Tag Archives: hurricane

Solar Power and Resilient Communities

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One of the most critical lifelines for survival for many citizens in a community stricken by disaster is the electrical grid. Without power, food spoils in refrigerators. Without power, one cannot recharge a cell phone, which may be a critical means of seeking help. Without power, one may freeze in the dark.

Last Thursday, February 26, I participated as a panelist in a webinar hosted by the American Planning Association as part of its involvement in the U.S. Department of Energy’s SunShot Solar Outreach Partnership. With two other speakers, Robert Sanders and Stephan Schmidt, I helped explore solutions to such helplessness through what is becoming known as solar resilience. The idea is simple: through a combination of solar photovoltaic systems and battery storage for the electric power produced, critical facilities—and even homes in vulnerable neighborhoods—can rely instead on solar power that does not need to rely on a functioning grid to power the buildings to which it was connected. Instead, it can provide reliable backup electricity in a crisis for shelters, hospitals, and public safety facilities like police and fire stations. Communities no longer need to be at the mercy of an electrical power grid that can fail in an emergency, as happened in Hurricane Katrina and, more recently, Hurricane Sandy.

My colleagues certainly have done their homework. Stephan Schmidt, now a planner in San Luis Obispo County, California, researched the topic in depth while a graduate student at California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) in San Luis Obispo. He is the author of a very thorough guide for local governments, Solar Energy & Resilience Planning, that discusses the technologies, practical benefits, and financing for such projects. The publication details numerous examples of the successful applications of solar technologies with battery storage in facilities like the Public Safety Building in Salt Lake City, completed in 2013 and now the largest net-zero facility in the nation. Net zero, a concept also being applied to many schools in innovative jurisdictions, means that the building’s solar photovoltaic system generates “nearly as much energy as it uses in operations.” That is to say, it draws little or no power from the grid.

The big question facing developers of such facilities has been financing. Solar power historically has involved high up-front costs, even as it has brought down the actual generation costs because of the fact its fuel source is sunlight rather than fossil fuels (coal, oil, or natural gas). That is the expertise of Rob Sanders and the Clean Energy Group, a national nonprofit advocacy organization working on clean energy and climate change issues. The group has created a number of resources to highlight means of financing solar electric power development. One useful guide it has produced is Resilient Power: Financing for Clean, Resilient Power Solutions. It details financing and ownership solutions to bypass systemic roadblocks that might otherwise impede progress on solar resilience. For instance, with $200 million of federal Community Development Block Grant—Disaster Recovery funds from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development following Hurricane Sandy, the state of New Jersey in 2014 created the nation’s first Energy Resilience Bank to underwrite the development of resilient power at critical facilities throughout the state and minimize the potential for major power outages. It is clear that some vital lessons are being learned.

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

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

Trees in the Disaster Recovery Equation

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For the last two or three years, if not longer, I have been engaged in an ongoing discussion with people from the U.S. Forest Service and the International Society of Arboriculture (ISA) about the role of trees in post-disaster recovery. Phillip Rodbell, an urban and community forestry program manager with the Forest Service’s Northeast office in Philadelphia, has been particularly diligent in pursuing the question of how we can better protect trees in urban areas from storms and other major disasters as well as how to reduce the loss of trees in the process of removing debris after disasters. Too often, in the absence of qualified arborists or other forestry professionals, the existing incentives for debris removal cause more, rather than fewer, trees to be cut down and hauled away than is truly necessary. The question is how to change that.

The fact that some trees, sometimes many trees, do in fact get blown down in storms, crushing cars and occasionally people, snapping utility lines, and blocking roads, fosters the false perception in some minds that trees are inevitably hazards in themselves. In fact, inadequate maintenance of the urban forest, including inadequate attention to those trees that really do pose hazards, creates problems that can be prevented with better municipal tree pruning cycles and pre-planning for more appropriate vegetative debris removal after big storms. However, local resources, including professional expertise, can be overwhelmed in a more catastrophic disaster such as a severe tornado or hurricane. The sheer number of trees blown down by Hurricane Katrina, for instance, was staggering, well into the millions.

Phil and I ultimately decided that, if the Forest Service could provide a modicum of money to help sponsor what we decided to call a scoping session, and if ISA and the American Planning Association (APA) could contribute more modestly to support the project, we could perhaps bring together a team of subject matter experts, representatives of relevant local, state, and federal agencies, and people from interested nonprofit associations, and we could foster a meaningful discussion of how to address this problem. In the process, we might help save federal, state, and local governments millions of dollars annually in avoidable debris removal costs.

This spring, we succeeded in bringing that package together and initiating a contract between the Forest Service and APA. The result was a two-day discussion held June 16-17 in APA’s Washington, D.C., offices, involving more than two dozen people, mostly in-person, but with a handful joining by conference call from remote locations in New York and Mississippi. A summary of that discussion, and the issues it addressed, is now available on the APA website, along with a bibliography of resources on the topic, and a series of briefing papers prepared by the invited experts. I invite my readers to check it out. To learn more, click here.

 

Jim Schwab

Interview with HUD’s Scott Davis

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I won’t go into great detail, just enough to entice you to click the link below to watch the interview I conducted with Scott Davis, formerly director of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of Recovery regarding Sandy recovery operations and programs and the role of planning in creating more resilient communities. The video, taped during the American Planning Association’s National Planning Conference in Atlanta, is on APA’s Recovery News blog, which features multimedia discussions and features on issues of planning for disaster recovery. To watch the video, click here.

 

Jim Schwab

Resilient Communities: Learning Opportunities

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Opportunities exist both May 20 in Chicago, and June 18-19 in Boston, to learn more about creating resilient communities that can survive and thrive in the face of disaster. The first involves a roundtable, “Smart Systems, Resilient Regions,” hosted by the Metropolitan Planning Council from noon to 1:30 p.m. The second is a two-day Planners Training Service workshop hosted by the American Planning Association. In both cases, I will be one of the presenters, along with some other experienced experts in the field. For more information on either one, click here.

Jim Schwab

Hawaii Log (Part 1)

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Early in 2008, after I learned that I would be offered a three-week visiting fellowship by the Centre for Advanced Engineering in New Zealand (CAENZ), colleagues and friends had a tendency to ask why that country was so interested in my expertise in planning for natural hazards. I was bemused by the question every time. “Have you watched Lord of the Rings?” I would ask. Because the movie trilogy was so popular, the answer was “yes” about 95 percent of the time. I would then follow by asking, “You realize those movies were filmed in New Zealand?” Most of the time, people were well aware of this. “Think about that landscape in the movies,” I would advise. “The logic will come to you.”

Those mountains, the volcanic craters, the rugged hills—they had the makings of many natural hazards, including landslides, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and avalanches, to say nothing of New Zealand’s flash floods and ocean storms, including the occasional cyclone. Throw in a few orcs and dark riders, and you have a hell of a script.

People have asked fewer questions about my three trips in the last four years to Hawaii, perhaps because it is more familiar as part of the U.S. They are aware of its volcanoes, may have read about tsunamis, but still . . . . it is paradise, isn’t it? Well, in a sense, but that is what I thought of New Zealand, as well. I couldn’t believe someone was paying me to come there, even though I was very much aware of doing some very real work: seven lectures and seminars in three weeks, as well as attending other events and producing a white paper for CAENZ before I left. It would have been less of a paradise if I had been in Christchurch during the 2010-11 earthquakes. Just as Hawaii was less of a paradise during Hurricane Iniki in 1992.

My most recent visit to Hawaii ended just a week ago, on March 12. I was there as one of three subcontractors working on developing a new training course for the National Disaster Preparedness Training Center (NDPTC) at the University of Hawaii (UH), the only one of seven such centers in the National Domestic Preparedness Consortium specifically devoted to natural hazards rather than terrorism and other human-caused events. The center has recently added disaster recovery to a previous focus on disaster response. Two years ago in June, I taught a three-hour seminar for the UH planning program’s Summer Disaster Institute, focusing on the theory of disaster recovery. The center is led by an urban planning professor, Karl Kim, who is himself a whirlwind of activity and the person who initially created the center. Over the last two to three years, Karl and I have built a significant working relationship between NDPTC and the American Planning Association, where I manage the Hazards Planning Research Center. This is different from the New Zealand relationship in one important way: NDPTC aims to provide training throughout the United States, whereas CAENZ was specifically interested in applying my expertise to hazards policy in New Zealand.

This article has no central purpose. I kept trying to think of one, but decided it would be more fun just to detail the trip itself, in part because my wife tagged along, and she brought with us our 10-year-old grandson, Angel, who skipped a few days of school with the blessing of a principal who was wisely convinced that he might learn more on the trip than he ordinarily would in school. Angel is a very inquisitive kid. He has read most of the I Survived books, in which characters somehow survive harrowing events in world history, like the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, Hurricane Katrina, the bombing of the World Trade Center, and, yes, Pearl Harbor. Now Pearl Harbor, at least, could become a real place, with a real story to tell, and become more than historical fiction.

Thus, we had a family trio making a trip that for me was largely work-oriented, but learning- and play-oriented for my wife and grandson. We all woke early on March 6, trudging through the curbside snow into a waiting taxi at 3:45 a.m., to go to O’Hare International Airport, catch a flight to San Francisco, get a quick lunch between flights, then catch a second flight to Honolulu, landing at about 3 p.m. with our bodies feeling like 7 p.m. (That difference would grow to five hours over the weekend, as most of the U.S. switched to Daylight Savings Time, but not Hawaii.) By 5 p.m., after getting baggage and a rental car, we were at our hotel, checking in and unpacking. An hour later, we were looking for an early dinner so that I could rise again at 5 a.m. for a flight to Kaua’i. Within the same block that housed the Hawaii Prince Hotel Waikiki, we quickly found Outback. Good enough, no need to search farther, I said. Outback, a chain, is what it is, but for a chain, it serves pretty respectable food. I was satisfied with my sirloin and lobster combo, and by 9 p.m. (1 a.m. where we started the day), we were all sound asleep.

Early Friday morning, the three of us working with NDPTC—myself, Gavin Smith of the University of North Carolina’s Coastal Hazards Center, and Carolyn Harshman, a San Diego consultant and president of Emergency Planning Consultants—drove in a rental car back to Honolulu International Airport for a half-hour flight on Hawaiian Airlines to Lihu’e, on Kaua’i, the farthest west of the main islands. Kaua’i was the target of Hurricane Iniki in 1992, and I had read some after-action reports of the relief operations on the flights from Chicago.

We had a full day ahead of us. First, the only significant roads in Kauai circle the perimeter of most of the island, with the interior dominated by lush mountains. All the towns are squeezed into a narrow coastline, making traffic a slow-moving nightmare, even though much of the coastal scenery is drop-dead gorgeous. Second, I immediately noticed that one thing I had been told was true: the island has a large number of feral chickens. They were wandering the parking lot of the county administration building when we arrived. Before Iniki, they were farm chickens in coops, but the hurricane sprung their cages, and there is no putting the genie back in the bottle. My wife, when I told her of this on the way to Hawaii, asked why people did not go out and recapture them. One may as well ask why no one has trapped all the snakes in the Everglades. One look at the scenery would dissuade anyone from such a mad scheme, aside from the fact that the return of value on the effort involved would be pitifully small. The chickens are now wild for all time, just like the nutria that escaped into the Louisiana bayou country nearly a century ago.

What? You thought I was kidding?

What? You thought I was kidding?

But my wife has not seen Kaua’i. She can be excused for an innocent question.

Well, no, I wasn't.

Well, no, I wasn’t.

Our trip to the North Shore of Kaua’i put us in touch with a remarkably articulate advocate for community involvement in disaster recovery. Maka’ala Ka’aumoana speaks to the value of long-term residents who understand the imperatives of survival in a shoreline community that can be imperiled by storms such as Hurricane Iniki, and she has seen the slow erosion of such knowledge and skills as Hanalei has become an increasingly transitory, visitor-oriented community. Still, she argues forcefully for “community as the convener” when all the county, state, and federal agencies show up to help after a disaster. Community is tricky business in Hawaii, which does not have the kind of decentralized small town governance of most mainland states. There are only four counties, each of which encompasses one major island and sometimes nearby smaller islands. A mayor is mayor of the entire island, not just of, say, Hilo or Honolulu. And so, even at the level of a village like Hanalei, the official governance mechanisms still reside with the county. Whether that is good or bad, or how it came about, is beside the point here. The reality for Maka’ala is that governing authority resides elsewhere, but the moral and civic authority of the community still resides with the people in Hanalei. They have plans, and they want them honored. At the same time, she gently challenges the values of some newcomers and visitors who seem to want all the amenities they left behind somewhere else. “If you did not come here to slow down,” she says she asks them, “why did you come here at all?” Hanalei, after all, has the look and feel of a town at the end of the road, which it almost is. Look closely at a map of Kaua’i, and you will notice that Route 56 goes only a few miles further west along the coast before ending at Ha’ena. The coast gets pretty rugged after that.

The view from in back of Maka'ala's office. In case I didn't mention it, "Jurassic Park" was filmed on Kaua'i, as was some of "Gilligan's Island."
The view from in back of Maka’ala’s office. In case I didn’t mention it, “Jurassic Park” was filmed on Kaua’i, as was some of “Gilligan’s Island.”

It is hard to imagine how one evacuates people on Kaua’i amid the traffic congestion that dominates the main roads on a daily basis, let alone in a crisis. We returned to Lihu’e, and it took nearly half the afternoon to do it. Volcanic islands tend to produce gorgeous but challenging terrain. We had the opportunity to hear from utility executives, county emergency management officials, and other citizens about the issues connected with protecting such a vulnerable population. Unlike the mainland, there is no larger grid, for instance, to provide backup power. That calls for a different kind of resilience than the rest of us are used to. There is a great deal to learn in a place like Kaua’i, but one must be prepared to listen. By the time we flew back to Honolulu in the evening, I think we all had learned a great deal indeed, and owed a debt of gratitude to some of the county officials who had arranged these conversations for us.

Meanwhile, my wife had taken our grandson to Pearl Harbor, where he saw the U.S.S. Arizona memorial and toured the U.S.S. Missouri, which hosted the signing ceremony for the Japanese surrender at the end of World War II. My next posting will discuss our time on Oahu.

 

Jim Schwab

Living Densely on the Urban Waterfront

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Far too often have I heard people ask the facile question about why other people live in hazardous areas, such as along rivers that flood or coasts that suffer coastal storms. Yes, Americans do have a propensity for building in hazardous areas, and often not building appropriately for such areas, but many of the people asking the question are themselves living in areas subject to some sort of hazard. It’s just that it’s easier to spot the speck in another’s eye than the mote in one’s own, as Jesus once noted.

I teach a graduate urban planning class at the University of Iowa, called “Planning for Disaster Mitigation and Recovery.” To make the point that not everything is as simple as it may seem, I ask students early in the semester to name me a place with no hazards. It would have no seashore, no rivers, no steep slopes, no forests, etc., for all those features of the landscape entail some hazard. It soon becomes apparent that we have built cities in many of these places for very practical reasons—access to water and natural resources, transportation, etc. So the question is not only where we build, but how we build. Some things belong on the coast. Others do not, or at least do not need to be there. And we can no more depopulate the entire shoreline than we can Tornado Alley or earthquake-prone California. People have to be somewhere.

Moreover, we have great legacies of cities along our seashores, in part because the thirteen colonies that founded this country were, largely, along the East Coast. So today we have great cities like Boston, Baltimore, and New York, with great harbors and millions of people who enjoy their access to the ocean. It does pose problems from time to time, particularly in hurricane season, but so does life in Des Moines. I woke from a sound sleep one night in Ames, Iowa, to hear what sounded like a freight train outside the window. It turned out a tornado had swooped down a mile away, swept the roofs off seven houses, and skipped off into the darkness. Tornadoes or not, we need people in Iowa, the source of much of the nation’s beef, soybeans, corn, hogs, and, well, insurance. To help pay the bills for all those people whose homes and businesses get clobbered by natural disasters, you know.

With billions of dollars of real estate near or along the waterfront in New York City, much of it invested in tall buildings, it is perfectly clear to most sane planners that simply abandoning the waterfront is not a workable solution in such dense urban environments. Nonetheless, many of the standard prescriptions for flood mitigation from agencies like FEMA, which manages the National Flood Insurance Program, seem to assume that communities have room to clear out the floodplain and move people elsewhere. That works well when property values are relatively cheap and the buildings are low-rise. It does not work so well in remedying the flood problems in high-rise apartment buildings, yet we cannot afford to let the people who live there be marooned in the midst of storms like Hurricane Sandy.

It is thus with some relief that I learned that planners in New York, not satisfied with standard FEMA guidance, decided that the city needed to take some matters into its own hands. It is not that the city can disregard the NFIP or FEMA hazard mitigation regulations. But it can adapt them to its own needs. Over the first half of this year, the New York City Planning Department did exactly that, in the context of a city government that is already taking the challenge of climate change, with resulting long-term sea-level rise along its 520 miles of urban coast, seriously. New York cannot afford, like so many Tea Party enthusiasts in the rural South, to put its head in the sand and pretend that climate change is a scientific fantasy. Too much investment is at stake, by the tens of billions of dollars in Lower Manhattan alone. New York needs to be real about this.

The result of its efforts is displayed effectively in two documents the city released in June. Designing for Flood Risk is the shorter of the two, basically examining how good city planning and urban design principles can be employed to maintain livable, walkable, attractive urban spaces even when some buildings are floodproofing lower floors, when some homeowners are elevating them, and when adjustments need to be made for exterior stairways and ramps to accommodate residents, businesses, and the needs of the disabled. I have just written about this for the November issue of the American Planning Association’s Zoning Practice, but I recommend a look at New York’s adaptations to new flood challenges in a dense urban environment. The longer document, Urban Waterfront Adaptive Strategies, spends more time and illustrations on a typology of the urban coastline, discussing which solutions better fit with sheltered or natural coasts and why. It too, however, is very readable and educational and introduce readers to the realities of addressing flood and coastal storm risks in a dense urban corridor.

It has been said, very accurately, that Sandy was the most urban disaster in the nation’s recent history. It is not that such a storm has never happened before. My father, who grew up in Queens, vividly remembered the “Long Island Express,” the unnamed hurricane of 1938 that swept across Long Island and southern New England, leaving massive flooding in its wake. But over time, we forget. Sandy reminded us and also acquainted us with the growing stakes associated with climate change. Such a disaster deserves an appropriate urban remedy. New York City is actually groping for one quite effectively.

Jim Schwab

A Dose of Good Judgment

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It is easy enough to be cynical about government, especially about its response in a crisis. Millions of Americans express such cynicism on a regular basis, if not daily. It takes a bit more fortitude to look honestly at some of the daunting challenges government must face in events like Hurricane Sandy and to conclude that some things actually get done well, and to conclude that leadership is sometimes successful. It takes a certain depth of judgment to conclude that some of that successful leadership can emerge from moments of governmental self-criticism, examining in some depth what works well and what does not, then drawing conclusions about what steps would solve the problems uncovered.

I have just spent the last two weeks pouring over the entire 200-page length of the Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Strategy, produced by the Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force since last winter and released on August 19. I would like to have blogged on this topic earlier, but I prefer on this site to be a bit more thorough in my reviews and not simply rush to judgment. I did use some material from the report in an August 20 presentation to the Chicago Metro Section of the American Planning Association, and have been seeking to wrap up work on the initial draft of our planned Planning Advisory Service Report on post-disaster recovery planning. But I wanted to be deliberate in reading the full report with its numerous recommendations, and I had plenty of distractions in the days following its release.

That said, on the Recovery News blog on the APA site, we did at least move to post quickly the link to the document without an extensive review. We thought it import ant to alert those readers to the document’s existence and provide easy access to a download. But here I want to comment a bit more on the underlying approach.

What impresses me most about the Rebuilding Strategy is the attempt to confront honestly the many dilemmas government faces in expediting recovery in the face of such a massive event. Although not at the level of Hurricane Katrina, the numbers are still staggering:

  • 200,000 small business closures due to damage or power outage
  • 72 direct fatalities caused by the storm, and 87 others indirectly connected to the storm
  • $1 billion in gas line repairs in New Jersey
  • Eight flooded tunnels, with average commute time doubled
  • Six hospitals closed by the storm
  • 650,000 homes damaged or destroyed

The litany of statistics could go on, but they are primarily associated with the fact that Sandy was the most urban-oriented natural disaster in a long time, perhaps ever, striking one of the most densely populated areas of the United States—New York and New Jersey. That, in turn, posed unique problems not always associated with hurricanes and floods, namely, that there was far less available land to which people in affected areas could be relocated because most of it was already highly developed. Amid all this, the Federal Emergency Management Agency was sending its new National Disaster Recovery Framework to the region on its maiden voyage, where it could work out all the kinks in a marvelous but still somewhat vague design for managing federal recovery assistance in a region containing one huge city, New York, with more planning and administrative resources than any other municipality in the nation, and a host of small townships and villages across Long Island and the New Jersey coast, many of which have only the most limited governmental capacity and require significant help from the state and federal government to begin to sort things out. This is not a recovery management challenge for the faint of heart.

The task force was the creation of President Obama, who appointed U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan as its chair, with a long list of other federal agencies involved. Part of its task was not only to oversee the entire redevelopment process among the many agencies involved, notably including FEMA, but to develop from the experience recommendations for improvements in future federal efforts of this type. That is the focus of my essay here because that is the focus of the report.

There are numerous recommendations, but I find very few with which I would take serious issue. The task force seems, in my view, to have undertaken a very common sense assessment of the most significant issues connected with recovery, and made sober, sensible recommendations in the vast majority of cases. The first group, which may cause heartburn among climate change deniers but undeniably looks to the future with a keen eye, concerns the need to incorporate sea level rise into future risk assessments. This is a necessity, and the report calls for the development and use of appropriate tools to make such assessments, including NOAA’s rollout earlier this year of a new sea level rise tool. It seems foolhardy to continue to build along vulnerable coastlines in ways that fail to anticipate higher storm surge associated with such climate change impacts. Fiscal conservatism would seem to suggest a more cautious approach, even in the face of the never-ending desire to build on the beach. Yes, I know, such development can be immediately lucrative for some local tax coffers and the associated developers, but there must at some point be some public interest asserted for not imposing upon taxpayers the obligation to bail out such development when the next superstorm threatens. It is important that we rebuild our coastal communities in a more resilient fashion. The report includes, as a matter of fact, some additional recommendations for establishing national infrastructure resilience guidelines. The Sandy supplemental expenditure authorized by Congress totaled more than $60 billion. It is important that we spend such vast sums of money wisely when we rebuild.

It is not possible here to detail all the recommendations made. It is the intent to facilitate connecting readers to the report itself for such detail. But I do want to state that the report covers far more than I have just suggested, including measures for effective and timely data sharing between the states and federal agencies, opportunities for enhancing green infrastructure as part of the recovery, green building standards, and a host of good management suggestions for rebuilding affordable housing and assisting in small business recovery, among other subjects treated at some length. It is not necessary for everyone to read the report in the same depth that I did, but I suggest at least glancing through it to get some knowledgeable impression of its breadth and depth and logic. There are a few things here and there that puzzle me, including a definition of hazard mitigation that seems considerably more limited than the one in use by FEMA. I have asked for an explanation of that but not heard back yet. But by and large, I do think it demonstrates that such a task force can take an honest measure of such a large crisis and actually produce ideas that fit the challenge and may very well move the nation forward in its ability to handle such crises in the future. That is no small achievement.

 

Jim Schwab

When You See the Face of God . . . .

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Hurricane season is once again upon us. This blog entry is about six years old. I decided to post it in light of our continuing national encounter with disasters and our difficulties in coming to terms with some of their implications. It is a closing plenary speech I delivered at the Carless Evacuation Conference held at the University of New Orleans in February 2007. I hope readers find it of some value.

Scene from New Orleans in November 2005

 

Presentation at UNO Carless Evacuation Conference

I have a small surprise for Professor John Renne today. It’s called No PowerPoint. It’s something we used to do back in the Stone Age before the invention of the PC. I think these days some people regard this as the oratorical equivalent of riding a bicycle with no hands.

I chose to do this because it seems to me that evacuation is only partially a technical problem. It is primarily a cultural and social problem. I wanted to get away from diagrams and talk about concepts and motivations. I also come to this conference as one who has visited Louisiana more times than I can remember, and who more than a dozen years ago made the state the focus of his longest chapter in a book about the environmental justice movement.

One thing you need to know about me before listening to the rest of this talk is that I have a bad habit of engaging in the free association of ideas. It comes from never fulfilling my destiny as a creative writer because I didn’t have the courage of a New Orleans musician to just stick to my art regardless of whether I made any money or supported myself collecting spare change by performing on the street corner.

So you won’t be too surprised when I tell you that the invitation to speak here drove me to start reading a book that never mentions evacuation or New Orleans. It’s Jared Diamond’s new tome, Collapse, which has the interesting subtitle, How Communities Choose to Fail or Succeed. He lays out certain criteria for failure or success, which largely involve environmental conditions and choices they made in confronting them. But the last of his five main points concerns how societies choose to respond to their crises. In the past, denial was not always even conscious because societies lacked the scientific education or even the literacy to grasp what was happening and what problems they were creating. Today, we cannot generally claim that excuse. Yet interestingly, he begins by examining attitudes toward environmental challenges in Montana, where he has a second home, and where anti-government, anti-regulatory attitudes often preclude effective discussion of planning as a route to a solution. He notes that many people have moved into the wildland-urban interface, the area where forests and housing co-exist, yet they expect the Forest Service to protect them from wildfires and are quite willing to sue the Forest Service for not doing its job if their houses are burned to the ground. At one point, he says, “Unfortunately, by permitting unrestricted land use and thereby making possible an influx of new residents, Montanans’ long-standing and continuing opposition to government regulation is responsible for degradation of the beautiful natural environment and quality of life that they cherish.” Of course, Diamond could have been discussing a number of other similar situations all around the U.S.

An influx of new residents may not be the main problem in New Orleans, but there is much that is precious to preserve, much of which is embodied in its people, and not planning both to preserve the people and make the city more disaster-resilient brings the same result: collapse.

The fact that he makes this point in a book called Collapse may be strong medicine for some people. Yet long ago, in the insurance business, I learned the slogan, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” And that seems to be part of what Diamond is saying. In the wake of Katrina, it is a very potent message that carries overtones concerning the very survival of a city with a unique and vital culture. It is also a city that is very conflicted about how to preserve itself.

Tradition is a wonderful thing. New Orleans has had a marvelous dose of it. It may be time to ask what elements of local culture, those that militate against planning in favor of “laissez le bon temps roullez,” need to undergo drastic metamorphosis or sacrifice in order that the rest of the organism may live. That city slogan is a perfect expression of a lifestyle, but what will preserve the lifestyle, short of effective, widely participatory planning?

This is not a question unique to New Orleans. If it were, Diamond would not have much material for his 525-page book. It is a powerful question that has absorbed a great deal of intellectual effort in communities large and small. Two decades ago, in an article for Planning magazine titled, “Small Towns, Big Dreams,” I explored the difficult choices facing several midwestern small towns faced with economic extinction. One was Babbitt, Minnesota, a victim of the closing of Minnesota iron mines. The mayor decided that his best resource was unemployed people, so he employed them in crafting plans and applications to qualify Babbitt as a Minnesota Star City, crafting a whole new future for itself. The key to success was that the plan involved the most unfortunate people in town–those who had lost their livelihoods. It was an interesting case of staring adversity in the face and defying communal death.

At the same time, faced with both natural and man-made crises, plenty of other communities reach some sort of day of judgment largely unprepared. Chicago, for example, is good at many things, but the city did a remarkably poor job of assisting its most vulnerable citizens during a heat wave in 1995, a situation documented by Eric Klinenberg in Heat Wave. More than 500 of our elderly, disabled, and isolated citizens died as a result. That is fully half the number that died in New Orleans as a result of Hurricane Katrina. What did we learn? For one thing, that we could and should use our social service networks proactively to identify our most vulnerable populations in order to reach out and assist before it is too late. We have mapping tools like GIS, public health systems that can be mobilized for phone calls and home visits during a heat emergency, and other options. What we learned yesterday from people like Linda Carter is that ample means exist to do all this, including disability registries and alert systems, but we need to marshal the political will to make these goals a priority.

What we need to avoid a collapse of social responsibility is a plan.

For areas potentially affected by severe storms and hurricanes, evacuation is a serious social responsibility. It is also recognized as a social responsibility in areas affected by wildfires, as is the need to devise means of allowing people to stay safely in their homes. At APA, we looked at both options in the latter instance in a report called Planning for Wildfires. Much of our ability to avoid the need for mass evacuations in wildfires revolves around controlling the pattern of development in the wildland-urban interface, creating defensible space around homes, creating building codes that reduce the combustibility of homes in the interface, and, for the day when evacuation is a necessity, at least devising multiple routes of access and egress to keep people from being trapped. Very little of that happens without some kind of planning. All of that is intended to reduce the likelihood of catastrophe, and then we start to talk about how to get people out when danger is imminent, including those who need some sort of help. But our first responsibility from a planning perspective is to reduce the likelihood of lives being placed in jeopardy and the likelihood of serious property damage.

The best way to achieve this is to be realistic about our choices in building our communities and to approach development with integrated thinking. We need to approach the whole planning process more holistically instead of stovepiping functions like emergency management, transit, land-use planning, and social services to special needs populations. Before they build, we need to ask about health care facilities how they will evacuate patients in an emergency, new subdivisions where the tornado shelter will be built, or how people will escape in a flash flood or a wildfire, or how they will survive an earthquake or a landslide. We need to ask how our communities can become more resilient.

To promote such thinking, we at APA over the last year have worked patiently with FEMA to reach agreement on producing a new best practices report, which we should be able to launch soon, on the integration of hazards into all forms of local plan making. The project will build on a portfolio of research and outreach stretching back 14 years to the onset of our work to produce Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery and Reconstruction, which many of you no doubt have seen. This new project is the logical next step in pushing communities to be fully accountable for the opportunities they must seize to plan adequately to address their natural hazards. What it means is that we shall look at how communities can address hazards within the various elements of their comprehensive plan, including transportation, land use, housing, and economic development. We will look at how communities link hazard identification and risk assessment to their decisions on development, including small area planning for neighborhoods and functional plans like sewers and transit. It means thinking about and addressing natural hazards at any point in the process where they become relevant, and not just in emergency management plans. In too many communities, planners and emergency managers never talk to each other. It means that we figure out how to minimize the need for evacuation, and then ensure that the resources are there to facilitate it when it is necessary, including giving priority to evacuating those who lack personal transportation. And it means that we have an element that describes how the plan will be implemented.

Another piece of this integration is the avoidance of duplicate planning work. For instance, communities preparing hazard mitigation plans under the Disaster Mitigation Act ought to be able to use an existing hazards element in their comprehensive plan to meet the FEMA requirements, and making that work is precisely what FEMA staff whom I know want. But in too many communities, one plan is prepared by emergency managers, another by the city planners, and lots of people aren’t coordinating and talking to each other to make all these plans mesh.

This issue of plan integration may seem small, but it is actually central to the whole enterprise of making our communities and our transportation systems more disaster-resilient. Florida has led the way in this region by requiring its communities to prepare comprehensive plans and to include in them a natural hazards element. Florida has worked hard to integrate emergency management and planning. Florida was able to control much of the recovery process after its four hurricanes in 2004 not simply because they were less powerful storms than Katrina, but because it had a planning infrastructure in place statewide that could speak effectively for what Florida wanted even when much of the process involved massive federal assistance. Not many states are so well prepared to assert their own vision. Florida is far from perfect, but it is farther along the road toward intelligent disaster planning than almost any other state in the union. The important point is that Florida has found the political will to take this issue seriously. That sets the stage for taking seriously the efficient evacuation of its carless population.

I hope I have not insufficiently emphasized the degree to which evacuation planning, including carless evacuation, is a subset within a much larger issue of overcoming denial in order to plan effectively for future disasters. There is a moral imperative that needs a special spiritual appeal to help public officials and decision makers rise above racism, classism, sexism, nepotism, indifference, inertia, and corruption. The public needs a moral imperative for dealing with an issue that too often is swept under the rug. Let me suggest one, in a region that takes religion seriously, by augmenting a sermon in the gospel of Matthew in which Jesus describes the righteous asking the Lord when they had seen him naked, hungry, and in prison. I think that God can only smile if I propose the addition of one line in which the righteous also ask, “When did I see you stranded in the storm and offered you a ride?” Then the king will reply, ‘As you did this for the least of these, you did it also for me.’

Perhaps we can finally infuse into our communities and their elected leaders a desire to start planning as if every desperate face in a natural disaster is the face of God, but we must not wait until disaster strikes to activate that sentiment. By then, it may be too late. By then, we may be facing the imminent collapse of our cities and their social structures. We must incorporate this sense of urgency into numerous planning opportunities long before it is too late. We must not only think of people in this way in an emergency, but in our daily planning operations at all levels in order to reduce the need for last-minute heroics and instead, to the extent possible, take care of our special needs populations and the poor in a systematic and effective fashion.

 

Jim Schwab