Of Boiling Frogs, Disasters and Chronic Disasters

June 16th, 2010 - Arthur (Andy) Felts

Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth made a large point of the boiling frog theory. You put a frog in a pot of boiling water and it will jump out. But if you put a frog in a pot of room temperature water and slowly raise the heat, the frog won’t notice the rising temperature. Before long, it will die.

Gore (and others) have used this story to illustrate climate change. Metaphorical, or better, mythically (since it does not appear to be true), I suppose it works. Climate change is analogous to slowly heated water, and we won’t notice until it is too late. Problem is, we already have noticed.

The illustration is, of course, fraught with inconsistencies. First, we have facts relating to boiling water and frogs. Researchers are pretty uniform in saying if you throw a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will jump out if it can or die from the immediate scalding. We can accurately call that an “acute disaster.” So far we agree with Al.

Contrary to popular assumptions, when placed in a pot of water that is slowly heated, the frog will most likely get uncomfortable and jump out. That is best labeled as “chronic disaster”—one that unfolds in slow motion, so to speak. Though in the end, the summative impacts of a chronic disaster may equal those of a major disaster, they just don’t all happen at once.

Climate change (if you believe in it—and I do, by the way) can best be described as a chronic disaster.

I live on a lot that has a salt marsh in the rear—eight feet out my back door. My lot is eight feet above sea level. Over some period of time, I could, I suppose own beachfront property if some sea-level rise predictions are correct and if I am alive. Alternatively, I could have deep-water access and a lot that is (by today’s standards at least) worth considerably more than it is now. I write this because I’ll have ample time to adapt and make any of myriad decisions to deal with rising water.

In thinking about the slow devolutions of chronic disasters, they occur in a way that is much akin to allowing me to make the decision to put up hurricane shutters in the midst of one.

Certainly the CARRI model of disaster and recovery can apply to chronic disasters. But should it and if it should, how? We can think about it, because nothing is pressing.

There are a couple of things we should focus on as we consider this question.

The first is whether or not a chronic disaster is one that suggests a community will be sustainable over time. In this sense, chronic disasters can result in a persistent downward trajectory of community functioning. In the case of climate change and sea level rise, salt water may make incursions into drinking water sources, beaches lost as recreation areas, and so on. In this sense, a community enduring a chronic disaster becomes less and less resilient and might not be able to resist even a minor perturbation as it slips downward.

The second issue is adaptation. Likely many communities will elect to build dikes or begin an incremental retreat from the shoreline as the sea levels rise. This would be akin to introducing a new species to combat a non-native invasive one.

Economic disasters are often chronic. One industry leaves, then another, and then another. Slowly, incrementally, the community’s economy crumbles. However, the warning signs are there in multiple forms. Higher joblessness, declining home values, higher crime and so on are all signs. Think Detroit. At some point, communities may breach the realm of sustainability and become entirely different than what they were, if anything at all. That is why my good colleague, John Plodinec says we need a Common Framework, now! It would allow us to see the oncoming freight train in an objective fashion.

The CARRI model can certainly assist a community in recognizing it is on a downward trajectory. We at CARRI have to decide whether the recovery model we have created “fits” chronic disasters that progressively deplete a community’s resources over an extended period of time. In the case of a community that is unsustainable, thinking out loud again and speaking for myself and not the CARRI team, I do not think it does because adaptation is one thing and unsustainability is another.

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Symbolism and Resilience

June 10th, 2010 - Arthur (Andy) Felts

I’ve been busy of late writing a paper for CARRI that explains our ideas about a Community Recovery System (CRS) and a Common Framework (CF) to wider academic and practitioner audiences. As I have done so, I have once again been struck by what a linear process writing is.

We at CARRI see disaster recovery as following a logic, but one that also shows the interconnectedness of a community. Though post-disaster infrastructure recovery is important early on, even then the gears of a community’s economic and social system are engaging. It is important to understand this because any recovery plan that does not will not be as effective.

As I was struggling with a way of explaining the need to pay attention to social factors, early on I thought about a community’s social capital. Social capital is one form of glue that holds a community together during normal functioning. It literally, to use our CRS and CF terminology, helps create a sense of community. And it gets stressed, stretched, and challenged during and following a disaster.

I went back and searched for a quote I had highlighted in Lawrence J. Vale and Thomas J. Campanella’s edited volume, The Resilient City: How modern cities recover from disaster, written in 2005. There, Vale wrote:

“….[R]ecovery occurs network by network, district by district, not just building by building; it is about reconstructing myriad social relationships embedded in schools, workplaces, childcare arrangements, shops, places of worship, and places of play and recreation.” (Vale, 2005)

My mind immediately seized upon a familiar image—that of the tattered American flag that someone searching amidst the World Trade Center rubble attached to the highest girder sticking in the ground. Even before the first truckload of debris was carted away, putting up a symbol that the city would use to endure its disaster. Who can forget the image of sheer compassion on the fireman’s face as he tenderly carried a young child away from the rubble that had once been the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City? These are the types of symbols that help a community rebuild.

Vale writes about other rituals that matter–the ceremony that was held before the last truck carted the last load of debris from ground zero where the towers once stood. In his words, “Remembrance drives resilience.”

The significance of this should not be overlooked. Even in the early stages of disaster recovery, a community should attend to matters of social capital just as it works to repair roads and bridges. Of course, the primary form this takes is communication from community leaders that clearly understand this is both at stake and an issue.

Social functioning may rest atop adequate infrastructure and a healthy economic system, but that does not make it any less important in the meshing of gears that create community resilience.

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Thinking the Unthinkable

May 12th, 2010 - Arthur (Andy) Felts

Today I am “thinking out loud” as I watch, read, and listen to what is happening on the Gulf Coast – I am really concerned about what is happening there, and I thank you for listening as I share my thoughts and note these are my thoughts and not necessarily those of the CARRI Team. A couple of years ago, Time magazine reporter Amanda Ripley published a book titled The Unthinkable: Who survives when disaster strikes and why. The book recounts individual acts of heroism in response to disasters and what bluntly must be described as incredible acts of naïveté at best and stupidity at worst. It is simplistic, but accurate, to say that those who survive disasters think ahead and those who do not, don’t.

Of course it is human nature to resist thinking about disasters, unthinkable or otherwise. We will never know why some people try to carry their luggage off a burning plane, why someone heads for their attic with no way out during a severe flood or why some thought up was the best way to get out of the burning World Trade Center.

CARRI is about encouraging communities to think about known possible threats that have a reasonable possibility of occurring. Addressing these through mitigation, preparation, response and planning to recover makes common sense.

But CARRI is also encouraging communities to think about the unthinkable where the consequences of a disaster can be dramatic in scale. The way we have been doing this is developing a Common Framework that asks communities to look at events, no matter how remote, where the potential loss is enormous. In doing this, they may decide that at least some preparation or mitigation – however modest – might be appropriate.

If we are to believe what we read these days, the unthinkable has occurred in the Gulf of Mexico. The possibilities of an oil rig exploding, collapsing and sinking one mile into the ocean, and leaving an open, gushing stream of oil were so remote and fail-safed enough we were not to worry.

However it appears a perfect storm of events did occur to make that unthinkable a reality. Given that reality, we now realize that the human/ecosystem damage could be so vast that it might have been worthwhile to construct a simple thing like a containment dome and perhaps even another one or two strategies in advance. I’m not privy to the BP boardroom, but I’m betting that they wish they did, given the costs they are facing in retribution and cleanup.

It is ironic that the unthinkable should have been because twenty-one years ago an oil spill in Alaska coated 1,300 miles of Prince William Sound. It was another perfect storm. A tired Captain turned the ship over to a tired crewman with icebergs in the outer shipping lane, forcing the ship to sail an inner lane. Add to that the technology was not operating that would have alerted the crew to the rocks that the Exxon Valdez encountered.

Ripley writes about this at the individual level. Even though we all know that being a passenger on a crashed plane is extremely remote, those who do survive report that they actually listen to the flight attendant’s instructions and identify the nearest exit. Or those that head to the attic in a flood take an axe with them.

As they become more resilient, communities should move from thinking about the thinkable and the probable to the unthinkable where the loss could be very high.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Psychological Effects of Disaster

March 29th, 2010 - Arthur (Andy) Felts

Thinking holistically about the impact of disasters means we need to be willing to drill down from the macro to the individual level.

At the macro level, infrastructure may be compromised or destroyed and that creates one set of problems. If a bridge is lost, an entire community may be isolated.

On an intermediate level, discreet neighborhoods left isolated by the loss of the bridge may be impacted in terms of overall survival and recovery. No one wants to return to a place where they cannot access health care, get groceries, or buy gasoline.

If we go down to the individual level, then we face a new set of challenges. Even if the bridge is rebuilt, the grocery store opens back up, and the gas station is pumping gas, we are still left with considerations about the impacts on individuals and their families.

If you will here permit me to speak from experience, I can tell you that, after experiencing Hugo in 1989 for many years afterward, I had a very sinking feeling when June 1^st rolled around and we faced a new hurricane season. Every day I felt a sense of dread as I checked the National Hurricane Center’s website to see tropical activity (something I do even now). I saw similar effects on many friends. Instead of being thrilled with summertime and vacations, we all took on a somber look. Some finally decided to move away from Charleston.

Experts tell us that many people suffer various psychological effects from disasters. Many exhibit mild to severe signs of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Depression is another observed effect.

Most of us are familiar with the effects of depression—if we watch TV at all, then we likely see one or two ads for drugs used to treat it. Though we commonly associate PTSD with soldiers who suffer the horrors of combat, the US Department of Veteran’s Affairs excellent website on PTSD (http://www.ptsd.va.gov/index.asp) includes disaster victims among those who suffer from it. It lists no less that twenty-four common effects ranging from emotional to severe physical reactions, including violent behavior.

Post-disaster, stress levels for those with jobs and families to support certainly will increase dramatically. They need to work, perhaps repair their homes or adapt to temporary housing, tend to their children (who are another psychological issue in and of themselves) and try to be an anchor. Children will not only be affected by this, but also suffer their own problems. Older people may feel helpless and endure increased isolation.

To an extent, we can predict those more likely to suffer from PTSD. They would be those that had emotional or psychological problems before the disaster or loss a loved one—even a family pet.

It is not hard to imagine the effects PTSD and depression can have. Jobs may be lost. Drug and alcohol abuse likely will increase. In short, the post-disaster effects of depression and PTSD will ripple upward from the individual to the community.

There is no question this affects community resilience. Experts are beginning to look at strategies to reduce the psychological consequences of disasters. Some are as simple as encouraging people to talk to others about the disaster. Some suggest we provide more immediate post-disaster counseling. We need better data. But we also know a lot.

Planning to recover means not just ensuring that the infrastructure is restored and economic recovery is set in motion. It means we also must think about keeping individuals whole as well.

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Reinforcing the Need for a Common Framework

March 22nd, 2010 - Arthur (Andy) Felts

Several times in these CARRI blogs, Warren Edwards has reinforced that CARRI is about planning to recover. In recent blogs, Dr. John Plodinec has argued several reasons why we need a common framework—perhaps more precisely described as a national community resilience system—to build communities more resistant to disasters. I’d like to add an additional note to that discussion that reinforces and links these two ideas explicitly.

We live our lives in a way that is analogous to facing backwards in a boat that is floating down a river. The maxim is that our hindsight is 20-20—meaning that we know after things happen much of why they happened. We will never see the future, but we can anticipate and prepare, making use of applied research and best practices. That, in two words, is applied theory and that is the intent behind the community resilience system.

We know that communities with fewer resources have a harder time recovering from disasters. While a community resilience system won’t necessarily augment resources per se, it does point at ways that scarce resources can be used more effectively. In this sense, it is a preparatory tool that can help communities create more resilience.

We know that businesses, large and small, can better weather a disaster and recover if they have business continuity plans. A community resilience system both predicts that and provides ways of measuring how effectively a community is promoting business continuity planning and thus predict their degree of resilience.

One thing that everyone agrees on is that all disasters are, ultimately, social phenomena. In the end, no one would care much if a flood, hurricane, bomb, tornado, or earthquake destroyed a baseball park if there were no one around to go there and watch games. That is the major reason we believe there should be a common resilience system that can be applied to any disaster. In that sense, the system would provide each community a lens to look at potential areas of loss and thus direct their attention to areas where they, specifically, should plan to recover.

So, to return to one of Dr. Plodinec’s assertions about the need for a system now, our research has led us to conclude that communities often have unrealistic expectations about federal aid after a disaster. This, in itself, is a negative indicator. Developing a system of community resilience will work to teach communities to be more self-sufficient and strategic.

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Cascading Events

March 5th, 2010 - Arthur (Andy) Felts

Most are probably familiar with the old maxim:

“For want of a nail, a shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, a horse was lost. For want of a horse, the rider was lost.” For want of a rider, a battle was lost. For want of a battle, a kingdom was lost.”

The maxim describes quite well what we call ‘cascading events.’ As communities, regions, nations, and even continents have become increasingly interdependent, understanding and factoring cascading events becomes an important part of assessing community resilience.

Think of our growing interdependencies in this way: In 1960 a major disruption in international trade would have meant you might not have bananas to put on your cereal. In short, its effects would have been fairly minimal. Now think what such a disruption could mean in 2010.

Cascading events are easiest to understand in the private sector—with economic consequences. A major disaster in the Pacific Northwest might reduce the ability of industries there to supply the rest of the nation with plywood. This might, in turn, cause other building materials to be substituted and thus reduce long-term market share for the plywood producers. Or, the lack of materials or higher costs might cause a southeast contractor to go out of business.

Complex interdependencies are a major reason that business continuity planning has become increasingly important in the private sector. A large company that outsources a service or production to another nation has to factor what a disaster in that nation would mean for its ability to provide services and/or products. Those dissatisfied with services might seek the other’s products, which then might cause production layoffs. read the entire article >

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Social and Professional Networking: Does it affect a community’s resilience?

October 13th, 2009 - Arthur (Andy) Felts

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