Arthur (Andy) Felts

Joplin, Missouri: An encouraging story of resilience

August 18th, 2011 - Arthur (Andy) Felts  

One of the things that leaders who have reflectively seen their communities through disasters have consistently said is that people want to feel like life is getting back to normal. It makes sense. Immediately after a disaster there is often a sense of euphoria—people are glad that loved ones and neighbors have survived unharmed. For all, whether they have suffered a loss or not, it is in the human spirit to rise to the occasion.

But then the grind of recovery comes. I remember in Charleston seeing debris truck after debris truck after debris truck for several months. I remember getting several flat tires from roofing nails that were blown off roofs.

I remember the task of cleaning up my office building after it took several inches of surge water. Many thought the College of Charleston should shut down for the semester. But President Harry Lightsey defied those faculty and staff, and the College reopened a mere week and one-half after Hugo. The College’s buildings were largely ok—some with water damage and blown out windows and others with stripped roofs. Getting the College of Charleston kids back on the city’s streets was a remarkably fresh breath of normalcy.

In yesterday’s (August 17th, 2011) New York Times, there was a remarkable story. I quote the reporter, A.G. Sulzberger in the story:

JOPLIN, Mo. — When the red brick schools here were reduced to rubble by a deadly tornado three months ago, local leaders announced a goal that seemed like a longshot: the new school year would start on time.

But on Wednesday the city made good on its promise, and students reunited for the first day of school, marking the end of a difficult summer as they streamed excitedly into makeshift facilities that replaced the 10 schools damaged or destroyed by the tornado on May 22.

As they exchanged standard so-good-to-see-you-again greetings — the boys slapping hands, the girls embracing — juniors and seniors swapped schedules and marveled at the modern touches of their new high school, built in just 55 days inside a recently vacant department store at the back of a shopping mall. Outside, residents of a local retirement home lined the streets to welcome them.

 What could make life seem more normal than kids going back to school in the fall? With effective leadership, Joplin was able to achieve a “longshot.” Going for a reopening of schools likely took some priority over other things that needed tending, but such are the choices we have to make in planning recovery.

It is a remarkable story that gives me heart in the ability of communities to be resilient. Joplin has given us all a clear message about what is important in being resilient, and we should both take heed and applaud them. A difficult summer notwithstanding, the community has likely turned the recovery corner.

Arthur (Andy) Felts

Infrastructure and Resilience–Or Lack Thereof?

February 28th, 2011 - Arthur (Andy) Felts  

In this blog, I am pushing the limits of my knowledge—and hope that any kind readers would correct me if I’m wrong.

One of the most resonant statements we have made throughout the entire CARRI experience is that a community’s trajectory before a disaster will likely be exacerbated. Not something hard to understand. A community that has been experiencing an economic boom will likely do better post-disaster, and one that is not, vice-versa. Ditto for crime or housing problems.

So much of our attention on disasters has been focused on physical devastation that I think it is time to put the record straight. We need our water systems, roads, water treatment facilities, public buildings, bridges, to be in the best shape possible to increase community resilience. Out of sight does not mean out of mind.

So, I ask this question: Where are we, as a nation, heading on our infrastructure? When I Google “America’s decaying infrastructure,” I get myriad hits. Am I searching under the wrong street light?

Many years ago I had a wonderful point made to me by a woman working in transportation planning in Kingsport, TN. As we were talking about the need to plan for capital expenditures, she very gently pointed out to me that sometimes the unseen things in our infrastructure are neglected because they are precisely that—unseen.

In the face of that fact, it is easy to see why major stakeholders would favor a new coliseum over repairing a bridge. But if the bridge is necessary to carry people to the new coliseum, is it any less necessary?

I can make my point here quickly. If we as a nation are on a downward trajectory with respect to our infrastructure, then we are slowly becoming less resilient. Facilities that might have survived a natural or manmade event may show their age. Part of the interesting part about participating in CARRI has been how much it has expanded my vision. A viable neighborhood or community that becomes cut off as a result of decaying infrastructure has experienced its own manmade disaster. Only in this case, we have met the enemy, and he is us.

More on this topic to come, including some hard data…

admin

Surge Capacity Planning in Fair Weather Saves the Day When Skies Darken

February 3rd, 2011 - admin  

In risk management terms, a major snow storm in the Northeast in late December is a high-probability event. The impact of such an event, however, is determined not only by the severity of the storm, but on how well the community is prepared for and responds to the disaster. As an anticipatable event, identifying resources and issuing memoranda of understanding before a snow disaster saves time, confusion, money and lives.

Health professionals speak of “surge capacity” when they are confronted with having to treat more patients than they can routinely handle. Fire departments do as well when they must deal with a massive conflagration. Clearly, the importance of addressing surge capacity should not be limited to fire departments and hospitals.

If a community asks itself the question – what happens if the demands of an event exceed municipal resources; what provisions have been put in place? – that is a first step toward mounting a strong emergency response. An overwhelmed snow removal fleet is no different than a multi-alarm fire or a disaster that brings a surge of patients to a hospital and overwhelms the system.

The old adage, “A stitch in time saves nine,” may be hackneyed, but it does make a point. By asking critical questions and preparing before a disaster means the system is already in place when a disaster hits. Accessing capacity is the first step toward coming up with regionally deployable strategies to mitigate against situations where capacity is exceeded. Though the concept of a “surge capacity fleet” may be new, the key steps needed to undertake such an effort are hardly elusive:

  • Identify independent contractors and others with snow removal equipment
  • Establish a universal agreement process to bring outside contractors into the emergency response equation
  • Identify gaps in the snow removal system, i.e., if the city’s fleet is wholly occupied clearing major arteries, the surge capacity fleet would be assigned to clear other prioritized areas such as emergency vehicle routes,  bus stops and other commuter services, secondary roads, etc. Included in this is the establishment of a system for prioritizing what areas should be cleared in order of importance
  • Establish an incident management system to synchronize existing resources with unified command and traditional emergency management
  • Establish maintenance and logistics support agreements, contingency contracting and volunteer corps. Working out matters such as how private contractors will be paid is much better to establish before the disaster than after when the economic clean-up can be messy.

During an emergency, people want to pitch in and do what they can to make a difference. An organized system to harness those resources can spell the difference between a disaster having a high impact on a community or reducing the impact to something much more manageable.

Arthur (Andy) Felts

Vulnerable Populations or Assets?

January 27th, 2011 - Arthur (Andy) Felts  

My graduate advisor and I were once talking about Marx and the fact that the spontaneous proletarian he predicted would occur was obviously not going to. He looked at me and said—“Look at how Marx described the proletariat. It was always in negative terms. They lacked this or that; they used religion as an opiate, and are reduced to an animal-like existence. Who would want to be a member of such a group?”

As I keep wrestling with the idea of “vulnerable populations” that has become so ubiquitous in disaster literature, I wonder out loud if the very term “vulnerable” is a good one to use. I doubt that anyone would like to be characterized as such and probably don’t think of themselves that way either.

In 1993, John McKnight and John Kretzmann published Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community’s Assets. They were specifically reacting to the growing practice of doing “needs analyses” in our poor, vulnerable communities. In doing needs analysis, we concentrate on what the communities don’t have. In doing what they called “asset analysis or mapping,” the focus on what they do have.

Most of the analyses of vulnerable populations tend to incorporate negatives—implicitly saying what they need. Income is likely low. Educational achievement is lower than average. There may be large numbers of single-parent households and a large number of renters. It is easy to see what they don’t have—more difficult to see what they do have.

A few years ago, Rev. Bill Stanfield moved his wife and kids into Chickora Cherokee, a North Charleston neighborhood, and founded a nonprofit called “Metanoia.” He looked at what the community did have—the capacity to become more self-sufficient. He followed John McKnight’s observation in The Careless Society that large numbers of social service providers meeting “needs” in a community tended to weaken it rather than strengthen it. Slowly, Metanoia has promoted grass roots, community engagement and has built a much stronger and more resilient community by building on assets, not meeting needs.

The point here is relatively simple. As long as we focus on a community’s needs or vulnerabilities, we neglect to see what it has in the way of assets. Many poor, rural communities may be wealthy in social capital—and more and more analysts are seeing how critical this asset is in disaster recovery. Social capital may exist in the form of tight bonds among a group, the presence of extended families, and frequented “third places” like a barbershop, beauty shop, or diner.

Where social capital is created, it can be used as a building block to improve lives. Neighbors might begin to use neighborhood handymen rather than outside contractors. Metanoia provides daycare where the caregivers are community residents and operates a farmer’s market where residents can sell vegetables and crafts that they grow or make.

 There can be little question that these steps have all increased Chickora Cherokee’s resilience even though it still has many needs and would be characterized as vulnerable. I’m sure that the residents are looking at what they do have rather than what they don’t

CARRI is all about promoting more community self-sufficiency. You can’t do that by constantly looking at what you don’t have.

Arthur (Andy) Felts

Cascading Events Redux

January 3rd, 2011 - Arthur (Andy) Felts  

The late, great Senator Everett Dirksen is reputed to have said, “A Billion [dollars] here, a Billion there, and pretty soon you are talking real money.” This pronouncement, by the way, was made in the 1960s when he was criticizing what he thought was the profligate spending style of Lyndon Johnson.

I suppose we could change the billion to trillion and the quote would be more accurate for today’s times. I think a billion is still pretty accurat

The massive snowstorm, a natural, anticipatable disaster, that hit the US NE last week is said to have likely cost retailers a billion dollars in lost holiday revenue.

A few blogs ago, I wrote about cascading events in terms of the old adage, “for want of a nail, a horseshoe was lost, for want of a horseshoe, a rider was lost….”

In this case, the reality is a lot of small businesses rely on holiday spending for as much as half their annual revenue. The battle will not be lost for a while. Many will struggle for a few months before collapsing. When they do, it will not be readily apparent that a snowstorm a few months ago was their loss of a nail.

In resilience thinking, this leads me to ponder two things and put them out as a challenge for thinking about slow motion disasters.

First, it would behoove us to think about the role that small businesses play in our own communities.

There is an obvious economic impact. The business will have to let go of employees that will, in turn, cause other employees to lose jobs and lead to predictable outcomes. This affects tax revenues and so on.

Another impact might be structural. A closing small business that anchored a neighborhood enclave with others might be a tipping point, causing a downturn in that specific place and result in more negative effects.

But there are human impacts as well.

That small business might have been the sponsor of a little league baseball team or an active member of the Chamber and participated in Rotary.

It might have been part of our sense of community. I just finished watching one of myriad food shows on TV that seeks out small restaurants/businesses that are great places to eat. They are often unique structures, as eclectic in style as possible—old barns, basements, bars, etc.  Compare that with the programmed, theme-style look of chain restaurants. Are you in Kansas or California?

To extend that idea, high-end chair retail stores that can pay top dollar rents are, increasingly occupying downtown Charleston, once populated by unique small businesses. They occupy the same buildings, but they have lost a sense of location. I think that Charleston’s old core is changing.

The real heart of Charleston has moved further north —and that is where you find Charlestonians frequenting. On the food shows, patrons comment that the “come here all the time.” The small boutiques, art shops, clothing stores can become community gathering places.

In all those ways, a small business in a community is everyone’s business. But it’s “just a nail.”

Arthur (Andy) Felts

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

December 17th, 2010 - Arthur (Andy) Felts  

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.

Arthur (Andy) Felts

Resources, Resilience and Recovery Following Disaster

September 29th, 2010 - Arthur (Andy) Felts  

            I was doing some online searches last week and encountered an editorial by Columbia University’s Dr. John Mutter in Nature Vol. 466 26 August, 2010. The title was “Disasters widen the rich-poor gap” and focused on the fact that recovery from Katrina in New Orleans has been significantly slower for the urban poor than the middle and upper classes. Poorer neighborhoods have not rebuilt, the poor have lost jobs and had less access to basic services.

            Mutter opines, “In many ways, this disproportionate effect is no surprise. Poorer people’s homes tend to be constructed to a lower standard, and occupy marginal areas such as swampy, low-lying land. But it is surprising that even in the developed world — where much effort and strategy goes into recovery efforts — the division between rich and poor is allowed to broaden in the wake of a disaster. The same thing happened after Hurricane Andrew in Florida in 1992 and the Chicago heat wave of 1995.”

            This observation struck me because in many ways, the same logic was applied in developing the Great Society programs in the 1960s. How, many leaders argued, could the world’s wealthiest nation tolerate the fact that significant portions of its population lived in at least some degree of depravation? A War on Poverty was declared—we would use our wealth to eliminate poverty in a generation. I’m certain we have not yet won that war, but also hope that that is not taken as a reason we should stop fighting.

            Looked at through that lens, we should critically examine Mutter’s base logic that we have placed much effort and strategy into recovery efforts just because we are a developed nation. From early on, we at CARRI have argued that resources are only one leg of a tripod of recovery with the other two being (a) the capacity to utilize those same resources and (b) anticipate (and mitigate) losses from disasters. Having resources (wealth) is a necessary but not sufficient condition for recovery.

      To be sure, we spent a lot of money on post-Katrina recovery efforts. But we should keep in mind a comment Alesch made in 2001 after looking at several communities and their recovery from disasters—including those affected by Hurricane Andrew:

 “[We have] . . . seen many anomalies in disaster sites, including immediate adjacent communities with markedly different post-event experiences. We have seen millions of dollars directed at activities with no apparent long-term benefits to the community. Some locales get better, some get worse, and a few wither away.”

            Developing more community resilience seems a better way to address post-disaster issues such as those raised by Mutter and myriad other issues as well. As we have said all along, a community’s trajectory before a disaster will likely be echoed during recovery. And a goal to develop more resilience puts a community on a positive trajectory.

            About a year and one-half after Hurricane Hugo hit Charleston many noted that the City had not looked as good since before the Civil War. But the city had its poor as well. What was the difference in this case? Resources were used in that recovery to buy paint, deal with ongoing drainage issues, clear debris, and myriad other problems and the end product was different than that observed by Mutter. Perhaps it is because area was more resilient. By the way, in Charleston swampy land is highly valued for its vistas.

John Plodinec

Recovering from the Great Recession –What Might a More Resilient Economy Look Like?

September 14th, 2010 - John Plodinec  

The Great Recession has had devastating impacts on every part of every community in the country – individuals and families with nest eggs severely depleted or disappeared often along with their jobs, businesses treading water, governments caught between the greater demand for services and fewer resources to provide them.  Recovery will be protracted, and may potentially take a decade.

In any and every sense, the Great Recession has been a disaster.  But we will recover – we are already seeing communities that are using the Great Recession as an opportunity to look at themselves with a new perspective and to do things better than before.  We are also seeing the classic dichotomy of views about what “recovery” should look like – some want to rebuild the economy the way it was; others want to build a new and more resilient economy.

If we could describe our pre-Recession economy in one word, it would be “consumption.”  We as individuals piled up debt to buy things we couldn’t afford, and might not have needed.  Government encouraged (and in some cases coerced) financial institutions to make risky loans.  Speculators packaged those loans into even riskier investments, offering outlandish rates of return.  We were living off of our futures, while ignoring the lesson of the past that the future is never certain.

It is clear that the American people have recognized that the economic model of the recent past is not very viable, and certainly not resilient.  Instead of spending, most of the almost 90% of us who are working are saving more than ever.  Individual savings are at a level not seen in decades.  Clearly, those who want to go back to a consumer-driven economy are likely to be disappointed.  This begs the question, what might a more resilient economy look like?

I’m sure there are several possible alternatives.  One that I can envision is what I call a “value-driven” economy.  In a value-driven economy, economic decisions are made on the basis of overall value at each step of the economic chain.  Individuals and families would make their purchasing decisions balancing protection from future contingencies against the value of the goods or services to be purchased.  Thus, we would see a return to saving for a house or a car, and a lessening of future debt.  Instead of spending so much on health care, individuals and families might spend more on health – eating better, getting outside more, spending more time together (Somehow in the debate about health insurance all sides seem to have lost sight of the fact that Americans rank somewhere in the 25-30 range in terms of almost all health measures – when we don’t rank even worse!).

Businesses would recognize that employees are not interchangeable parts, but significant assets to be nurtured (Loyalty might even make a comeback!).  Businesses would recognize that we live in a time of almost frenetic technological change, but that success in business is built more on relationships than technology.

Government and business would forge a new relationship.  In times like these, government would not try to create jobs (at $240K per job!), but would help businesses – especially small businesses – create many more and better ones.  Government would not champion energy measures that actually add to our already bloated energy budget (e.g., carbon capture), but would encourage and reward efficiencies that reduce that budget. Communities would balance incentives to attract new businesses against actions to nurture the ones they already have.  Communities would also recognize that the natural environment is just as important to the community as the built environment.  And most importantly, communities would encourage and help individuals and families to be as self-reliant in the face of disaster – of any type – as possible.

 An unrealistic pipe dream?  Perhaps.  But clearly the old model didn’t work – this one just might.

Arthur (Andy) Felts

If Vulnerability is the Dark Side, Resilience is the Force

September 7th, 2010 - Arthur (Andy) Felts  

          Recently I had a conversation with a colleague who works at the National Science Foundation. I shared with him some of the work I’ve been doing with CARRI and community resilience. His response to me was interesting. He recognized that resilience was finding its way into researchers’ and practitioners’ lexicon and opined that he viewed it as the opposite of and a more positive take on vulnerability.

            My colleague was following the logic of John McKnight and his research on poor communities. McKnight argued that rather than constantly talk about what poor communities need, we should focus on what they already have; rather than doing a needs analysis, we should do an assets analysis.

            It is an interesting conceptualization—seeing vulnerability and resilience as two sides of the same picture. I confess to not being entirely convinced and that makes it a good topic to blog on, seeking input from readers of this.

            Some researchers, especially social work academics and social psychologists, write about the resilience of vulnerable populations. Their arguments are cogent: disadvantaged, vulnerable populations can see each day as a stress test—they are only an illness or broken down car or temporary job loss away from personal disaster. Their ability to survive and even thrive is testament to their resilience.

            This likely speaks to the building of social capital in some groups we see as vulnerable. But then, are they as vulnerable as we think they are, looking from the outside?

            The biggest difficulty I have in seeing vulnerability and resilience as closely related is that what might not look like a vulnerable population may become one as the cascading and rippling effects of a disaster unfold. Small business owners may look to be in reasonably good shape pre-disaster. But they can quickly become part of a vulnerable population if they lose their businesses six months or a year after a disaster.

            The same might hold for the underinsured. If they lose a business or home and the insurance settlement just pays off their debt, those that appeared to be middle class can quickly look very different.

            Edmund Andrews, an economics reporter for the New York Times, wrote last year about his slow spiral into a $500,000 mortgage by borrowing constantly to pay off old debt. Andrews was finally unable to meet his debt obligations after paying his alimony and child support. It is doubtful that he would look vulnerable until the house of debt cards he constructed completely crumbled.

            Interestingly, in a conversation with Dr. Dean Kilpatrick, a researcher at the Medical University of South Carolina, who looks at psychological effects and disasters, I opined that older people might be more vulnerable. He immediately said his data did not support that observation. Older people often don’t have many of the obligations of middle class workers—high mortgages, children to care for, jobs to worry about and even parents to look after.

            It may be that populations vulnerable to disasters can be just about any place we look for them. That is why a more comprehensive view of a community, as we have consistently taken with CARRI, is a better way to see resilience than as the opposite of vulnerable.

Arthur (Andy) Felts

Cities and Resources

August 24th, 2010 - Arthur (Andy) Felts  

           Another breakout track at the July Hazards Conference in Boulder focused on Environmental Change and Patterns of Vulnerability. I wrote a bit about that in my first blog on the meeting.

            In that blog I mentioned that Dr. Peter Wenger from NSF participated on the panel and talked about Dr. Peter Berke was researching the “new urbanism” and its impact on community resilience.

            The panel, “The Maddening of Crowding: Urban Vulnerability,” was interesting in and of itself. It focused mostly on what were called “megacities,” those with 19 million plus residents. Wenger talked about the most vulnerable being “SINs”—Small Island Nations and the need for a global platform to look at vulnerability. He also referred to cities as having large “concentrations of resources.”

            Dr. William Siembieda from California Polytechnic Institute—San Luis Obispo, echoed that comment. Only he also pointed out that these cities contain large poor populations and both the need to increase income for these as well as form international “insurance pools” where they can ensure the leverage of these resources.

            All of this echoed for me Lawrence J. Vale and Thomas J. Campella’s edited volume, The resilient city: How modern cities recover from disaster (Oxford University Press, 2005). I highly recommend the book. Various authors in that book talk about how major cities are located in important places and there was a commitment to building them in the first place. That suggests that we don’t need to look exclusively at megacities, we could include a whole lot more on the list. New York City of course, Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, Atlanta and Charlotte all have a lot of resources at their disposal.

            This predisposes (pun intended) most all big cities to be more resilient. While researching for a paper I’m just finishing up, I was quite surprised to discover that Hiroshima’s population returned to pre-atomic bomb levels by 1955. Undoubtedly, this is a good example of resilience, acknowledging that Japan is a small nation and enjoys cultural homogeneity.

            The resilient city is an excellent read. It recounts, among other things, how Berlin was rebuilt after WWII, San Francisco recovered from the 1906 combined fire and earthquake, and Washington, DC after it was nearly destroyed by the British Invasion of 1814.

            In all these cases, and many more, there was a huge will among the cities leadership (public and private) to restore and recover. In fact, Vale suggests it is an axiom of resilience that it is a test of the very legitimacy of those leaders. They have to inspire people and leverage resources to go on.

            It was the fact that these cities had large numbers of differently skilled leaders that were able to leverage the resources they possessed.

            “Large” is a relative number—what was large in 1500 AD might be small now—but I’d opine that in today’s world, most cities with 5 million or more residents possess that inherent resiliency that comes from making themselves unique and creating a sense of place and capitalizing on their economic engines. There are exceptions, of course. Pompeii was in no position to recover after Mount Vesuvius erupted.

            It may come down to simply a large population, poor or otherwise that points to their inherent resilience. I’d say not. One of my favorite quotes from Charleston’s Mayor Joseph P. Riley, Jr. is that city “places”—parks, promenades, cultural venues, sports arenas, boulevards—are places where “memories are made.” People seek to preserve those.

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