Tag Archives: Sandy

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

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

Calling All Disaster Experts

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Think not only of the natural disasters suffered within the U.S. each year, but around the world. Then imagine finding between 400 and 500 of the most experienced experts in the various fields related to research and practice on natural disasters and bringing them together in the same space for three days. These would include emergency managers, urban planners, social and physical scientists, government policy makers, geographers, architects, and engineers, among others. Finally, imagine instigating wide-ranging discussions among all these folks, getting them to talk to each other and explore interdisciplinary solutions to the numerous problems posed to humanity by natural hazards. Imagine the richness and creativity of the conversations that would follow.

For about 20 years, with a few intermissions, I have had the privilege of attending precisely such an event every summer in Colorado, hosted by the Natural Hazards Center of the University of Colorado. This event was initiated in 1976 by the late Professor Gilbert F. White, who launched the Center that long ago with help from the National Science Foundation. Dr. White is known today as the father of modern floodplain management, and is famous for saying, “Floods are acts of nature; flood losses are largely acts of man.” After his death in 2006 at age 94, his life was memorialized in a biography by Robert E. Hinshaw, Living With Nature’s Extremes: The Life of Gilbert Fowler White. It is worth reading because it relates the saga of a man who managed over the course of a long career to bend the needle of history without taking himself too seriously in the process. He was more interested in knowing whether his many achievements, such as helping to engineer the creation of the National Flood Insurance Program way back in 1968, were actually making the difference he thought they should make. He had not the slightest interest in idle congratulations or in the hazards professional community sitting on its collective laurels. The question was always what lay ahead.

And so this summer we met for the 38th annual Natural Hazards Workshop in Broomfield, Colorado, with attendees not only from the U.S., but according to Center director Kathleen Tierney in her opening remarks, from 31 other nations as well. For the first time in several years, I did not actually speak in any sessions, although I did speak on a plenary panel for the Natural Hazard Mitigation Association, which sponsored a one-day event added on at the end of the Workshop. I had to follow Margaret Davidson, director of the Coastal Services Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and David Miller, director of FEMA’s Federal Insurance and Mitigation Administration, which oversees the NFIP and thus is responsible to some extent for implementing Gilbert’s vision. Both are tough acts to follow. I spent a notoriously quick ten minutes describing the American Planning Association’s work on a FEMA-supported project to publish a second-generation version of our 1998 publication, Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery and Reconstruction. It was no easy task, but I knew that many people at the conference are anxiously awaiting the completion of APA’s work, slated for early next year.

Photo credit: NHMA

There were many highlights to both events, including a plenary panel probing the impacts of Hurricane Sandy and a significant presentation by Gary Machlis, of the National Park Service, on the deployment of a scientific task force during Hurricane Sandy by the Secretary of the Interior. It would take considerable space in a blog to explore all the nooks and crannies of individual sessions, but it is fair enough to say that the real value of such a conference lies as much in the many passionate conversations that populate the halls outside the meeting rooms as in the sessions themselves. The Natural Hazards Workshop has always allowed space for and fostered those conversations, even through such simple techniques as facilitating lunchtime exchanges by hosting a large buffet in the outdoor pavilion at the Omni Interlocken Resort and Hotel, which has hosted the event in Broomfield for the last several years. The traditions, however, date back to Gilbert White’s original vision, which looks better with every year that goes by.

This year, APA took advantage of all this creative flow by allowing me to bring our Interactive Media Coordinator, Mike Johnson, to help videotape a series of interviews with both U.S. and international participants. You can watch those on the Recovery News blog, where we will roll them out in coming weeks. I hope it provides some sample of the activity of the conference. I also invite you to use all the links in this post to explore the rest of what went on, as best as can be done vicariously.

 

Jim Schwab

 

Lessons from Sandy

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I don’t believe I have ever previously been to New York three times in as many months. The first week of April, however, I had the honor of leading a team of five experts on post-disaster recovery, including myself, in conducting a series of five workshops in as many days for planners, public officials, and allied professionals in New York and New Jersey to assist planning for recovery after Hurricane Sandy. The two earlier trips—one from January 30-February 2, and another March 1-2—covered much smaller swaths of territory. A California colleague, Laurie Johnson, and I collaborated on the first one, meeting with the American Planning Association’s New York Metro chapter representatives in the Rockaways, then with Occupy Sandy volunteers on Coney Island, touring Staten Island, and speaking at the New Jersey APA conference in New Brunswick, before taking a tour of the more northerly barrier island from Seaside Heights north. Seaside Heights is the Jersey Shore tourist town that lost a roller coaster to the ocean, providing one of those iconic disaster images that the networks love to share. I flew to New York with a FEMA colleague on the second one, meeting with people from FEMA’s Joint Field Office in Queens before participating in a Saturday training workshop on Staten Island for volunteer facilitators of a series of neighborhood charrettes to discuss rebuilding shattered neighborhoods. Those are still ongoing through June.

But this last was the most demanding by far. Our team moved every day, from Newark to Brooklyn to Manhattan to Monmouth University (NJ) and finally to Richard Stockton College just north of Atlantic City. This was the effort we had all been working toward, and the one that allowed us to connect with nearly 200 people who could anticipate doing the local hard work of mapping a path to recovery for both New York City and dozens of small municipalities on Long Island and in New Jersey. Their questions and doubts were often poignant and penetrating. Our team tried hard to be diligent in response.

Roller coaster lost to the ocean in Seaside Heights, NJ (Jim Schwab photo)

There are real differences in style and circumstance between all these communities. Some of those differences, if we let them, can speak deeply to issues of faith and integrity. Many in New York City expressed real concerns about the degree to which their neighborhoods and neighbors could influence or speak to City Hall, from which a great deal of power flows. There were fears that the mayor’s staff might not hear some or all of their concerns. There are real vulnerabilities in certain urban areas of New York, most notably in the Rockaways, a long spit of land extending westward of John F. Kennedy International Airport that is home to no fewer than 118,000 people, many of whom are far less familiar with other neighborhoods right in the Rockaways than other people elsewhere are with other parts of their entire city, let alone other parts of Queens or the rest of New York. New York is a gigantic city of 8 million that can seem harshly impersonal and difficult to traverse because of its geography, with Queens and Brooklyn on Long Island separated from Manhattan, another island, which is also separated from the Bronx, a southern extension of the mainland, all of which are completely separated from Staten Island. It costs $13 to use the Holland Tunnel from New Jersey to New York, the same price charged to use the Verrazano Bridge from Brooklyn to Staten Island. The cost of transportation must be an intimidating and isolating factor for the poor. Meanwhile, one bridge connecting the Rockaways to the rest of the city is out, forcing commuters on the New York elevated/subway system to use other stops. Isolation becomes a real problem; isolation and lack of access allowed 130 homes in Breezy Point, a Rockaways neighborhood, to burn down during Sandy because fire trucks could not reach them. How do homes burn down in a hurricane? Electrical systems corroded by salt water can short, and once the fire spreads, look out. In a densely developed area, the damages escalate quickly.

If you are guessing that all this implies that there is some serious work to be done on issues of social equity in the face of disaster, you are right. Occupy Wall Street has morphed into Occupy Sandy, mobilizing volunteers in part to raise issues, and voices, on behalf of the underrepresented segments of the city, although they are hardly the only ones. We heard a similar refrain two months earlier from the Rockaways Development and Revitalization Corporation, which has been aided by New York Metro APA volunteers trying to help the nonprofit group assist with small business recovery throughout the peninsula.

But there are also major issues of physical planning and public safety that must be confronted. A Florida colleague, Lincoln Walther, and I joined FEMA colleagues for a Thursday morning, April 4, tour that began at our hotel in West Long Branch, New Jersey, and visited such shoreline communities as Sea Bright, which was hit hard in places by the storm surge directly off the ocean. We saw private clubs whose members include well-known celebrities quickly rebuilding—money matters—while those more dependent on permits and public assistance had to wait. The towns can easily rationalize this. Those shoreline properties pay most or at least much of the property tax load. They provide seasonal jobs for those who live nearby. It can still be troubling to find that there seem to be two sets of rules, of course. In other places, however, houses built atop of, or at least unprotected by, dunes within a short distance of the shore often collapsed on top of one another, causing spectacular damage. In the workshops, I showed a photo of one such home and raised the question of why we cannot do better. Nonetheless, in many shoreline and barrier island communities, there is a palpable tension between economic development and public safety. This is the Jersey Shore, one of America’s playgrounds. A large dune system proposed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is embraced by some, seen as cutting visitors off from the ocean by others. There is no doubt such natural systems are effective in mitigating damage to inland structures. But people still pay willingly for the privilege of sitting on the ocean’s edge. What we can say for certain is that the experience of Hurricane Sandy has moved the public debate visibly in the direction of more public safety.

It is exceedingly difficult to remain dispassionate in the face of such massive challenges. Congress passed a supplemental budget for Sandy recovery of approximately $60 billion. New Jersey alone estimates damage to homes and businesses totaling about $37 billion. New York faces long-term questions of protecting vital public infrastructure like subways and tunnels from future storms and sea-level rise (resulting from global warming). The undertaking of recovery planning strikes me as one that challenges our values to the core if we feel any compulsion to try to answer the most compelling questions it poses. And we can all assume that if this happened once, it can happen again.

Jim Schwab