Arthur (Andy) Felts

How Far We’ve Not Come

April 26th, 2010 - Arthur (Andy) Felts  

           I teach a Capstone Seminar in the master of public administration program at the College of Charleston—it is designed to bridge the students’ academic experience with the practitioners’ world. One of the assignments for the seminar is for students to work in teams of three or four on a real policy issue/problem. I ask local governments and nonprofits if they have issues or problems and the students choose from the list I get in response.

            This semester, one group chose to examine and suggest updates for the City of Charleston’s policy addressing how employees will be expected to perform in the event of a disaster. While some employees, for example, those involved in public safety and health are clearly part of an emergency response plan others are not. Disaster or not, the city’s financial operations cannot shut down, public works crews need to be ready to quickly deploy for emergency repairs to critical infrastructure, and an orderly system of public communication needs to fall in place.

            In previous blogs, Dr. John Plodinec and I have hinted at this by suggesting that any recovery plan should factor the critical role that public employees will play. Many employees may be required to work several days straight and then be on-call for an extended period. It is unreasonable for a plan not to acknowledge this and provide assistance to them in meeting family needs. It is unreasonable to expect that an employee will work two or three straight days and not know if their family is safe and secure.

            A good plan for public employees would identify ”tiers,” from those that are deemed critical for the ongoing operations of the government, to those that may not be needed for several days. Employees should know in advance what is expected of them in a disaster, what they can expect in return, and, as best they can, make their own personal plans accordingly.

            As the students did their research, they naturally decided to contact other East coast communities to see what their employee plans were for disasters.

            One community representative, alarmingly, responded they would convene department heads and make a plan if a disaster was imminent. There are two pieces of news here. That is not a plan. Rather it is a plan to plan at what is probably not a very good time. Secondly, and more importantly, they should understand that a disaster is always imminent.

            As if that was not enough to set off alarms in my head, the students reported that many communities said they had no plan at all for use of employees during a disaster. The students said they didn’t feel comfortable in asking them ”why not” since they are, after all, still students.

            If you are reading this, alarm bells should be ringing loudly in your head as well. Governmental response outside emergency management both during a disaster and in the extended recovery period is crucial. Lack of a plan that employees know and understand will likely not only dramatically affect the time needed to recover, but human lives as well.

John Plodinec

Three things I think I think – about resilience

April 19th, 2010 - John Plodinec  

With apologies to Peter King of Sports Illustrated …

I think I think I’m starting to hate resilience.  Not the concept, but the word.  Like sustainability, it has been adopted as a fad by so many, that it is losing its meaning.  In CARRI, we are focused on the concept of being able to bounce back better, but that injects a tincture of resistance into our definition that sometimes confuses people.

I think I think that our ballooning federal deficit is the single greatest threat to the resilience of our communities.  From 2005 to today, the federal government has lost one “Katrina” – the federal government’s payments to service our national debt have increased by slightly more than it cost to recover from Katrina.  Simply put, communities will have to develop creative ways to find and use the resources they will need to recover from a disaster.  This is one area where I hope that CARRI’s Community Resilience System Initiative will have a great impact.

I think I think that we as a nation need to put a spotlight on rural America.  In a very real sense, our rural communities are under siege.  Their ability to respond to disasters is at its lowest ebb since the Depression.  Many are struggling to reinvent themselves because they have lost their original reason for being; others are just holding on trying to stave off their inevitable death.  But if some of the predicted impacts of global warming are real, it is likely to eradicate a large number of rural communities across the country.  Rural citizens most likely will go to coastal areas that will already be coping with their own impacts from climate change.  Ideally, we’d like to see the migration go the other way – away from coastal communities.  We need to figure out how to help rural communities become more resilient – in this case, able to recover quickly from acute disasters and respond to the chronic problem of reinventing themselves in a changing world.

Arthur (Andy) Felts

More Thoughts Regarding “Managing for Long-Term Recovery in the Aftermath of a Disaster” – Read it With Us!

April 14th, 2010 - Arthur (Andy) Felts  

This is a continuation of last week’s blog on Managing for Long-Term Recovery in the Aftermath of a Disaster, Charles J. Alesch, Lucy A. Arendt, and James N. Holly (Public Entity Research Institute, 2009). This is, as I said, a book I heartily recommend.

            The methodology used in the book was qualitative interviewing. They picked several communities that had endured disasters and in varying stages of recovery and simply asked people who were there when the disaster hit, “What happened?”

            In listening to people tell their story, the authors gradually arrived at some conclusions put forth in the book. One particularly insightful one was that even as infrastructure was being restored and steps taken toward recovery, the disaster’s effects continued on for several years.

            Though undoubtedly communities need some outside support in recovering from major disasters, they note they could find no correlation between the amount of support and how effective the community was at recovering. Some got a lot of support and still appeared to be failing and some not so much and were succeeding.

            The last chapters of the book are written from a public practitioner’s perspective. The authors note the incredible strain that disasters put on public workers. Not infrequently, city managers resign after working long days for months on end. This is one more reminder that communities that do not plan to take care of their employees and their families are neglecting a crucial resource.

            Recovering from disasters can offer a community an opportunity to undo past mistakes. Many communities tried to do just that in focusing on revitalizing their decaying downtowns as a recovery strategy. Not surprisingly, they didn’t succeed. Even after facades were spiffed up, streets landscaped, and inviting parks built, most in the community continued to prefer the mall on the edge of town.

            I am reminded of the many failed efforts that cities undertook to ‘mall-ize’ their downtowns in the 1960s and 70s. Despite spending massive amounts of money and building them, the people did not come.

            We at CARRI are always reminding ourselves that the trajectory of a community before a disaster will be exacerbated post-disaster. The point here is a simple one. The decayed, vacant, unappealing downtowns didn’t happen overnight. Their development was an incremental process that occurred building-by-building, street-by-street, and tenant-by-tenant over several years. Attempting to change direction with all of that momentum in the wrong direction is not, as Alesch et. al. observe, good policy.

            Restoring, rehabilitating a vacant downtown should be done through careful planning with community involvement and likely will take a long time. While recovery planning can undo some mistakes, it cannot expect to reweave the fabric of the community in a completely new pattern.

Arthur (Andy) Felts

New Publication “Managing for Long-Term Recovery in the Aftermath of a Disaster” – Read it With Us!

April 7th, 2010 - Arthur (Andy) Felts  

 

          In my initial relationship with CARRI as the local researcher in Charleston, one of the aspects of disaster recovery was gathering what we called ‘nuggets.’ These were, in our mind, some things that communities did to smooth the path toward ‘getting back to normal.’

            An example that comes to mind is that Mayor Riley arranged for utility workers to stay in a vacant hotel (which has since been renovated and is now on the historic register) in Charleston. Rather than having to drive their equipment to a central site, they could leave it where they were working, get on a bus, and come back to a meal and bed. This undoubtedly hastened Charleston’s recovery from Hugo.

            An excellent book that contains many ‘nuggets’ has recently been published by the Public Entity Risk Institute (PERI)—Charles J. Alesch, Lucy A. Arendt, and James N. Holly co-authored a book, Managing for Long-Term Recovery in the Aftermath of a Disaster, PERI, 2009. You can find the book at their website:  http://www.riskinstitute.org/peri/

            The authors are to be praised for taking on the issue of disaster recovery from a holistic perspective and giving a lot of good information in a very readable format. I would encourage any practitioner who has an interest in disaster recovery to read it. This book not only contains many examples of what communities did right in recovering from a disaster, but also others where they made mistakes. All are nuggets making the book a very worthwhile read.

            The best parts of the book are in patiently explaining how disasters are really complex socio-economic events. We on the CARRI Team have constantly said that recovery must engage the ‘full fabric’ of the community and that is a different way of saying the same thing.

            The book is particularly effective at explaining and categorizing cascading events, the slow unfolding of the consequences of disaster that are often unnoticed and may take years to occur. The authors break out the immediate consequences of disasters and then explain clearly how these can lead to more immediately following consequences and to systemic community consequences that in turn, create ripple reverberations and consequences. They offer excellent, concrete examples of all these, grounding them in their on-the-ground research method that they used in questioning individuals in specific communities on how they endured different disasters.

            If all this sounds complicated, it is not—and that I why I recommend the book.  One of the things they note, for example, is that sometimes business failures as a result of a disaster may take many more years to occur. The business owner holds on for as long as they can, linked to their communities by a sense of place and community, and simply cannot do it anymore. The success stories they tell are equally as enlightening.

            What Alesch et. al, know is that a disaster affects the whole community—recovery is not about any single component—the infrastructure, economy or social aspects.

            At this point, what I would invite is for any who are reading this blog to get the book and read it. It is worthwhile. Engage in some commentary and we can begin to exchange our views on it. I have some problems with it, but that is because we are all passionate about disaster recovery. You are welcome to respond to this blog or engage me directly at feltsa@cofc.edu.