Tag Archives: flood

Resources for Planners to Address Hazards

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Sri Lankans dedicate new housing built in 2005, after the Indian Ocean tsunami, in a Buddhist ceremony.

Sri Lankans dedicate new housing built in 2005, after the Indian Ocean tsunami, in a Buddhist ceremony.

One benefit of increased attention to hazards and climate change within the planning profession is a growing array of valuable literature that can benefit practicing planners and widen the scope of thinking on the subject among academics. This review of books published within the past year or so is intended to highlight some of this new literature and offer some comparisons on the focus and practical value the authors provide.

Because urban planning is ultimately about people and the built environment, it may make sense to start this survey with two books that examine the context within which risk happens. Kathleen Tierney, a professor of sociology at the University of Colorado in Boulder and director of the Natural Hazards Center there, sets out in The Social Roots of Risk: Producing Disasters, Promoting Resilience (Stanford University Press, 2014) to reorient our thinking away from the idea that individual natural phenomena—earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, etc.—“cause” the death and destruction that we often associate with them. In fact, she says, the death and destruction, particularly in the modern world, is an artifact of the social decisions that produce and, equally important, distribute risk differentially among populations, often producing widely varying impacts. In the opening chapter, she states, “the organizing idea for this book is that disasters and their impacts are socially produced, and that the forces driving the production of disaster are embedded in the social order itself.”

By itself, the idea that disaster losses result from the collision of natural forces with the built environment should not surprise any planners with a modicum of intelligence. And the built environment is inevitably the result of both individual and community decisions. The devil of Tierney’s thesis lies in the details: paying attention not only to all the social, institutional, and political decisions that either enhance or mitigate risk but to how those decisions get made and for what reasons. It is clear that those impacts are anything but randomly distributed and that most are avoidable, yet the litany of losses marches on. Tierney notes that a great deal of professional attention in recent decades has focused on how people perceive risk, a legitimate area of inquiry, but not nearly as much has focused on the origins of risk and how it was socially constructed. There are reasons, after all, why a 7.0 magnitude earthquake in Haiti kills an estimated 300,000 (but who really knows?) yet only dozens at most in California, and why the 1,800 who died during Hurricane Katrina included overwhelmingly disproportionate numbers of the economically disadvantaged.

Most planners work in local or regional government, and they serve power structures that must make the decisions, even when they choose to do nothing, that affect these outcomes. In that sense, some of Tierney’s theories and conclusions may challenge our comfort zones because they imply (or state directly) a need to challenge power with regard to these issues. For precisely that reason, I recommend reading it. Most social progress results from stepping outside traditional comfort zones. For planners, it is also within our ethical and legal responsibilities to help protect public health, safety, and welfare.

Those who wish to examine more closely how differential risk affects more vulnerable subsections of community populations can follow up with a case in point provided by Michael R. Greenberg, professor at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers in New Jersey, where he had a front-row seat to observe Superstorm Sandy in 2012. As a baby boomer with aging parents, he says, the event inspired him to examine the issues such events pose for seniors. Protecting Seniors Against Environmental Disasters: From Hazards and Vulnerability to Prevention and Resilience (Routledge, 2014) closely dissects the vulnerabilities of the rising generation of seniors among baby boomers. It exposes the resulting collision of demographics with natural hazards and often inadequate public policy in considering the reduced resilience that may result. At the same time, he notes that many seniors in good mental and physical health can become assets in using their to help build the very resilience many communities will need in coming decades, if only their communities learn to focus these social resources to address and help solve such problems. My only regret after reading this thoughtful book is that the publisher chose to make it so expensive ($145 hardcover), but perhaps a library or electronic copy can make it more accessible.

Six authors, mostly at Texas A&M University (TAMU) have addressed the question of resilience head-on in Planning for Community Resilience: A Handbook for Reducing Vulnerability to Disasters (Island Press, 2014). Jamie Hicks Masterson, program director of Texas Target Communities (TAMU); Walter Gillis Peacock, professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning and director of the Hazards Reduction & Recovery Center (TAMU); Shannon S. Van Zandt, associate professor in the department and director of the Center for Housing and Urban Development (TAMU); Himanshu Grover, assistant professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Regional Planning at the University of Buffalo; Lori Feild Schwarz, comprehensive planning manager for the City of Plano, Texas (and formerly in Galveston); and John T. Cooper, Jr., associate professor of practice in the same department at TAMU, have combined somehow to produce an almost seamless document that lays out a very practical approach to understanding and developing resilience within communities. The book is littered with tables, checklists, and exercises to walk planners and city officials through the necessary analysis to grasp the impacts of everyday planning decisions in connection with natural hazards. The book tends to rely heavily on the Texas and Gulf Coast experiences of the authors, but as they note with a wry sense of humor, “We like to say that if you can plan in Texas, you can plan anywhere.” For the practicing planner, this may well be the most useful of the five books reviewed here.

Two other books represent the rising level of interest among planners in addressing the impacts of climate change, a subject implicit, and sometimes explicitly expressed, in the three books noted above. One of these, Local Climate Action Planning (Island Press, 2012), by Michael R. Boswell, Adrienne I. Greve, and Tammy L. Seale, is actually three years old but still a very useful and well-informed primer for those planners and city officials undertaking to address climate change. The primary focus is actually not hazards but climate action plans, which focus on mitigating climate change by using public policy and planning to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For climate change skeptics, it is worth noting that many of the resulting strategies have local environmental and economic benefits that add to the allure of effective climate action plans. While much of the book addresses techniques like inventorying local greenhouse gas emissions and developing reduction strategies, nonetheless, the authors devote one chapter to climate adaptation and outline means of assessing community sectors for vulnerability to climate change impacts.

Finally, Adapting to Climate Change: Lessons from Natural Hazards Planning (Springer, 2014), assembled from a variety of contributions by editors Bruce C. Glavovic, of New Zealand’s Massey University, and Gavin P. Smith, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, brings together the subjects of climate and natural hazards in a way that points to future successes in addressing the increased vulnerabilities associated with climate change. Unlike the other books, it is less a single narrative than an anthology using examples of climate change adaptation from around the world. It is unquestionably the most cosmopolitan and far-reaching of the five books in its aspirations for global relevance, using case studies from South Africa, Peru, New Zealand, and the South Pacific, among other locations, in addition to the United States. The two editors first met while working in different capacities along the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina and have collaborated periodically ever since. Both have been anxious to explore and explain the critical roles of planning and governance in managing exposure to natural disasters, especially as “practitioners from diverse backgrounds  . . . are faced with the grand challenge of adapting to climate change. Planners who like to mine the experience of other cities and regions in case studies will find plenty to contemplate as they review the mixed international track record of community resilience in facing floods, coastal storms, and other weather-related phenomena influenced by a changing global climate with its wide-ranging variations in specific local settings. It may take a while to digest this substantial book, but it is probably well worth the effort.

 

Jim Schwab

Bounce Forward? But, of Course!

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In recent years, there has been growing interest in and activity around the concept of resilience. For many people long involved in trying to make the world’s communities safer from disasters, the interest has been heartwarming. The underlying idea is that a community should be better positioned to “bounce back” from a disaster, recovering more efficiently and quickly. A major natural disaster—tornado, hurricane, earthquake—need not be a death sentence or leave a community flat on its back for years. There are numerous ways in which we can do better. We can prepare better, mitigate better, plan better—but to what end?

Some resilience advocates are almost scared by the current interest. After all, look at what happened to the concept of sustainability, subjected by now to years of corporate whitewash and a relentless watering down of the essential message, as originally framed, that we have a moral obligation to future generations to leave them with the same opportunities to enjoy prosperity by reducing our ecological footprint, taking better care of the earth’s resources. Sustainability by its very nature ought to be challenging, yet too many things are too easily labeled sustainable, and the word loses its moral authority in the process.

Could the message of resilience be watered down in the same way?

For a long time, federal and state policies with regard to disaster assistance focused on supporting no more than the replacement of what existed before disaster struck. We’ll help you build back, but we won’t help you build a Cadillac. As federal policy, particularly within the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), increasingly emphasized hazard mitigation in order to minimize losses in future disasters, however, the idea behind such thinking became increasingly suspect. If you could make a community more resistant to future disasters, if you could reduce that community’s future reliance on outside assistance in managing recovery, why would you not want to make that investment? In the 1993 Midwest floods, in particular, the use of federal Hazard Mitigation Grant Program money to buy out flood-prone properties and create public open space in floodplains at least meant removing some development from harm’s way. That opened the door to even more forward thinking. Some relocated communities, like Valmeyer, Illinois, went much farther and adopted green building codes. The “green rebuild” of Greensburg, Kansas, after its 2007 tornado built on this idea.

DSCF1844Indeed, is there really anything wrong with leaving a community better off than it was before? By the time the Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force issued its report in 2013, this bridge appears to have been crossed. The task force answer was clearly that we want very much to rebuild communities that would be more resilient in the face of future disasters. Ideally, that would not mean that such communities would merely regain their pre-disaster status quo more quickly, although that seems to have been the goal for more than a few communities after Sandy. The bigger vision just never materialized. At the same time, however, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has been seeking ways, most recently through the National Disaster Resilience Competition, to encourage states and communities to think about improvements that, in particular, instill greater resilience among their most vulnerable populations.

The question won’t go away, and fortunately, there are plenty of people, particularly within the growing community of climate change adaptation professionals, who remain engaged. This is a very good thing because, in the face of phenomena like climate change and sea level rise, hazard mitigation faces the prospect of running hard merely to stay in place, a la Alice in Wonderland. Elevate homes, retreat from the seashore, and you find in another generation that you have gained little or nothing because average temperatures are rising and the sea is following you to higher ground. This is precisely why the latest guidance from FEMA on hazard mitigation assistance insists that states and communities must begin to account for climate change in the hazard mitigation plans that qualify them for federal grants. There is little sense in spending federal money to mitigate the same problem repeatedly when you can do it once with more foresight.

At the risk of oversimplifying the underlying questions, which can and do fill volumes of scholarly and professional analysis these days, I lay this out as the background for introducing a remarkable new document unleashed into this debate by The Kresge Foundation. Bounce Forward, a strategy paper from Island Press and the foundation, which funded the project, raises the question of what constitutes “urban resilience in the era of climate change.” At the outset, it confronts the fear I cited at the beginning of this blog post—that of losing the essential poignancy of the message of resilience. It states:

But the transformative potential of resilience is far from assured. There are several potential pitfalls. Notably, if resilience is conceived simply as “bouncing back” from disaster, it could prove harmful, by reinforcing systems that compound the risks our cities face. More insidiously, the concept of resilience could be co-opted by opponents of meaningful reform. And if efforts to build resilience do not also mitigate climate change, they will be of limited use.

I sense an echo here. For some years, at the American Planning Association and some allied organizations, we have talked of “building back better” as the real goal of disaster recovery. (See Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery: Next Generation.)* But resilience is about much more than effective recovery from disasters. It is also about positioning a community’s human and institutional resources to respond to all manner of setbacks, whether stemming from chronic decline and social pressures, or from the impact of nature on the built environment, to deal more creatively with those problems so as to evolve a society that can help its least advantaged sectors in responding to those threats and to become more prosperous and confident. A commitment to social justice must be inherent in the formula. A society that imposes unfair environmental burdens upon, and denies opportunities to, its most economically challenged elements cannot be resilient in any meaningful way. Such a society is merely perpetuating its vulnerabilities. A community is only as strong as its weakest link. In an “era of rapid change,” the Kresge report says, in effect, that weakest link is getting weaker, inequalities are growing and will be magnified by the impacts of climate change, and the concept of resilience means nothing or worse if it does not address these issues.

The aim of Bounce Forward is to create a framework for doing so. Stronger social cohesion and more inclusive community decision making are among the ingredients essential to this transformation. What’s more, as such reports go, this one is a very good read.

Jim Schwab

*I wish to note that, at the invitation of The Kresge Foundation, I have participated over the past year as a member of its Project Advisory Committee for a study of community resilience being prepared by Stratus Consultants, which is still being completed. I also represented APA at a Kresge Foundation symposium on resilience at the Garrison Institute, held last June in Garrison, NY. Because of our common agendas, APA has had an active interest in supporting the Kresge initiatives on this subject.

Update to “Don’t Say Those Words”

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In response to my good friend, Allison Hardin, planner and floodplain manager in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, posting on Facebook the article referenced in my last post from the Post & Courier covering my and Matt Hauer’s presentations last week at the Coastal GeoTools conference, another long-time friend, James Quigley, who teaches at Stonybrook University on Long Island, has brought to our attention another article about Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s unofficial policy that state employees in various agencies not use the words “climate change.” This one is from the Miami Herald, further elaborating on a situation first brought to light by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting. Check it out.

Jim Schwab

Report from Coastal GeoTools 2015

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Somewhat dark, this is what happens when you don't remember to charge a camera with a flash. :)

Somewhat dark, this is what happens when you don’t remember to charge a camera with a flash. 🙂

Since Sunday evening, I have been in North Charleston, South Carolina, attending the 2015 Coastal GeoTools conference, hosted by the Association of State Floodplain Managers with support from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. I intend to post more material from this conference as the opportunity arises, but as is often the case, especially where one is both a participant and presenter, time is often tight and inadequate to write the sorts of thoughtful analyses and comments I prefer to make the hallmark of this blog. But look for more in coming days.

In the meantime, however, at least with regard to a session on coastal inundation at which I presented Tuesday morning, the local press (Post & Courier) made my job easier because I can provide the following link to coverage of our panel: http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20150331/PC16/150339871/1177/researcher-millions-could-be-displaced-by-rising-oceans-by-2100

I will say for now that this is a truly useful and informative conference for the attendees, who explore uses of geospatial technology to help the nation and coastal communities solve vexing problems of coastal hazards, sea level rise, and coastal development. This is a thriving area of discussion, and there is a good deal of fertile work evident among the presentations so far.

Jim Schwab

Seattle Hosts the Nation’s Planners

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Housing in Seattle along the harbor All photos by Carolyn Torma

Housing in Seattle along the harbor
All photos by Carolyn Torma

It appears the American Planning Association may break all its attendance records at its annual National Planning Conference next month in Seattle. The last previous record of about 7,000 was also set in Seattle in 1999, so there must be something about the city that both supports and attracts urban planners and those interested in the subject. Perhaps it is the whole Pacific Northwest that sets a tone in favor of well-planned communities; Portland, Oregon, for example, has long been regarded as uniquely progressive in this regard. But Seattle and King County, which includes the city, have been no slouches in embracing forward-looking initiatives aimed at achieving sustainable, environmentally friendly communities. Former King County Executive Ron Sims, who led many of those efforts, will be speaking at the conference, as will Julián Castro, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Sims served with HUD as Deputy Secretary under Secretary Shaun Donovan before returning to Seattle to lead the Washington Health Benefit Exchange Board.

In planning for a plenary presentation at another conference in July, the Natural Hazards Workshop, as well as for an article assignment for Planning, the APA monthly magazine, later this year, I have been assembling data on some important changes in the interests of American planners over time as expressed in conference session attendance. I have been around long enough to recall APA conferences 20 years ago when it was difficult to muster significant attendance at sessions addressing issues connected with natural hazards and disaster recovery, and sessions addressing issues related to climate change did not exist. This year, in Seattle, APA will host an entire track of 18 sessions devoted to Planning and Climate Change, and my guess is that most of them will be well attended. And that is without counting other sessions addressing disasters without the climate change component as part of the subject matter. I will be participating in some of both, but speaking at one in the very first round on Saturday morning, April 18, on “Climate Change Projections and Community Planning.” The audience can expect a rather heady deep dive into the question of how best we can integrate data generated by the science of climate change into hazard mitigation and other community plans.

This is of no small significance to communities seeking federal hazard mitigation assistance (HMA) because the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s new FY 2015 guidance for its grant programs now includes a section now includes tools and resources for climate change and resiliency considerations. Moreover, a new presidential executive order makes inclusion of climate change factors a preferred method for assessing flood risk under the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard, for which public comments are due by April 6. To encourage consideration of these factors, FEMA has incorporated sea level rise into its HMA cost-benefit analysis tool. This is a major step.

Climate change also has implications in planning for drought and urban heat emergencies, and I will serve also on a panel organized by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Program Office on “Coping with Heat and Drought,” which will include some valuable integration of the impacts of such challenges on public health. Elsewhere in the conference, my Washington-based APA colleague, Anna Ricklin, manager of APA’s Planning and Community Health Center, will be busy with sessions addressing the relationships of urban design and public health, such as fostering physically active communities, another vital frontier in the field of urban planning.

Vertical garden in Seattle

Vertical garden in Seattle

All of this makes an ecologically aware city like Seattle a fascinating laboratory in which to conduct mobile workshops and other conference events for knowledge-hungry attendees. At this point, I will commend fellow practitioners of my own professional for their intellectual acuity and curiosity. I have attended and spoken at many kinds of conferences over the years, but I have seen few at which the professionals involved show such enthusiasm for new knowledge. They attend the sessions, they ask questions with a passion, and otherwise demonstrate that they truly care about the work they perform in communities on a daily basis, whether as local, state, or federal government staff, or as consultants, land-use attorneys, or academic researchers. (The largest portion of APA members is and long has been employed in local government in some capacity.)

Let's see, the last time I visited the Pike Street Market, I came home with a gel ice-packed 7-lb. steelhead salmon, promptly consumed that weekend by family friends in a backyard cookout.

Let’s see, the last time I visited the Pike Street Market, I came home with a gel ice-packed 7-lb. steelhead salmon, promptly consumed that weekend by family friends in a backyard cookout.

For all the fascination with cutting-edge topics like climate change and public health, however, there will remain the traditional hard-core topics of modern urban planning such as zoning, economic development, transportation, and capital improvements programming, for these are the tools that must absorb and focus many of these emerging concerns into a means of addressing them through regulations, incentives, other public policies and better design practices. The overarching goal is to create livable and lasting, sustainable, resilient communities.

Jim Schwab

Yes, Floods Are More Frequent

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If you live in the Midwest, you’re over, say, 50 years old, and you’ve had the impression that floods are happening more frequently than they used to, your memory is not playing tricks on you. A pair of researchers at the University of Iowa have studied the daily records collected at stream gauges in 14 states by the U.S. Geological Survey from 1962-2011. Four times as many stations (264, or 34 percent) showed an increase as showed a decrease during that time (66, or nine percent).

Iman Mallakpour and Gabriele Villarini published their findings, “The Changing Nature of Flooding across the Central United States,” in the February 9 advance online edition of Nature Climate Change, a scientific journal. Villarini is an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, and Mallakpour is a graduate student in the program who served as lead author on the paper. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Institute for Water Resources, the Iowa Flood Center, and IIHR-Hydroscience & Engineering supported their work, along with the National Science Foundation.

The two authors studied the data for both changes in peak flow—the magnitude of the events—and the frequency with which floods occurred. They did not find a statistically significant pattern of increased large events, but the data on increasing frequency of flooding was quite convincing. They also examined seasonal differences and found some differentiation between the central Midwest and its perimeters, where the pattern of increased flooding was generally less pronounced. They also found an “overall good match” when they overlaid the areas of increasing flood frequency with those experiencing heavy rainfall events. Although the two authors did not go so far as to relate these results to climate change, this does not mean there is no connection; they simply chose not to speculate beyond the information provided by the stream flow data they examined. As the article states, “a direct attribution of these changes in discharge, precipitation and temperature to human impacts on climate represents a much more complex problem that is very challenging to address using only observational records.”

However, as this blog has noted previously (“Iowa Faces Its Fluid Future”), this tracks well with the prevailing theory among climate scientists that, as the atmosphere becomes warmer, it can hold more moisture, resulting in more intense events of higher precipitation—offset, at other times, by an increased propensity for drought. The expected tendency is for a flattening of the bell curve of weather events—more on the extreme ends in both directions, lessening the dominance of more moderate events. The article by Mallakpour and Villarini is one more in a long string of indicators that change is afoot with regard to weather and flooding patterns. The science of climate change has not been and will not be built on one or two studies, but hundreds, if not thousands. That is why the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change involves thousands of researchers from 195 countries. It is important to pay attention to both individual pieces of evidence and its massive overall accumulation to understand how the case for the human impact was built over time.

Jim Schwab

The Challenge of Creating Resilient Communities

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A scene from the Jersey shore after Hurricane Sandy.

A scene from the Jersey shore after Hurricane Sandy.

Resilience has typically been defined as an ability to bounce back from, and to withstand, shocks and crises. These can include natural disasters but also terrorist strikes, sudden economic downturns, or major industrial accidents. The term was borrowed from the field of ecology, but it has taken root in community planning and has important implications for how and where we build and for the kinds of human capital we develop. It is inherently a complex topic.

That complexity raises the question of how entities outside communities can encourage or foster greater resilience within them. Is it all up to local planners and elected officials, or is there a role for state and federal governance and perhaps private philanthropy? If so, what is that role?

Last fall, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), followed up on its Rebuild by Design initiative that followed Hurricane Sandy by unveiling the National Disaster Resilience Competition (NDRC). The new effort makes nearly $1 billion in grants available to eligible jurisdictions. Details about the HUD Notice of Funding Availability (NOFA) and the overall competition are available elsewhere on the APA website, on the HUD website, and on several other sites allied to or supportive of the competition (also listed on the APA page linked above), most notably including the Rockefeller Foundation. The idea was to encourage communities to develop proposals that would address community resilience needs in a holistic fashion. At the same time, because the money was tied to the Sandy supplemental appropriations for HUD’s Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery program, the proposals needed to tie those needs back to a presidential disaster declaration between 2011 and 2013, and meet other CDBG requirements relating to vulnerable and disadvantaged sectors of the community. Those requirements establish a threshold of eligibility for states and communities that can be challenging to meet while setting their sights even higher. In all, the NOFA listed 67 eligible jurisdictions. These included 48 states (only South Carolina and Nevada had no declarations during the relevant period), and 19 other counties and municipalities, plus Puerto Rico. Louisiana and Illinois had adjacent local jurisdictions eligible in both the Chicago and New Orleans metropolitan areas.

Because only HUD can legally explain the NOFA but is unable to directly help jurisdictions develop their applications, the Rockefeller Foundation, already supporting other resilience initiatives, chose to support the competition by providing such technical assistance. It did this with extensive help from HR&A Advisors, a consulting firm, by organizing five regional “resilience academies,” in Atlanta, Seattle, Kansas City, Boston, and Chicago. These provided an excellent vehicle for using the talents of at least some of the APA members who volunteered their time for our Planners Resilience Network, whose names we shared with both HUD and Rockefeller. The Rockefeller consultants enlisted dozens of design professionals as subject matter experts (SMEs) and facilitators to staff the workshops. I participated as an SME in the Chicago academy, which was held January 29-30 at the James Hotel. Both groups were assigned during the events to specific applicant teams as they worked through their ideas, but also participated in critiques of presentations by other applicants. HUD personnel were on hand to answer questions about the NOFA, and Enterprise Community Partners representatives held counseling sessions with each applicant team.

The overall idea was to help the teams refine their ideas and broaden their thinking about resilience, overcome siloes and boundaries, and collaborate with neighbors. Judging from my own experience, I would say that in most cases the applicant teams moved quite far from their initial concepts in just two days. There is a tendency in local and state government to tailor proposals narrowly to fit the needs of highly stovepiped funding sources at the federal level, which can be notoriously limiting with regard to the range of acceptable options. Even HUD in its FAQs has broadened its interpretation of its own NOFA in recent weeks.

One challenge in particular that I noted in Chicago was that many of the issues states and other jurisdictions face do not stop at their boundaries. In the Midwest, for instance, major river systems—the Missouri, Mississippi, and Ohio, in particular—form those boundaries, but the floodplain management issues clearly involve both sides, whether it be Wisconsin/Minnesota or Ohio/Kentucky, to name just two examples. There can be little doubt that similar issues prevail across the country. What the academy organizers—and HUD—hoped to convey was that collaboration across such boundaries not only would be rewarded but is absolutely vital to long-term regional success in creating disaster resilience.

The formula worked in part because it minimized set presentations in order to maximize team discussions and feedback. There were basic presentations about the concept of resilience, defining risks, and how to apply innovative thinking to resilience problems. More importantly, however, the academies focused their efforts on a well-considered progression of exercises throughout the two days. These exercises led participants through the identification of resilience opportunities in their target communities, to understanding the risks they face, then to expanding their approach, before the first critique, which forced each team to decide on the “elevator speech” that would communicate the key elements of their proposal in about five minutes, subject to feedback from the SMEs and facilitators. Mastering the art of identifying a handful of key bullet points about a complex proposal to increase community or regional resilience for a particular area in reference to particular hazards and disaster events is not as easy as it may sound, and it probably does not even sound easy.  It is fair to say that some master this challenge better than others, but what is important is that all went home with the experience of having to defend and rethink their ideas and how they could be tied together into a coherent strategy that met also met the threshold requirements for the HUD grants. That is no small request to make of these teams, but many were game to at least try to rise to the occasion. That is progress.

The second, slightly shorter day allowed these teams to refine their approach through a leverage and consultation exercise, followed by a post-lunch second critique, closing out with an opportunity to finalize their approach before going home. The morning also offered five topic area breakout sessions where applicants could choose to learn more about particular hazard types or about leverage and creative financing.

Although the more conceptual Phase I proposals are due March 16, allowing HUD to winnow the list for the Phase II proposals that will nail down specific projects, it is virtually a certainty that nearly every team will be meeting with its counterparts at home to take their ideas farther and respond to the challenges posed during the academies. No one ever said planning is easy. Planning with the goal of achieving community resilience is even tougher. Representatives for the Rockefeller Foundation repeatedly emphasized that, even for communities that do not make the cut, the process of participating in these academies may still enrich their approaches to such issues for the future. No one should have gone home empty-handed.

Jim Schwab

The Next Generation of Disaster Recovery Guidance

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It is always an honor to be able to lead an effort that advances the state of practice with regard to a subject as critical to the nation, and the world, as planning for post-disaster recovery. As readers will have noted from this blog and website, for the last four years or so I was in that position as both the manager of the APA Hazards Planning Center and project manager for Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery: Next Generation, a project that has included the production of an APA Planning Advisory Service Report (No. 576) of the same name. We wish to acknowledge the support of the Federal Emergency Management Agency through an agreement with APA, which made the project possible. I personally wish to thank the members of the project team who contributed to the report and the project overall, who are noted in the acknowledgments page of the report. Particularly, these include my co-authors: Laurie A. Johnson, Kenneth C. Topping, Allison Boyd, and J. Barry Hokanson.

The report came off the press at the end of last year, and became available online last week on the APA website. With it have come some other resources we were able to create:

  • A model pre-event recovery ordinance to help communities guide the recovery process
  • A new resource list of federal programs for assistance with local disaster recovery needs
  • Still to come, a series of briefing papers on subtopics of disaster recovery (stay tuned)

The purpose of this posting is simply to link interested readers to these resources, which include a free PDF download of the 200-page report, which we believe will set the standard in coming years for best practices in the arena of preparing communities beforehand for potential disasters and for planning afterwards for effective recovery. Please use the link above to access all of these resources.

 

Jim Schwab

Interview with Boulder, Colorado, Mayor

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This is one of those short posts that takes you to a different blog, but one for which I have direct responsibilities–the Recovery News blog at the American Planning Association website. We posted last Friday a video interview with Matthew Appelbaum, the mayor of Boulder, Colorado, exploring the lessons the city learned from the floods that afflicted the city in September 2013. Appelbaum discusses the road to recovery, the unique circumstances of the flood, and the fact that “resilience is the watchword.” I hope you enjoy listening. Click here.

Jim Schwab

Living in an Integrated World

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Little more than a week ago (October 28-29), I was participating in a conference in Broomfield, Colorado, north of Denver, sponsored by the Association of State Floodplain Managers, a national organization of 16,000 members dedicated to better floodplain management in the U.S. The conference was the Sixth Triennial Flood Mitigation and Floodproofing Workshop. Along with Julie Baxter, a former staff member of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Region VIII office in Denver, who recently left to join the new consulting firm, Risk Prepared, as a planner, I presented a mini-workshop on “Mitigation Planning Integration with Comprehensive Planning.”

Julie Baxter's opening slide, borrowing a cartoon from the Natural Hazards Observer

Julie Baxter’s opening slide, borrowing a cartoon from the Natural Hazards Observer

The first thing I am aware of is the need to explain what that actually means. It sounds like technical jargon, right? Or at least like a typical Germanic-language habit of stacking up nouns atop each other, most of which actually function as modifiers for the words that follow. Which is to say that technical English tends to use nouns as adjectives, but the end result sounds like gobbledygook. I know.

So here’s the story for those not already immersed in disaster lingo: In 2000, the U.S. Congress passed the Disaster Mitigation Act. Troubled by the rising costs of post-disaster rebuilding, Congress wanted to make states and communities more accountable for how they used federal disaster assistance. The law, in essence, stated that, henceforth, states and communities would receive no federal grants for hazard mitigation projects unless those states and communities had prepared a plan that won FEMA approval for meeting the standards of the statute (and FEMA’s implementing regulations) and was subsequently approved by the governing body, for example, a city council. Fourteen years later, FEMA can count the law a substantial success in that it has induced more than 20,000 local jurisdictions to prepare or adopt such plans. (Communities can choose to participate in a multijurisdictional plan instead of preparing one that is uniquely their own.)

That sounds wonderful, but there has been a problem, and it is only slowly going away. FEMA’s middle initials, after all, are “Emergency Management,” and the agency’s innate tendency is to stovepipe its programs through the state level with its equivalent agencies—state-level emergency management agencies or departments. They, in turn, work with their local partners. All of that is wonderful with regard to disaster response, which defines the core programs of emergency management—evacuation, search and rescue, restoring utility services, etc. Hazard mitigation, however, deals with permanent or long-term ways of reducing the probabilities of a community suffering loss of lives and property in disasters. Much hazard mitigation necessarily implicates issues of land-use planning and regulatory controls, such as zoning and subdivision regulations, which are largely the expertise of urban planners. The issue is both how and where we build. Success in this realm depends heavily on getting urban planners and emergency managers to collaborate, but often it has not happened. The emergency managers prepare the local hazard mitigation plan to comply with DMA, and the planners are either uninterested or on the outside of the process, looking in.  None of that expedites the efficient implementation of cost-effective hazard mitigation measures in our communities, and the losses from natural disasters continue to mount, while development in hazardous areas is not always questioned in a timely or effective manner.

The solution is to bake hazard mitigation into all aspects of the local planning process, from visioning and goal setting through comprehensive planning and on to financing and implementing the plan’s vision with regard to creating a more disaster-resilient community (presuming such a vision exists within the plan). One solution is to make the local hazard mitigation plan required by DMA for funding eligibility either part of, referenced by, or an element in, the local comprehensive plan that guides development in the community. That was, in effect, the underlying vision of a Planning Advisory Service Report we produced (and I edited and co-authored) at the American Planning Association in 2010.

In Broomfield on October 28, I took the matter one step further. I strongly suggested it was now time not only to include hazard mitigation in the local comprehensive plan, but some type of pre-event planning for post-disaster recovery as well. I announced that APA in December is due to release our newest effort, funded by FEMA like the hazard mitigation study, titled Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery: Next Generation, a complete overhaul of an earlier study we produced in 1998, Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery and Reconstruction. There are certain things we can do before we know what specific kind of disaster will strike our communities, and when, I told the assembled planners, and some things that must await knowledge of a specific pattern of damage resulting from a disaster. Those we can address beforehand, in order to give our communities a leg up in kick-starting their recovery, are the organization of a recovery management structure and certain policy goals guiding the recovery effort. With those two key points already settled, a community can regain crucial weeks and months that might otherwise be wasted after a disaster in establishing an effective strategy for planning and implementing recovery. In fact, as part of the new report, APA just released our new Model Recovery Ordinance, prepared by Kenneth C. Topping, a veteran California planner who, among other experience, was once the planning director for the city of Los Angeles. He has worked on and studied this question for a number of years and developed incomparable expertise. I have enjoyed working with him for the past two decades.

None of this should surprise anyone, even outside the field of disaster preparedness, who has thought more broadly about the need for more integrated approaches to managing the problems of business and government in the modern world. The old ways of compartmentalizing and bureaucratizing our responses to social and business problems is still with us, of course, but it is a dying breed. The path to creative solutions and business and community resilience lies with those who can think about and pursue integrated, collaborative solutions.

 

Jim Schwab