Back To The Future: Was That Back To Normal or a “New Normal?”

When the CARRI Charleston team first started traveling around the area meeting with community stakeholders and explaining the concept of community resilience, I sought some simple ways of explaining what we are about. One catch-phrase that I used to describe when a community beset by a disaster was clearly on the road to recovery was when a community member could drive to Barnes and Noble and shop. Even in those days, we discussed whether community resilience might mean getting back to a “new normal” rather than the “normal” that implied things were restored and life was as it had been before the disaster. In that context, recovery from a disaster might offer the opportunity for a community to rectify past mistakes or weaknesses in the community. Recovery could mean making a community more resilient.

Of late, I have begun to think that in many ways disaster recovery will always mean getting to a “new normal” in even more complex ways than we initially thought. To illustrate: I note with some chagrin that many now think Barnes and Noble (one of the original “killer B’s”—along with Borders and Blockbuster Video) is struggling on the verge of bankruptcy. It may not be there in the “new normal” that will inevitably unfold as time passes, disaster or not.

The point here is relatively simple. We live in a dynamic environment. What we think of as normal at any given point in time is always undergoing change into a new normal. Sometimes that change is incremental—sometimes less so, as when we drive by a favorite business and see it is closed.

We should think of disaster recovery as part of a normal process of community evolution. To be sure, we want for it to be expedient and fair, but natural disasters (and, I hesitate to say, but it likely is true that manmade ones are as well) are themselves part of a “natural” cycle of things, not unlike the impact of forest fires on the life cycle of ecosystems.

 Most everyone is familiar with the decision made by the citizens of Greensburg, Kansas after it was leveled by a tornado in May 2007. The decision was that the “new normal” would be to rebuild “green.” In this case, the new normal is a new future. Currently, Newport News, VA is abandoning a city park that has been subject to tidal flooding as a result of sea level rise and land subsidence. It will be restored as the wetland it once was. In this case, the new normal was the old normal.

Oystermen in Louisiana will have to create a new normal after the BP Deep Horizon spill. Even though their oyster farms were largely undamaged by the oil and they will be ready for a harvest in February, they may have a hard time finding customers. Many restaurants that relied on them for a steady supply have found new purveyors and now have a loyalty to them. Lacking adequate supply when the Louisiana beds were closed, many restaurants across the country simply dropped oysters from their menu. It is doubtful that most of the oystermen “planned to recover,” but had they done so, they would have a strategy in place to deal with this “new normal.”

When disaster recovery is planned for in advance, it allows us to think about where we might like to be rather than having to think about where we have been.