Arthur (Andy) Felts

Individual Versus Community Resilience

May 25th, 2011 - Arthur (Andy) Felts  

One of the more interesting things to me about the flooding that is occurring in our heartland is that some are going to extraordinary measures to preserve their property. Recently, a picture of a single home, sand bagged, was shown. Gas generators were pumping what water seeped in as it inevitably did. The home was a bit of an island in a sea. It depended upon gasoline (or diesel) that might not be as readily available in a matter of hours. If it had a fire, then no fire department could respond. If someone broke in, then no police department could respond.

I do not fault any homeowner for trying to protect their investment. It is only natural. However, as they say, there are three things that are important about the value of a piece of property. Location, location, and location.

When I first moved to Charleston, I purchased a home next to one that was under construction when Hurricane Hugo hit. It was a pile of wood after that and was not removed for three years. That affected the value of my home. But more importantly, it robbed me of neighbors and a sense of place so I could watch them plant flowers and have kids playing in the yard. Instead, I lived with a pile of rubble for three years. That was not good.

I want to be careful in saying this-so I will do so as straightforwardly as I can. CARRI is about community resilience. Individual resilience contributes to that. But becoming a resilient community is more than that. The saying is that ‘no person is an island.’ But that is exactly one sense I got in watching the sand bagged home surrounded by water. In the best of all possible worlds, that home would become an anchor for rebuilding a neighborhood. But more anchors might be necessary and would certainly factor in people deciding to live there.

As we watch the flooding, we should realize that we are in a common boat, figuratively speaking. Community resilience is about learning how to protect our communities. In the end, the community is what caused us to choose to live where we did.

Arthur (Andy) Felts

Planning to Recover: Some thoughts on what we know will happen when the flood waters recede

May 10th, 2011 - Arthur (Andy) Felts  

In his last blog, my good colleague, Warren Edwards wrote about what a CARRI Community would do differently after a disaster. He emphasized the need to communicate and develop a vision for a post-disaster community. This blog is intended to follow that line and delve more into what a CARRI Community might do.

 As I write this, the Mississippi Valley is experiencing unprecedented floods that will likely exceed the major one in 1927. Since then, the Mississippi has flooded many times of course. Sometimes these are minor, other times less so. Sometimes, like now, they appear to be catastrophic.

Since we live in a world of scarce resources, communities cannot prepare for every disaster they might face through efforts to mitigate—building yet higher dikes in the case of the Mississippi, which many think is bad policy. When the disaster is big enough, the mitigation efforts, wall/dikes in New Orleans, earthen dikes along the Mississippi, reinforced structures elsewhere, will fail and the disaster consequences may be all the greater when they do.

It is at this point that a community’s real resilience is tested. Even if they cannot employ techniques/policies that mitigate against disaster, they can still plan their recovery. We are witnessing some of this resilience thinking in many communities along the Mississippi. Homeowners are not just evacuating, they are moving their furniture and belongings as well in anticipation of flood levels yet to come.

 That said, much rebuilding must take place after the flood recedes. This is easy to see. But how many communities have developed resilient practices around that? How many have precertified building contractors who will come in to help rebuild? The alternative is a backlog of filings and unnecessary delays in getting back to normal? One easy way to precertify is simply to recognize licensed contractors that come from communities with essentially the same building codes. As well, how many communities have thought about their permitting process, including staffing, and have anticipated being figurative flooded with permits to review? The alternative is to have yet another time-delaying process imposed on homeowners and builders.

Recovery from the floods will take a long time. How many communities have thought about critical staff that will experience dramatically increased workloads? They will be working long hours and under a great deal of stress. Have the communities planned for this since we know it will happen. Are they prepared to provide assistance for critical employee’s families—help with living arrangements, schooling and other life necessities?

Utilities will need to be restored. Electric companies are excellent examples of resilient thinking in that many have reciprocal agreements with other companies. Equipped workers will come from far and wide to help restore systems. But how many community water systems or gas systems have similar agreements?

The flooding comes at a bad time—toward the end of the school year. Have communities thought about perhaps extending schools into the summer so parents can attend to rebuilding? Or, perhaps having day-camp programs for those who need them?

Disasters always surprise us in that things happen that were not anticipated. However, many things can be predicted, and resilient thinking attends to these to make recovery as smooth and quick as possible.

Warren Edwards

CRSI Quarterly Update: Community Resilience System

May 2nd, 2011 - Warren Edwards  

Coding the System: 

 After a year’s work by over 175 people representing the research world, the full spectrum of America’s communities and significant representatives from the private business sector, our developers are coding the software for the Community Resilience System (CRS) that we have envisioned from the beginning of this project.  Our challenge continues to be ensuring that the resulting system is highly flexible, simple, easy to use, and has robust embedded supporting resources.  The joint Community and Regional Resilience Institute (CARRI) and Meridian Institute team supervising the software engineers works daily to create a web-enabled product that has an attractive and user friendly portal for client interface while testing each step for logic and adherence to the principle that the tool must be useful to the community’s experts without outside assistance.  This entire process is overseen by the Community Resilience System Initiative (CRSI) Steering Committee which continues to actively guide and direct the entire project. 

Building the Resource Base: 

The Community Resilience System is designed to allow communities to work systematically through a number of recommended or required actions tailored to the community’s needs that culminate in an actionable plan to increase resilience.  One of the most powerful attributes of the system is the inclusion of robust sets of supporting resources that accompany each recommended action.  The supporting resources are varied and specifically designed to support the action with which they are associated.  They may take the form of checklists, templates, examples of successful practices, guidance material or data sources.  Each action has several pertinent supporting resources. 

The CARRI team is working hard now to complete the compilation of those resources.  For all actions, we want to find the best resources available to meet the specific need.  In most cases, we have been able to find one or more existing resources that can be used to meet the action requirements.    In no case do we wish to re-invent or duplicate an existing, proven resource with anything original and untested.  In this way, the CRS acts as a robust vehicle to expand the reach of existing private sector and government programs.  Where resources do not exist or additional guidance or instructions are needed, the team is creating these resources to be tested early in the community pilot process. 

More about the pilots and CRSI report to come…

Arthur (Andy) Felts

Very Hidden Infrastructure: Social Capital

March 28th, 2011 - Arthur (Andy) Felts  

Though I only moved to Charleston six weeks before Hurricane Hugo hit, the aftermath was remarkable in many ways. Despite the misery of no power, downed trees, blocked roads and widespread damage, many remember the first few days with a great deal of fondness. In my neighborhood, we had a few block parties. As people realized their freezer stocks were going to thaw, they drug out grills and gas stoves and cooked for their neighbors. Of course there was a sense of exhilaration that no one lost a loved one or was seriously injured. But the feeling of ‘togetherness’ persisted for some time and brings a smile even today.

In her book, “A Paradise Built in Hell,” Rebecca Solnit writes directly to this phenomenon through recorded chronicles and interviews around five major disasters—the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, the 1917 munitions ship explosion in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina.

Though she is careful to say that a disaster is never something to be wished for, she explores the resilience of the human spirit in disaster recovery by suggesting that it is a time when many discover a new side of human nature—a giving, caring one built on our sense of community. This description is contrary to our usual disaster movies where many turn to rioting and looting. While this latter can occur, there are likely exponentially higher incidences of the former.

Solnit is of course exploring a dimension of life that we in the social sciences describe as “social capital.” Essentially, this is the glue the binds us together and how strong that glue is. Like invested money, social capital can grow or shrink, depending upon how communities evolve over time. A disaster is a time when social capital is tapped as a community resource.

Robert Putnam, in “Bowling Alone,” observes that, like our infrastructure, it may well be that our social capital is on a declining trajectory. Metaphorically, Putnam suggests that the decline in Friday evening bowling leagues signifies that we are less and less closely glued together in the specific geographic sense of community—which is always where a disaster hits. The impact of Putnam’s book was huge—and it is still hotly debated.

Some say we are just bound together differently, as in Internetted social networks. As I looked at these today—the obvious conclusion was that they may be “new” neighborhoods, but they remain virtual for all of the reality of the people who populate them.

Disaster strikes neighborhoods, towns, cities, and regions, not networks. Networks are what we need to recover, and it is questionable in my mind whether those that are virtually glued together have as much disaster resilience as ones that are created in a neighborhood coffee shop or pub. I don’t question the glue; I just question its disaster resilience.

This raises the question of course of how we might go about rethinking our notion of social capital in connection with disasters. Solnit suggests that it is human nature to want to come together. In thinking about creating more resilient communities, how do we facilitate that in a way that helps communities better understand its vital role in recovery?

Arthur (Andy) Felts

The Unthinkable

March 24th, 2011 - Arthur (Andy) Felts  

As I write this, it has been less than one week since the devastating tsunami moved the island that is Japan eight feet further west, killed thousands, and destroyed untold numbers of homes, business, and factories. As bad as that is, I have faith in the resilience of the Japanese people to recover.

I have less faith in what is potentially an unrecoverable disaster, a nuclear meltdown sufficient to breech a reactor core of one of the damaged plants and release radioactive clouds of steam that will contaminate the land for miles around. Recovery from that will be on a scale of centuries, if it occurs.

Of course Japan has experienced nuclear explosions before. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were horrendous in terms of deaths. Somewhere between 100,000 and 166,000 were killed in Hiroshima. However, ten years after Hiroshima was leveled, it reached its population level from just before the bomb was dropped. That is a statement on resilience.

The difference between the potential with the current situation is volume of radioactive material. The Hiroshima bomb contained a few kilograms and not all was consumed. Nuclear power plants have thousands of kilograms of fissionable material and so the potential for radioactive release on the same order. That, plus the purity (radioactivity) of the material we use in reactors today, is far better than in 1945.

With nuclear reactors as part of our nation’s infrastructure, it behooves us to ask what types of preventative maintenance is being done since that question is being raised about the Japanese ones.

Part of becoming more resilient is to ask communities to engage in risk analysis—essentially asking a simple question: “What is potentially at loss in the event of a disaster?” It is easy enough to create surge maps and calculate losses from a massive wave. More difficult to consider is the cascading event of reactor pumps failing afterwards.

Already, the threats posed by the failing Japanese reactors are sparking debates about the relative safety of nuclear power—at a time when more and more seemed to be turning a favorable eye to it as an alternative to fossil fuels. I take no position in the debate because I do not consider myself sufficiently knowledgeable. What I do know is that the land for miles around Chernobyl is still radioactive and will be so long after I, and my grandchildren are gone.

If that is a potential loss in the event of a disaster, then we need to make such choices with our eyes wide open and do our best to mitigate against failure. Resilient thinking demands it.

Warren Edwards

The Status of the Community Resilience System Initiative

March 10th, 2011 - Warren Edwards  

For those blog readers who are interested in the status of the Community and Regional Resilience Institute (CARRI) Community Resilience System Initiative – a quick update.  Just about a year ago we at CARRI with the concurrence of our DHS colleagues decided that our experience in over two years of research that combined the insights of a distinguished group of academic researchers with practical experience in a number of communities warrented an effort to build a practical, useful, web enabled Community Resilience System.  Our goal was to take a year and coordinate the effort of a much wider group of experts from academia, from the full fabric of community life and from the private business sector to create a robust set of processes and tools that would allow any community to understand, assess, measure, improve and reward community resilience.  Our plan was (and is) to have this web-enabled system completed as a prototype ready for initial testing and refinement by April 1, 2011 and fully functional and available for community-based developmental pilots by July.  We are on track.

All three working groups that came together to assist us in this project – a group of researchers (the Subject Matter Group); a group of community representatives (the Community Leaders Group); and a group representing government and the private business sector (the Resilience Benefits Group) have completed their formal work, although we remain in constant contact with them and continue to benefit from their wisdom and experience.  In all, well over 200 individuals provided input, advice, ideas, and constructive criticism.  We have documented hundreds of hours of in-person workshops and telephonic listening interviews, numerous short surveys on specific topics and a significant amount of individually produced thoughts, ideas and suggestions in summary reports for each work group.  Each of these reports will be published on or about April 1 as annexes to the full project report of the CRSI Steering Committee.  The final Steering Committee report will also include a set of policy and other recommendations flowing from the working groups’ reports that bear on community resilience. 

We know that every community is a complex social organization with its own characteristics, needs, challenges and potential solutions.  The Community Resilience System  acknowledges this and provides a framework from which communities will be able to tailor their individual resilience vision, programs and action plans without being overly prescriptive.  It guides communities in how to think about resilience and provides a well conceived set of actions that will lead to community self-knowledge; to outcome driven actions; to an implementable, sustainable plan; and, we hope, to community improvement.

We are indebted to the scores of people who have shared their experience and wisdom to make the system possible.  We are keenly interested in any suggestions, connections and ideas our readers would care to share.

Arthur (Andy) Felts

Water, Water Everywhere . . . And Not a Drop to Drink

March 8th, 2011 - Arthur (Andy) Felts  

While it is ultimately difficult to prioritize segments of our infrastructures, the CARRI team has generally concluded that water is high on the list along with adequate power. Difficult to say which is more important since we know water systems need power to pump water. Hospitals can have emergency generators, but we know a lot less about how long they can go without water. We know as well that they consume very large quantities of it.

The recent cholera outbreak in Haiti has exposed twenty-first century youth to a problem as old as human communities—the need for clean water. It may come as a surprise to many, but it is widely held that the provision of safe, potable water is the single greatest contributor to our longer life spans.

There are many communities in the United States that have serious drinking water supply problems. Most know that the greater Los Angeles area is too dry to sustain its population and water must be piped in from a distance. Many other western cities have made the list of those facing water shortages. Closer to the east coast, Atlanta has now made the list. Doubtful that any would argue water shortage as an issue influencing a community’s ongoing resilience.

What may be less clear is the growing fragility of the water delivery system. Underground, out of sight, there are some very large man-made streams. Water mains in excess of 72 inches in size crisscross communities, having to endure extreme variations in temperature, pressure, and the constant shifting of the earth, including that created by cars on the surface.

The force of a large water main breaking is something to be reckoned with. It can toss cars like matchbook toys. It can flood basements in seconds. I can sweep people away with virtually no warning.

 Here is another fact probably not well known. Most all underground water lines leak—that is what eventually leads to a major break, and it makes sense when seen that way. A loss of 10 to 20 percent of the water pumped is considered ‘acceptable.’ But a sudden drop in pressure from a burst line can require extraordinary precautions to maintain sanitation.

 The American Waterworks Association tells us that a water main breaks every two minutes—for a total annual count of 300,000. The nation’s water system was mostly built in the 1950s and 60s—and is rapidly aging. Washington DC’s average pipe age is 77 years.

Needless to say, a community whose pipes do not hold water very well in normal times will probably experience even worse problems in the aftermath of a disaster. Water pipes are indeed, out of sight, and thus we don’t have to look at them as a part of our aging infrastructure. But we should.

Or are they really out sight? Aren’t they really readily visible when you walk in your kitchen and turn on the tap

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.”

Warren Edwards

Community Resilience – What Federal Government Can Do

January 5th, 2010 - Warren Edwards  

In a 2009 paper by the British Think Tank, Demos, titled, “Resilient Nation,” author Charlie Edwards suggests that for the UK, the role of central government in community resilience should be limited and mainly supportive of local and regional efforts. He recommends a central government role based on four “Es” – Engagement, Education, Empowerment and Encouragement. Although written for the UK, the paper has great relevance for the US and is well worth reading. The full paper can be found on the Demos web site at http://www.demos.co.uk/. These four Es may be useful in thinking about how DHS relates to other partners in the homeland security enterprise in the area of disaster preparedness and recovery.

The federal government (largely through the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Emergency Management Agency) plays two significant roles in community disaster resilience. In the first role, DHS is the leader of the federal response to incidents of national significance – the nation’s first responder at the federal level. As such, DHS acts in a top-down manner as a cabinet-level department within the federal government. In the second role, DHS is the leader of the nation’s “homeland security enterprise” and must coordinate many different types of efforts including disaster preparedness and recovery. In the past, DHS has fulfilled this role by acting as the approver of state and local plans, providing funding for preparedness planning and coordinating federal efforts to prepare for recovery.

DHS has steadily improved its ability to carry out the first role. But while the National Response Framework lays out an operational framework for response, the framework has not been fully effective in helping DHS carry out its second role – coordinating preparedness and recovery efforts across the Homeland Security Enterprise. In fact, the lessons of the past decade demonstrate inherent tensions in these two roles that produce expectations that often cannot be met within the constraints of traditional emergency management. read the entire article >

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