Category Archives: Public safety

Gratitude on Parade #7

Posted on by
Reply


GRATITUDE ON PARADE
#gratitudeonparade

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.

Posted to Facebook 3/2/2019

Prisoners of Profit

Posted on by
Reply
Cover photo provided by Random House

It is hard to know where to start in describing why the privatization of prisons is a terrible idea. The effective abandonment of public responsibility for the fate and welfare of people sentenced to incarceration after being convicted of various crimes—some of whom, in recent years, have been exonerated because of revelations of sloppy or corrupt police work—should speak deeply to the conscience. Apparently, in some legislative circles, however, money counts for more. The lobby for private prisons has made headway over time at both the federal and state levels.

To find out whether and how private prisons are particularly dysfunctional, Shane Bauer, a senior reporter for Mother Jones, went undercover at Winn Prison in Louisiana, an operation of Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) under contract with the state. Not totally undercover, mind you. He used his own name, and had CCA checked him out as he applied for a $9-per-hour job as a corrections officer, they might have wondered why someone with his background would want to work there. But CCA has a problem. Guards working just above minimum wage tend not to last long, and CCA needs bodies in uniforms, so the hiring process appears less than diligent. He was hired easily and worked at Winn for four months before it was time to leave. But more on that later.

For the record: Guards at public prisons in Louisiana, Bauer reports, started at $12.50 an hour. Not a lot, but almost 40 percent more than CCA was paying. Undoubtedly with better benefits.

Let me state at the outset that the resulting book, American Prison (Penguin Press, 2018), which follows his reporting in Mother Jones, is not my normal reading. Regular followers of this blog can figure out what I like to read, for the most part. But I am currently a judge in adult nonfiction for a book awards contest for the Society of Midland Authors, so this and many others arrived at my doorstep, day after day, until the deadline arrived earlier this month. Prisons, correctional policy, and the business of punishment are well outside my areas of expertise, and I am glad of that, but I know a book that demands public attention when I see one. This one will be an eye-opening experience even for some cynics. It will also be heart-wrenching for anyone with a moral core or a sense of human decency.

Before I delve into the details, I must express my admiration for Bauer’s courage in even undertaking this project. For one thing, he had prior experience with prisons—as an inmate. Several years ago, while Bauer was covering the Middle East, he and two friends, Josh Fattal and Sarah Shourd, went hiking and wandered too close to the Iranian border in Kurdish Iraq. All three were arrested. He was taken to the notorious Evin prison, where he spent considerable time in isolation before his eventual release. Shourd was released after about a year in a separate prison. That experience might very justifiably have kept most other people from even considering working in a prison, but Bauer has instead developed a commitment to prison reform. Meanwhile, the CEO of CCA, Damon Hininger, earned $4 million in 2018, according to Bauer, 20 times the salary of the director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Just sayin’.

Bauer does not simply relate his experiences at Winn Prison. He has done his homework on the history of making money from prisons and prison labor. He points out that many immigrants to the American colonies were convicts exported from England as indentured servants. Many fortunes in the United States, sometimes vast fortunes, have been built on free (meaning forced) labor from slaves and convicts. But the business of prison labor being used for profit took wing mostly after the Civil War, when the 13th Amendment abolished slavery with one loophole: “except as punishment for a crime.” The opportunity to convict multitudes of African-Americans, as well as a fair number of hapless poor whites, for even minor crimes, opened the door for leasing convict labor. That, in turn, led to horrific conditions as legislatures, especially in the South, sought ways to reduce the costs of penitentiaries by making them profitable—thus, the institution of the prison farm, and later, chain gangs.

That conditions were often horrid on plantations and chain gangs is beyond dispute. Bauer provides ample statistics and documentation including large percentages of deaths in places like Alabama. But individual stories sometimes often serve better to illustrate the moral degradation of prisons for profit. Bauer supplies us with the once infamous case of Martin Tabert, a white, 22-year-old middle-class kid from North Dakota who in 1921 set out to tour the country as a personal adventure. He ran out of money in Florida, between odd jobs along the way, and was arrested and pulled off a train by the sheriff for not having a ticket. Tabert wired his family for money, but before it arrived, he was sold off to the Putnam Lumber Company for three months of work in a turpentine camp. He worked all day in swamp water in “tattered shoes that didn’t fit.” When he had an aching groin and lagged behind other convicts, the “whipping boss” made him lie on the ground for thirty lashes in front of the other convicts. After additional beating and being hit over the head with a strap, he died the following night. The company sent a note to his family saying he died of fever. Not satisfied with the explanation, the family convinced the North Dakota state attorney to go to Florida to investigate. His findings, including the company’s agreement to pay the sheriff $20 for each prisoner he sent to them, produced a major scandal, a lawsuit, and an investigation by the Florida legislature.

All of that highlights the fact that, for decades, some states wavered between episodes of investigation and reform and a desire to limit the prison budget and make the penal system earn money. One might think that, in more enlightened times, we might get past that sort of moral cowardice and come to terms with public responsibilities to provide opportunities for at least the less violent or nonviolent prisoners to make amends, acquire skills, and rehabilitate themselves for participation in what we might hope would become a less dangerous society.

But private prisons, and major problems even at public prisons, persist because America has not yet moved beyond moral indifference and hard-nosed, but short-sighted notions like “throw away the key.” I do not say that to minimize the very real challenges involved in incarcerating felons in the first place. Bauer himself, as he details his experiences as a corrections officer at Winn, confronts much of the moral ambivalence of handling such responsibilities, including the head games and manipulation in which prisoners often engaged at his expense. The moral turmoil of maintaining control of a potentially violent setting is significant, but it also serves to underscore the moral turpitude of trying to do so in a private prison staffed by guards who are earning barely above the minimum wage. That, of course, cuts costs, as does minimizing medical care for inmates and many other short cuts. Bauer plies us with statistics including comparisons of suicide rates between public and private prisons. But again, a personal story highlights a major problem. Bauer tells of one inmate, Damien Coestly, who hangs himself. His suicide is not reported by CCA, he tells us, because he died in the hospital, not at the prison. Never mind that the scenario played out at the prison. Just get the guy out of our prison before he dies on our watch. Good grief.

Now, at some point, you know this whole undercover operation must end. I will not spoil the story for you, nor even share how he got so much information out of the prison on a daily basis. But the epilogue details how and when he decided the time had come to pack up and leave, reporting his resignation by phone from the safety of neighboring Texas. Just read it. It is high drama, making Bauer’s subsequent arrival at the annual shareholders meeting of CCA in Nashville almost anticlimactic, but revealing, nonetheless. If this book does not affect your outlook on the whole subject of incarceration for profit, I swear, there is something wrong with you.

Jim Schwab

Building Codes Matter

Posted on by
Reply

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jim Schwab

Sobering Portrait of a Fiery Future

Posted on by
Reply

 

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 by
Reply

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 by
Reply

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 by
Reply

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

Before and After and a Disaster Course Online

Posted on by
Reply

In two weeks, I will deliver my first online course with the Sustainable City Network (SCN), an organization I’ve become familiar with in recent years. Last October, I blogged about a keynote presentation by Kristin Baja at their annual conference in Dubuque. More recently, I signed an agreement with SCN to become an online instructor, starting August 21 with a course on planning for post-disaster recovery. The note below is theirs, transplanted from the Projects page of my business website at www.jimschwabconsulting.com. If you’d like to learn a lot in a hurry and want me to teach it, I encourage you to follow the link and check it out. I’m working overtime right now to put it all together.

Jim Schwab Signs on as Instructor for SCN

POST-DISASTER RECOVERY PLANNING BEFORE & AFTER – 4-Hour Online Course – Aug. 21 & 22, 2018

Sustainable City Network will host a 4-hour online course Aug. 21 and 22 for anyone responsible for initiatives related to resilience and disaster recovery planning. In the first 2-hour session, we’ll review the overall concept of recovery planning and the need for widespread involvement by various sectors of the community. The second segment will walk participants through information gathering, assessing the scale and spectrum of the disaster, and how to involve the public in meaningful long-term recovery planning. Instructor James Schwab, FAICP, is a planning consultant, public speaker and author who has taught since 2008 as adjunct assistant professor in the University of Iowa School of Urban and Regional Planning, with a master’s course on “Planning for Disaster Mitigation and Recovery.” Attend live or via on-demand video. Cost is $286 when purchased by Aug. 3.

Register now at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/post-disaster-recovery-webinar-series-registration-47309610318

Jim Schwab

Frog-Marching Illinois into the Dark Past

Posted on by
Reply

 

Photo of Gov. Bruce Rauner, from Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Rauner.

Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner, elected in 2014 and up for re-election this year as the Republican nominee, has made manipulative politics the centerpiece of his first term, at the expense of passing a budget through a Democrat-dominated legislature. Illinois has had such split governance before, but other governors at least understood that their first responsibility was to pass a budget so the state could pay its bills, even if that required some compromise. Rauner instead has thrown down the gauntlet repeatedly, often on issues such as right-to-work legislation that were not directly related to the budget but became his bludgeons to get what he wanted. The result was a two-year stalemate that saw Illinois continue many of its programs under court mandates rather than through legislation. Finally, enough Republicans bucked their own governor last year to force the issue and approve some tax increases to begin to pay down the state’s backlog of debts to social service providers, school districts, and state universities, among others.

You might think that, by now, Illinois would have had enough of such counterproductive, divisive politics. Compromise and disagreement always have co-habited in politics, mostly by necessity. Even in the era of Donald Trump, even in a gubernatorial election year, acting like an adult should still count for something.

Instead, Rauner on Monday used his line item veto power to revise a gun law passed by the legislature to attempt to reinstate the death penalty. The gun law would establish a 72-hour “cooling-off” period following the purchase of an assault weapon. Legislators have considered several proposals in response to the recent wave of incidents of gun-related violence around the nation and in the state. Rauner also stated that he believes the 72-hour rule should apply to all gun purchases, and proposed other gun-control measures, but it is hard to take him seriously when he makes the legislation contingent on an unrelated death penalty provision. Rauner understands all too well the political divisions inherent in gun policy, having barely survived a primary challenge from St. Rep. Jeanne Ives, a right-wing Republican from Wheaton, in the conservative evangelical heart of the Chicago suburbs. It is far easier to see a streak of raw cynicism behind Rauner’s move: How desperate are gun-control advocates to get something passed? Desperate enough to split the Democratic base by supporting reinstatement of the death penalty?

It is important to understand just how cynical this is in the context of recent Illinois history. The last Republican governor, George Ryan, placed a moratorium on the death penalty in 2000 because he found himself increasingly troubled by the number of wrongful convictions in Illinois and the possibility that, in denying clemency, he could be signing the death warrant for an innocent person. In 2003, before leaving office, Ryan commuted the sentences of all death row inmates. Despite considerable criticism at the time, Ryan mounted a stout defense of his actions.

This has been no small matter in Illinois. The list of exonerations in recent decades runs on for pages. The City of Chicago has already paid out more than $100 million in reparations for wrongful convictions resulting from forced confessions, extracted through torture, by police detective Jon Burge, subsequently convicted himself in federal court for obstruction of justice and perjury. That is not even close to the end of the story; the overall total of settlements for police misconduct, according to the Better Government Association, totaled well in excess of $500 million by 2014. Thus, the move by Ryan served to open the floodgate of grievances and reservations that finally led the legislature to abolish the death penalty in 2011, signed into law by Gov. Pat Quinn.

In the meantime, Ryan himself went to federal prison on corruption charges, followed a decade later by his Democratic successor, Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who himself seemed intent on proving that one need not be an adult to hold high office. Blagojevich is still appealing a 14-year sentence and hoping for clemency from President Trump. Illinois has had a colorful, but hardly confidence-inspiring, political history.

It is thus small surprise that there is little voter sentiment for what Rauner has now suggested. The notion that it may be better to let a murder convict sit in prison, where at least he or she may still be alive if or when a wrongful conviction is overturned, seems to have become the dominant sentiment among most of the body politic. Illinois does not need to revisit that conclusion so soon after achieving this historic landmark in its long history of criminal jurisprudence. We still don’t know what other innocent persons might be sitting on death row if the state had not ended the death penalty.

Rauner is trying to parse the distinction between potential wrongful convictions and legitimately convicted murderers by limiting the application of the death penalty in his amendatory veto language to those who murder police officers or kill two or more people. Asked why his proposal should not include murder of firefighters or teachers, Rauner declared himself open to expanding the list of victims for which the new death penalty would apply.

And thus, Rauner begins the process of frog-marching Illinois back into its dark past, picking scabs and reopening old wounds from a past that most of us have already chosen to put behind us.

Rauner also introduced in his amendatory veto a new standard of “beyond all doubt” in place of “beyond all reasonable doubt” for such convictions. But in practice, how does a jury, or a judge, truly distinguish one from another? If any doubt exists about convicting a defendant in a murder trial, shouldn’t that doubt be “reasonable” before it is even considered? In light of past miscarriages of justice, who will guarantee a just result before imposing the death sentence? Rauner’s tweaking of language does almost nothing to resolve the manifold doubts that moved public opinion toward the elimination of the death penalty in the first place.

The legislature, as always, has two options. One is for enough Democrats and Republicans, bipartisanly sick of this brazen manipulation, to override the amendatory veto with a three-fifths vote in both houses. The other is to do nothing, in which case the legislation goes nowhere. Legislators are also actively pursuing other measures concerning state licensing of gun dealers. The possibility of approving Rauner’s version of the bill creating the cooling-off period is, in fact, almost nonexistent, and Rauner’s true goal may be to satisfy the Republican right wing by killing the gun-control measure that passed and blaming its failure on Democrats. If so, voters may want to consider just how cynical they want their governor to be.

Jim Schwab

Related links for this article:

“Rauner’s death penalty ploy,” Chicago Tribune editorial

“In Rauner’s gun proposal, politics ahead of policy,” Chicago Tribune column by Dahleen Glanton

“Lawmakers revise plan to license Illinois gun stores,” Chicago Tribune

FEMA Needs to Think about This One

Posted on by
1

Flooded property in Lyons, Colorado, after the St. Vrain River flooded in September 2013.

There is that old saying that, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. To that, one might add that, if you’re thinking about fixing it anyway, you may want to clarify exactly how you wish to improve things and why you think the improvement will be better.

In a February 27 notice in the Federal Register, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) proposed a major change in long-standing hazard mitigation rules regarding grants for acquisitions of flooded properties that made almost no effort to meet that test. I wish I had noticed it earlier because the deadline for comments was April 30. I submitted a brief comment on that date and tried to rally others on Facebook, but the truth is that this one got away from me. I was busy on other fronts. I have subsequently spent a few days gathering background information.

I am very glad that a few national organizations like the Association of State Floodplain Managers (ASFPM), American Rivers, and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) found time to file substantial objections to FEMA’s notice on Property Acquisitions and Relocation for Open Space (Docket ID: FEMA-2018-0006). Their objections raise profound questions about both the process and the substance of FEMA’s proposed changes. Others have also submitted comments.

Here’s the bottom line: For 30 years since the passage of the Stafford Act, which provides the basic framework of most federal disaster law, federal hazard mitigation grant programs have required that lands being acquired from property owners whose homes have been flooded must be placed into perpetual open space following demolition of the structures. The clear intent is to reduce the ongoing exposure of the federal government and the National Flood Insurance Program to repeated losses by precluding further development in those flood-prone areas. By and large, those grants go through state and local governments, which then maintain those open spaces and must periodically certify to FEMA that the lands remain in that status. Today, those grant programs include not only the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program (HMGP), a sometimes-substantial source of mitigation funding that is available after a presidentially declared disaster; the Pre-Disaster Mitigation (PDM) program, created as part of the Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000, which amended the Stafford Act; and Flood Mitigation Assistance (FMA), part of which deals with Severe Repetitive Loss properties, which make up a disproportionate share of overall flood claims.

In the notice, FEMA has announced a new option to allow owners of flooded properties to retain the underlying land while being paid to demolish the structures, thereby permitting them to eventually rebuild on that same flood-prone land. Because mitigation grants have gone from FEMA through states to local governments, those governments have been responsible for the open space programs that result. This new approach would allow the property owner the option of taking the grant directly from FEMA. In its comments on the proposal, ASFPM noted that, in the 2004 NFIP reform legislation, it supported providing FEMA the option to deal directly with property owners, mostly because some local governments have lacked the capacity to monitor the open space requirements, but it still expected that FEMA would consult with those governments before using that option as a means of maintaining consistency with state and local hazard mitigation policy. The current notice makes no mention of such coordination.

Elevation of flooded properties remains a viable option in many cases.

It is not as if these owners do not have other options for mitigating future flood damage, including elevation of residential structures above the 100-year base flood elevation established on FEMA flood insurance rate maps, or floodproofing the structure. But, the thinking seems to be, some owners will be more willing to demolish if they can retain the land. One possibility for some might be to retain the land, rebuild in due course, and flip the improved property while leaving the NFIP with continued flood loss exposures. How that helps federal taxpayers or other flood insurance rate payers is not especially clear.

The Federal Register announcement does nothing to make that clear. If you follow the link and read the notice, you are likely to experience my reaction, which was that I felt left in the dark regarding the rationale for making this move, which is not explained. Nor does FEMA provide any data to support the idea that this initiative would do anything to reduce flood losses. The opposite could easily prove true.

In an April 26 article in Insurance Journal, former FEMA administrator Craig Fugate offers some support for the new option by noting that placing land in permanent open space through a buyout is often a “hard sell.” That may well be, but it is partly because the solution is meant to be effective and lasting. It is also not as if the approach has lacked success. As NRDC notes in its comments, citing ASFPM case studies, more than 30,000 floodplain properties have been removed from development since 1993, many of them following major cataclysms such as the 1993 and 2008 Midwest floods and various hurricanes.

Perhaps more telling is the question of homeowners’ motivation in making the difficult decision to sell and relocate. The idea that people would necessarily prefer to be able to rebuild in the same location is not as clear or straightforward as some might assume, though there are, no doubt, advocates of property rights who would prefer to create the new option. But this emotional decision contains some factors that should not be ignored. Perhaps straight to the point is this comment from American Rivers:

Our experience working with floodplain managers has taught us that convincing property owners to accept a buyout is an emotional and difficult decision, and many are only willing to accept the buyout offer after they are assured that the property will be preserved as open space for the good of the public. Offering direct grants that allow new construction where a structure was demolished could be at odds with local hazard mitigation plans and efforts to acquire flood prone properties for open space. FEMA should instead be working to support the implementation of open space goals in local and state hazard mitigation grants.

In other words, many of those choosing a buyout, having suffered the damages of severe and repetitive losses from flooding, and aware of the larger issues concerning the public good in these situations, would rather ensure that nothing like this happens again, at least in their community. But what happens to the motivation undergirding their willingness to sell if they become acutely aware that their neighbors now have the option of prolonging the pain by not placing the land in permanent open space? Will they still feel that they are accomplishing anything by pursuing the traditional option? In any event, are these not the people whose choices we most want to honor for the greater good of the community?

City-acquired open space in Cedar Falls, Iowa, near the Cedar River.

The essential reason all this is important is that we have learned much over the years about the natural and beneficial functions of floodplains, which include soil enrichment, wildlife habitat, reduced flood severity, and reductions in erosion and stormwater runoff, to name a few, in addition to the potential recreational functions of waterfront parks and open space. All this is in addition to the fiscal benefits of reducing future floodplain losses in the areas affected. If all that is not reason enough for FEMA to pause, rethink the question, and at least offer some solid scientific and economic documentation of the benefits of the proposed new approach, then I am not sure what is. Otherwise, count me a serious skeptic.

Jim Schwab