Tag Archives: Texas

Housing the Needy after Disaster

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This post will be brief. Rather than ask you to read my thoughts, I want you to listen–hard. It has long been known among disaster recovery planners that lower-income citizens are considerably more vulnerable to disasters largely because of the marginal resilience of most low-income housing. The affluent can afford to build fortresses, some of which may still be lost to the elements, but those in second-rate housing, poorly maintained multifamily buildings, and most certainly the homeless, face life-or-death dilemmas when disaster strikes in any form. They live with mold without the resources to make expensive repairs. They face shortages of affordable housing. Federal programs designed to help them often fall short.

Few people have worked harder to remedy these problems than John Henneberger, a 2014 MacArthur Fellow and the executive director of Texas Housers, a nonprofit advocacy organization that has been working with low-income communities in tracking recovery from Hurricane Harvey. This link will take you directly to a podcast page on the American Planning Association website to hear a 46-minute interview with Henneberger about this experience.

The podcast, the first in a series called Resilience Roundtable, is the product of collaboration between the APA technical staff in Chicago and the Professional Development Committee (PDC) of the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division, of which I am currently chair-elect. In that capacity, I organized and have led the PDC. More such podcasts will be released in coming weeks, but this is the first, and we are very proud to introduce John Henneberger to a new audience. His message is detailed, highly informed, and eloquent. Please check it out.

Before I leave the soapbox, I wish also to provide you to a link to a recent study detailing why minorities are more vulnerable to the impacts of wildfires, a subject that has not been explored widely in the past. “The Unequal Vulnerability of Communities of Color to Wildfire,” available online as linked, was printed in the journal Plos One, and enriches our awareness of equity issues in disaster.

Jim Schwab

The Predictable Impact of Florence

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

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

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

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

Hurricane wind warning at bridge in Socastee, South Carolina

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jim Schwab

Taking Stock of Recent Disasters

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Photo by Jeff Clevenger

We learn from disasters as we recover from them, but each disaster teaches slightly different things. Sometimes the lessons are significant and historic; in others, one community is learning what others already know or should have learned from their own past events. Some years are relatively quiescent, as 2018 so far seems to be. And some become relentless slogs, like 2017.

Adam Smith, lead scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Centers for Environmental Information, noted in a plenary panel in July for the 2018 Natural Hazards Workshop, in Broomfield, Colorado, that the tally for 2017 disasters had exceeded $200 billion. This is more than 40 percent of the tally so far of billion-dollar disasters for the entire decade beginning in 2010. Simply put, with three major hurricanes—Harvey, Irma, and Maria—striking parts of the southern U.S., followed in short order by some of the most expensive wildfires in California history, it was a wild, taxing year in the world of emergency management.

But our attention fades quickly. Right now, there are no equivalent disasters seizing our attention, but in time there will be. The people who remain painfully aware that recovery is a long, slow process are those directly affected, and even many of them will not fully grasp the ways in which past location choices and patterns of development have brought them to this pass. Many had no choice anyway. Our communities are frequently full of social inequities that compromise the life choices of the poor and disabled. In other cases, the losses inflicted on neighborhoods are the result of hubris on the part of developers, city officials, and homeowners themselves. It does not hurt, approximately one year after these combined events, to look at what we know so far about the recovery following them.

Apparently, the U.S. General Accountability Office (GAO), an arm of Congress, agreed that the time was ripe for review because it has released a study, 2017 Hurricanes and Wildfires: Initial Observations on the Federal Response and Key Recovery Challenges. Because of the severity of challenges in Puerto Rico, one may note from the graph below, reproduced from the report, that Hurricane Maria by far entailed the largest federal expenditures.

In spite of that level of effort, Puerto Rico has engendered the most significant criticism of the performance of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Maria struck Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI) after Harvey had already drenched and flooded coastal Texas, and Irma had swept through much of Florida.

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

The report notes that, as a result, FEMA resources were severely stretched by then, only to have wildfires in California add to the pressure, though the personnel assigned in the last case were small compared to the hurricanes (as is typically the case). Adding to the challenge, Puerto Rico and USVI are offshore and were also poorly prepared for a Category 4 hurricane. Puerto Rico had already suffered years of neglect of crucial infrastructure, was burdened with oppressive debts, and was by far the least prosperous target of the 2017 storms. All this, combined with some incredibly inept public relations from the White House, led to a perfect storm in which nearly 3,000 people have died directly or indirectly as a result of the disaster. To my knowledge, that is a number exceeded in U.S. history only by the 1900 hurricane in Galveston, which killed more than twice as many people. The difference is that, in Puerto Rico, most people died because of blocked transportation, loss of electricity, and similar problems with critical facilities that prevented adequate transportation or medical attention in many isolated communities in the interior of the mountainous island.

Exactly what we learn from Puerto Rico remains to be seen. It is worth noting, in my view, that far more prosperous Hawaii has coped well with admittedly less-challenging disasters in recent years, in large part because state government has practiced response and committed resources to the problem. I say this despite being aware of gaps in Hawaii recovery planning that merit further attention. But if Puerto Rico is a logistical challenge for mainland responders, Hawaii is even more remote but better prepared. The difference in economic circumstances, however, is a dramatic and powerful variable in this comparison, as is Hawaii’s statehood. It is also worth noting that Hawaii is a long chain of islands, and storms (or volcanoes) never affect all at the same time. Effectively, that has always meant that emergency resources in Hawaii have been able to be moved from one or more islands to another that has been hit by a storm. All of Puerto Rico was devastated almost on the same day, with internal transportation, communications, and electric power nearly brought to a standstill, making access to many villages nearly impossible.

If Puerto Rico, followed closely by USVI, is the direst case for long-term recovery, there nonetheless remain serious challenges in Texas, not only in Houston but in dozens of other counties along the Gulf Coast. A recent Washington Post article used the term “Harvey homeless” to describe thousands of Texas families living in whatever parts of their flooded homes they have salvaged while struggling to accumulate the resources to repair the rest. They live with mold, dust, and any other environmental contaminants that endure in essentially unusable parts of their homes. In all, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety, at least 175,000 Texas homes were “badly damaged” by Hurricane Harvey, and 80 percent lacked flood insurance, thus relying on much smaller federal disaster payments (averaging $4,203) than flood insurance would have afforded. If there is one powerful lesson in Texas, it concerns public education on the value of flood insurance, particularly in the many areas outside the 100-year floodplain. Unfortunately, much of the public retains the illusion that flood insurance is either unnecessary or unavailable outside the legally defined floodplain. Yet Harvey’s 60 inches of rain in some parts of metropolitan Houston left vast areas beyond the regulatory flood boundaries under water because water does not care about such artificial boundaries. It goes where gravity compels it to go. Moreover, years of loose land-use regulation over the past half-century of rapid growth have expanded the floodplain and put numerous neighborhoods in greater danger than they faced in the past.

Moreover, as John Henneberger, executive director of the nonprofit advocacy group Texas Housers, noted in his keynote at the Natural Hazards Workshop, Texas does not have a noteworthy history of attention to social equity in disaster recovery. Henneberger called for a new model of disaster recovery in which we seek to use recovery planning to overcome racial and economic inequities, stating that “the legal framework already exists” in federal programs like Community Development Block Grant—Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) to “overcome inequalities,” but the rules are not always followed. Thus, his top recommendation for reform was simply to “obey the law” regarding the conditions that apply to state and local use of CDBG-DR funds.

Finally, Bloomberg Business Week chose recently to examine the questions surrounding rebuilding after the California wildfires. With a population already approaching 40 million, the state is under intense pressure to build adequate housing amid rising housing costs. California has repeatedly toughened its building codes in response to wildfire threats but faces a legacy problem of homes built under earlier standards. Not often known outside wildfire research circles is the fact that the average home contains seven to eight times the density of combustible materials as the surrounding forest in the wildland-urban interface. That means that every home that catches fire or explodes is a huge matchstick endangering every other home in its immediate vicinity. When one considers that California is unquestionably the most progressive state in tackling wildfire problems, one understands that the problem of retrofitting older homes built to lower building code standards—or none at all in some other western states—is a lingering and potentially very expensive problem. The dilemma serves to illuminate the value of pre-planning for recovery, learning how to seize the “teachable moment” for reform, to reduce the scope of the problem. The article also notes that, if California is to reduce pressure to build in the forest, its cities must be prepared to allow greater density to relieve the housing crisis in a state where a shortage of affordable housing has yielded a concomitant problem of growing homelessness. And so, we see why urban planning needs both to be holistic in its approach to social problems and guided by wise state policy with supporting resources. We all still have a long way to go.

This blog post can never be long enough to explore all these issues in depth. But in coming weeks and months, I hope to delve into specific issues more deeply, share interviews with individual experts, and explore what needs to be done. I am also watching intently for new books that will shed light on new solutions. One just arrived today. Stay tuned.

Jim Schwab

Disaster Guidance for Rural Communities

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

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

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

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

Photo from Texas Planners4Health

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

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

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

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

Jim Schwab

Life after Tornadoes

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

The remains of a home destroyed by the tornado.

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

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

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

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

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

Debris from the April 29 tornadoes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jim Schwab

Flood of Events in Just Two Weeks

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Life can produce very sudden turns of events. The turmoil and destruction dished out by Hurricanes Harvey and Irma may have been predictable in the abstract, that is, events that could occur at some point someday, but that means little when the day arrives that a hurricane is bearing down on your shores.

More than three months ago, I retired from the American Planning Association to move into a combination of activities I had tailored to my own skills and interests, which I have previously announced and discussed. Over the summer, I began setting the stage for introducing these new enterprises, but my wife and I also took time for a long-awaited excursion to Norway to celebrate this new phase of our lives. I began to share that story in August with blogs about our journey.

Meanwhile, I began work on the creation of Jim Schwab Consulting LLC, my solo planning practice. Just two weeks ago, with the help of a web designer, Luke Renn, I unveiled a business website that is a companion to this one. You can find it at the link above. But when we began to construct the site in mid-August, I had no idea what would ensue. By the time we had completed the new website, Harvey was making landfall on the Texas coast and dumping unimaginable amounts of rain in the Houston metropolitan area, and then on Port Arthur and Beaumont, Texas.

As Harvey was losing steam and moving inland, Irma, initially a Category 5 hurricane, devastated the small island of Barbuda, the smaller part of the tiny Caribbean nation of Antigua and Barbuda. Officials estimate that 95 percent of the island’s buildings were damaged or destroyed, and residents have been evacuated to the larger island of Antigua, partly in advance of an anticipated second attack by Hurricane Jose, following in Irma’s wake, that mercifully did not come to pass. That would have been bad enough, but the storm also badly rocked St. Thomas and St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands, sideswiped Puerto Rico and the northern coast of Cuba, and finally passed through the Florida Keys, demolishing much of the community there, and sped up the western coast of Florida through places like Naples and Tampa. Irma was so huge that its waves and winds also buffeted numerous coastal communities in eastern Florida, no doubt shaking many people in Miami Beach to their core.

I will soon complete the tour of Norway on this blog, but it seemed more important to offer some insights, in some small way, into what is happening and will be needed in the recovery in Texas. Irma has been too large an event for me yet to absorb its totality and even begin to understand how I can possibly enhance what people know from the daily news barrage that has accompanied it. I am sure emergency management personnel at all levels are already weary but patriotically staffing their posts.

Planners like me must prepare for the much longer endurance test known as long-term recovery planning. While it is far too easy to say what, if any, role I may be asked to play in this drama, there have been conversations. Recovery, unlike emergency response, will take months to unfold. I will do my best to share what I learn. It is important because long-term recovery provides the opportunity to hash out major questions of the future and the resilience of the surviving communities. It has always been possible to learn from experience and to improve so that we lose fewer lives, suffer fewer losses, and rebound more quickly in future disasters. But possible is not certain. It is up to all of us to decide that we will rebuild with a resilient future in mind.

Jim Schwab

Map of Irma as of 9/12/17 from NOAA website.

Hurricane Harvey Interview on CBC

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For those who have been reading the posts I have recently done since Hurricane Harvey made landfall, I thought it might be of interest to see this video clip of an interview I did with Canadian Broadcasting Corp. two days ago: https://youtu.be/UFslrKPd04s 

Jim Schwab

The People Affected by Harvey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jim Schwab

Initial Observations on Harvey

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Map from National Weather Service. http://www.weather.gov/akq/Harvey

For the people of the Texas Gulf Coast, the rain and winds of Hurricane Harvey are just the beginning of a long journey. The storm will last a few days. The recovery will last years.

Destruction in the Bolivar Peninsula after Hurricane Ike in 2008

I am not there, so I can only surmise, based on the news coverage I have seen, the full extent of the damage and suffering that people are enduring in Corpus Christi, Houston, Galveston, and hundreds of other communities in a wide arc that has fallen under the impact of this storm. I do not even expect that people there will read this, certainly not right now. Nonetheless, it may be worthwhile to offer some insights to people elsewhere. I have never lived or worked in Texas, but I have been there numerous times and visited Louisiana more often than I can remember. I saw first-hand the devastation wrought in the Bolivar Peninsula and Galveston after Hurricane Ike. I have worked with people in Texas, including those at the Texas A&M Hazards Reduction and Recovery Center, over many years. They have educated me greatly on the vulnerabilities of their state.

With all due humility, therefore, but also with experience from other disasters over the past quarter-century, I offer some observations that may enhance what readers of this blog may learn from the news.

Photo from NOAA. The NOAA/NASA Suomi NPP satellite captured this infrared image of Hurricane Harvey just prior to making landfall along the Texas coast on August 25, 2017 at 18:55 UTC. NOAA’s National Hurricane Center has clocked Harvey’s maximum sustained winds at 110 miles per hour with higher gusts. Infrared images like this one can help meteorologists identify the areas of the greatest intensity within large storm systems, such as the areas with the most intense convection, known as overshooting cloud tops (dark orange), surrounding the eye and along the outer bands. https://www.nnvl.noaa.gov/MediaDetail2.php?MediaID=2086&MediaTypeID=1

First, this is apparently a somewhat unusual storm system. It approached the coast just northeast of Corpus Christi as a Category 4 hurricane, although it is now downgraded to a tropical storm. That does not make it less dangerous. The Saffir-Simpson scale that is used to rate hurricane strength deals only with wind speeds. Winds are certainly important, especially when they reach the 130 mile-per-hour range that was the peak for this event. Winds have, from all the visual evidence on the various news outlets I have watched, wreaked tremendous havoc along the coast, tearing apart buildings and overturning trailers and other vehicles. Moreover, hurricanes often spawn tornadoes, and some of the intermittent damage—that is, buildings ripped apart near others largely intact—suggests that this has occurred. In other words, if the more diffuse hurricane winds don’t get you, the tornado just might. It is no laughing matter. It is a wonder the death toll remains relatively low, although we almost surely don’t know the full tally just yet.

One specific impact that always accompanies coastal storms of this magnitude is storm surge, the waters pushed landward by the winds that in this case ranged from six  to twelve feet. These can do considerable damage in low-lying areas along the coast and may also exacerbate coastal erosion.

What makes the storm somewhat unusual also makes it dangerous even after being downgraded to a tropical storm. The storm system appears to have stalled a bit on Sunday and may even be backing out into the gulf for another landfall. At least two very serious consequences can flow from this. One is that the stagnant storm front will dump immense amounts of rain over consecutive days. The projected precipitation totals, even larger than what has fallen so far, mount up, so that projections for many communities range as high as 50 inches. Keep in mind that 30 inches is ample rainfall for an entire year in many parts of the country, and almost no city in the United States is prepared to absorb even half that amount in just a few days. The average yearly rainfall in Houston is just shy of 50 inches.

Moreover, as the storm moves back out over the Gulf of Mexico, it may regain strength that storms typically lose as they make landfall. Tropical storms draw their strength from the warmth of the water over which they pass until they make landfall, after which wind speeds begin to die down. The water of the Gulf right now is in the mid- to high 80s Fahrenheit, reportedly a full two to three degrees above average. That is the source of the strength of Harvey. Regaining any strength from the warm Gulf waters is not a good omen for the Texas coast, and as the storm moves slowly northeast, more of this will affect Houston than was originally the case. That is why we are seeing such intense scenes of flooding in Houston: The storm began with enormous amounts of moisture and has moved along the coast at a snail’s pace, at times just a mile an hour. As the week progresses, however, the storm is projected to move northeast over Louisiana and Arkansas, weakening along the way.

Of course, those warm waters raise questions about the influence of global warming, a topic that does not always receive a warm reception in Texas political circles. It is impossible to say that a specific storm like Harvey would not have happened but for climate change. It is also possible to say very credibly that warmer waters make stronger storms possible. Warmer waters can reflect seasonal and yearly variations, but over time they can also reflect climatic trends. For now, let’s leave it at that. People will have plenty of time later to debate this topic. In due course, as recovery proceeds, it should become a topic of reasonable, informed public discourse.

Other factors are at work as well. The sheer extent of flooding reflects the inexorable fact that the ground in any area has limited capacity to absorb rain. The hydrological cycle allows much rain under normal circumstances to drain into the ground, depending on the types of soil present in any given location. Sand absorbs very well but does not provide a very solid building foundation. Clay provides a better foundation but does not absorb water as quickly. Soil types matter, therefore, but in urban areas we have complicated matters greatly with large quantities of impervious surface that absorb little or no water by design. Impervious surface includes buildings (with the limited exception of green roofs), paved surfaces like roads, parking lots, and driveways, and other structural impediments to the movement and absorption of water. Houston is a very large metropolitan area with the fourth-largest population among major cities in the U.S. Although it is making strides, it is also far from the greenest city in America. Like most major cities, the percentage of impervious surface varies widely, depending on density levels in specific neighborhoods and corridors. Flooding is also influenced by the quality of the drainage systems; Houston is challenged in this respect by low-lying, flat terrain. It is criss-crossed with numerous bayous and canals that provide paths for the movement of water but also have serious limits to the water they can absorb before spilling over onto streets and highways. Those water-filled streets are the main obstacle to evacuation for those who stayed behind. There comes a point where people are better off remaining in place than trying to move, which is why Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner chose not to recommend evacuation.

Some dangers of mass evacuation for 6.5 million people are self-evident: clogged highways that are rapidly filling with water, producing death traps for people in stranded vehicles. Pedestrians cannot see steep drop-offs in elevation as they wade through high waters and can trip and drown. In Houston, the bayous may also contain alligators, water moccasins, and other wildlife hazards that are more easily avoided in dry weather. Moreover, the sheer volume of water can produce eddies and swirls that catch people off guard, and not everyone will be strong enough to regain their footing. Finally, flood water is always dirty water, sometimes just plain filthy, posing a potentially serious threat to public health.

All that said, many other major cities suffer from similar problems. I can think of no city that is prepared for the sheer volume of water currently falling along the Texas coast.

The Texas Gulf Coast communities, therefore, will emerge from this storm with a widespread pattern of both wind- and flood-related damage that will vary significantly from one area to the next, but collectively the costs will probably skyrocket into tens of billions of dollars. It is impossible to know the full costs just yet, but this will almost surely rank as one of the most expensive disasters in U.S. history. The recovery will take years of planning and implementation. If done well, it will involve a great deal of reassessment of patterns of development along the Gulf Coast and of the quality and importance of building codes. Social equity considerations will demand a new examination of the location and quality of low-income housing and the adequacy of affordable housing. Development regulations have seldom been politically popular in Texas, a state that still has never empowered counties to enact zoning codes. Some coastal communities may also wish to look more closely at the prospect of undergrounding utility lines to protect them from hurricane winds.

Events can push public attitudes in new directions. Part of that may depend on new lines of thought gaining traction in the discussion of rebuilding after the disaster. That may require some degree of courageous political leadership. Some very significant changes occurred in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina, including consolidation of levee district management, adoption of a statewide building code, and a charter amendment in New Orleans that gave a new master plan more control over development regulations. We should not make perverse assumptions about outcomes, just as we also should not be naïve about the obstacles. But in my time at the helm of the Hazards Planning Center of the American Planning Association, we certainly worked hard to create a thorough blueprint for those willing to advocate better planning in response to major and catastrophic disasters, and I assume APA remains prepared to further that discussion and provide technical assistance where it can.

There will also be plenty of help available from the federal government, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and other agencies. We can only hope that Congress will sidestep much of its partisan bickering to ensure rapid allocation of the necessary resources. And we can hope that those resources and personnel are managed well to advance the recovery process, which is complicated and daunting.

One encouraging factor in the response has been the emergence of both willing volunteers and the effective use of social media to expedite search and rescue operations. The number of boats driven by volunteers rescuing people from rooftops and the interiors of flooded homes reminded me of the so-called Cajun Navy that operated throughout New Orleans in the desperate days that followed Hurricane Katrina. Disasters have a fortunate tendency in most cases to bring out the best in people, but we are also at a point in history where our new technologies facilitate the ability of willing heroes to find the people who most need help. Even the elderly and disabled are largely capable of dialing 911, or tweeting, or posting photos of their situation on Facebook, sharing their location, and pleading for help—and then finding their guardian angel at the front door with a motor boat. That is a huge advance from only a decade ago because it enables the willing volunteers to become effective heroes. If those civic and humanitarian instincts carry over into the slower grind of recovery, perhaps a stronger, more resilient Gulf Coast can yet rise from the mud, the grime, and the shattered buildings we see now.

Jim Schwab

Engaging Preparedness for Drought

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NASA-generated groundwater drought map from the NIDIS website (https://www.drought.gov).

NASA-generated groundwater drought map from the NIDIS website (https://www.drought.gov).

Drought has historically been the disaster that fails to focus our attention on its consequences until it is too late to take effective action. While other disasters like earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and most floods have a quick onset that signals trouble, and a clear end point that signals that it is time to recover and rebuild, drought has been that slow-onset event that sneaks up on whole regions and grinds on for months and years, leaving people exhausted, frustrated, and feeling powerless. Our species and life itself depend on water for survival.

Over time, our nation has responded to most types of disasters both with an overall framework for response, centered on the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and with resources for specific types of disasters with operations like the National Hurricane Center. It took longer for drought to win the attention of Congress, but in 2006, Congress passed the National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) Act, creating an interagency entity with that name, led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NIDIS was reauthorized in 2014. Its headquarters are in Boulder, Colorado.

For the last five years, I have been involved in various ways with NIDIS and the National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC), an academic institute affiliated with the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. To date, the major byproduct of that collaboration has been the publication by the American Planning Association (APA) of a Planning Advisory Service (PAS) Report, Planning and Drought, released in early 2014. Both NIDIS and NDMC have helped make that report widely available among professionals and public officials engaged in preparing communities for drought. The need to engage community planners in this enterprise has been clear. Much of the Midwest was affected by drought in 2012, at the very time we were researching the report. Texas suffered from prolonged drought within the last few years, and California has yet to fully recover from a multi-year drought that drained many of its reservoirs. And while drought may seem less dangerous than violent weather or seismic disturbances, the fact is that, in the last five years alone, four drought episodes each exceeding $1 billion in damages have collectively caused nearly $50 billion in adverse economic consequences. The need to craft effective water conservation measures and to account adequately for water consumption needs in reviewing proposed development has become obvious. We need to create communities that are more resilient in the face of drought conditions.

A subgroup of the NIDIS EPC Working Group discusses ongoing and future efforts during the Lincoln meeting.

Part of the NIDIS EPC Working Group discusses ongoing and future efforts during the Lincoln meeting.

Over the past decade, NIDIS has elaborated its mission in a number of directions including this need to engage communities in preparing for drought. It was this mission that brought me to Lincoln at the end of April for the NIDIS Engaging Preparedness Communities (EPC) Working Group. This group works to bring together the advice and expertise of numerous organizations involved in drought, including not only APA, NOAA, and NDMC, but state agencies like the Colorado Water Conservation Board, tribal organizations such as the Indigenous Waters Network, and academic experts in fields like agriculture and climatology. Over ten years since the creation of NIDIS, this and other working groups have made considerable strides toward better understanding the impact of drought on communities and regions and increasing public access to information and predictions about drought in order to give them a better basis for decision making in confronting the problem. NIDIS has conducted a number of training webinars, established online portals for databases and case studies, and otherwise tried to demystify what causes drought and how states and communities can deal with it. Our job for two days in Lincoln was simply to push the ball farther uphill and to help coordinate outreach and resources, especially for communication, to make the whole program more effective over the next few years.

Much of that progress is captured in the NIDIS Progress Report, issued in January of this year. More importantly, this progress and the need to build further national capabilities to address drought resilience, captured the attention of the White House. On March 21, the White House issued a Presidential Memorandum signed by President Obama, which institutionalized the National Drought Resilience Partnership, which issued an accompanying Federal Action Plan for long-term drought resilience. This plan enhances the existing muscle of NIDIS by laying out a series of six national drought resilience goals: 1) data collection and integration; 2) communicating drought risk to critical infrastructure; 3) drought planning and capacity building; 4) coordination of federal drought activity; 5) market-based approaches for infrastructure and efficiency; and 6) innovative water use, efficiency, and technology.

Drought clearly is a complex topic in both scientific and community planning terms, one that requires the kind of coordination this plan describes in order to alleviate the economic burden on affected states and regions. With the growing impacts of climate change in coming decades, this issue can only become more challenging. We have a long way to go, and many small communities lack the analytical and technical capacities they will need. Federal and state disaster policy should be all about building capacity and channeling help where it is needed most. The institutional willingness of the federal government to at least acknowledge this need and organize to address it is certainly encouraging.

 

Jim Schwab