offer a credible way forward.

This book will not seek to overwhelm you, even inadvertently, with the kind of daunting picture of our global future that leaves many people despondent. At the risk of offending some, I would venture that the most extreme and poorly considered pitches about climate change have nearly pirated for the Earth itself Dante’s line from The Inferno: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” I know one person who literally suggests something close to that. I fail to see where that sort of message leads us. The harsh political and social reality is that most people need to understand how something they can do will make some concrete difference that may make their lives better now as well as perhaps a half-century from now. There are temporal factors in human consciousness that greatly affect how we receive messages, and most of us are not well programmed to respond to issues too distant in time or in space. Framing the message effectively matters.

The bond that brings these two authors together is that combination of hope and realism. They may understand that polar bears are losing their habitats, but their message focuses closer to home: Business opportunities await those willing to embrace solutions to climate change. Cities can make themselves more livable even as they reduce their negative impacts on the atmosphere. Despondency is not only counterproductive; it is downright pointless in the face of such golden eggs waiting to hatch. This is more than rhetoric. Climate of Hope provides a steady diet of details for investing in solutions, whether through public policy and programs such as Bloomberg highlights in New York and other cities, or in the business sector, which both authors do very well.

Of course, there are some very tough questions that must be addressed. The biggest involves the future of energy both in the United States and around the world. In a chapter titled “Coal’s Toll,” Bloomberg is unflinching after crediting Pope and the Sierra Club for bringing to his attention the public health costs of continued reliance on coal. He notes that pollution from coal emissions “was prematurely killing 13,200 Americans a year,” or 36 per day because of various lung and respiratory diseases, with a resultant financial toll exceeding $100 billion annually. In many other parts of the world, the figures are even higher. All this is in addition to the environmental damage of lost and polluted creeks and rivers wherever coal is mined or burned. To counter this toll, the Sierra Club, with support from Bloomberg Philanthropies, undertook a campaign to close outdated coal-fired power plants. It is also important to recognize the degree to which fossil fuel companies have benefited from public subsidies and relaxed regulation that has failed to account for the magnitude of negative externalities associated with coal and petroleum.

Inevitably, someone will ask, what about the jobs? The strength of Bloomberg in this debate is his understanding of markets, and he rightly notes that, for the most part, coal is losing ground because of the steady advance of less polluting, and increasingly less expensive, alternatives including not only natural gas but a variety of new energy technologies like wind turbines, energy-efficient LED lights, and electronic innovations that make coal essentially obsolete. The issue, as I have noted before in this blog, is not saving coal jobs but investing in alternative job development for those areas most affected. Once upon a time, the federal government created a Tennessee Valley Authority to provide economic hope and vision for a desperately poor region. Although the TVA or something like it could certainly be reconfigured to serve that mission today, the federal vision seems to be lacking. Instead, we get backward-looking rhetoric that merely prolongs the problem and makes our day of reckoning more problematic.

It is also essential to balance the problems of coal against the opportunities to shape a more positive, environmentally friendly energy future. In many parts of the world, off-grid solar can replace more polluting but less capital-intensive fuels like kerosene or wood for cooking. Hundreds of millions of poor people in India and other developing countries could be afforded the opportunity to bypass the centralized electrical facilities of the West through low-cost loans to build solar networks. Again, what may be missing is the vision of world banking institutions, but under the encouragement of international climate agreements, and with the proper technical support, places like India can make major contributions to reducing their own greenhouse gas output. The U.S. expenditures in this regard about which Trump complained in his announcement of the U.S. withdrawal from the climate accord are in fact investments in our own climate health as well as future trade opportunities. In chapter after chapter, Bloomberg and Pope describe these opportunities for private investment and more creative public policy. The intelligent reader soon gets the idea. This is no time for despair; it is instead a golden day for rolling up our sleeves and investing in and crafting a better future.

It is possible, but probably not desirable, for this review to roll on with one example after another. We face tough questions, such as reshaping the human diet to reduce the environmental and climatic impacts of meat and rice production in the form of methane, but there are answers, and Pope explores them in a chapter about the influence of food on climate. Food waste is a source of heat-trapping methane. Both en route to our plates and after we scrape them off, food waste can be a major contributor to our problems because of decomposition, but again there are answers. The issue is not whether we can solve problems but whether we are willing to focus on doing so. There will be disruption in the markets in many instances, but disruption creates new opportunities. We need to reexamine how the transportation systems in our cities affect the climate, but we should do so in the knowledge that innovative transit solutions can make huge positive impacts. We can reframe our thinking to realize that urban density is an ally, not an enemy, of the environment, when planned wisely. Urban dwellers, contrary to what many believe, generally have much lighter environmental footprints than their rural and suburban neighbors. They ride mass transit more, bicycle more, and mow less grass. Lifestyles matter, where we live matters, planning matters.

Quality of life in our cities is a function, however, of forward-looking public policy. Bloomberg notes the huge changes being made in Beijing to reduce its horrific air pollution. He notes:

One of the biggest changes in urban governance in this century has been mayors’ recognition that promoting private investment requires protecting public health—and protecting public health requires fighting climate change.

I have personally found that, even in “red” states in the U.S., it is easy to find public officials in the larger cities who recognize this problem and are attuned to the exigencies of climate change. Mayors have far less latitude for climbing on a soap box with opinions rooted in ideology because they must daily account for the welfare of citizens in very practical matters, such as public health and what draws investors and entrepreneurs to their cities in the first place. Hot air, they quickly discover, won’t do the trick.

Staten Island neighborhood, post-Sandy, January 2013

Necessarily, the authors, toward the end of the book, come to terms with the potential consequences of failing to act. Bloomberg, in a chapter titled “New Normals,” describes the state of affairs in New York City after Hurricane Sandy, a storm that could easily have been far more destructive than it already was. For a dozen years, he was the mayor of a city with 520 miles of coastline. To its credit, New York City pursued numerous practical solutions and recognized that no one size fits all, that making the city more resilient would require implementing hundreds of individual steps that dealt with various aspects of the problem. Some of the solutions may seem insignificant, such as restoring oyster beds, but collectively they produce real change over time. Other changes can be more noticeable, such as redesigns of subway systems, changing building codes and flood maps, and rebuilding natural dune systems. The battle against climate change will be won in thousands of ways with thousands of innovations, involving all levels of government, but also businesses, investors, and civic and religious leaders.

All of that leads to the final chapter, “The Way Forward,” which seems to make precisely that point by identifying roles for nearly everyone. Bring your diverse talents to the challenge: the solutions are municipal, political, and financial, and require urban planning, public policy, and investment tools. In the end, although I recognize the potential for readers to quibble with specific details of the prescriptions that Bloomberg and Pope offer, I would still argue that they provide invaluable insights into the practical equations behind a wide range of decisions that our nation and the world face in coming years. The important thing is to choose your favorite practical solution and get busy.

Jim Schwab

Home of the Brave

Book Reviews and Discussion with Jim Schwab

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Disaster Guidance for Rural Communities

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Climate of Hope