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

How would a CARRI community recover from a tornado?

May 5th, 2011 - Warren Edwards  

Earlier this week, a colleague e-mailed me and asked to send him some ideas on how I thought a Community and Regional Resilience Institute community using the  Community Resilience System would recover from a tornado.  I thought it made sense to give him a description of the environment within which the community would be conducting their tornado recovery.  This is how I think a CRS community would be positioned for response and long-term recovery:

A CARRI community would have assessed its vulnerabilities, catalogued its assets and determined which assets were most vulnerable, which could/should be restored first and identified the gaps for which outside resources would have to be requested well before the tornado. This would have been done by all parts of the community — individuals and families; local government; small and large employers.

A CARRI community would have a well planned and well rehearsed communications plan for getting information to all of its citizens based on a collaborative use of all the resources available to the community rather than just government.  The information provided by such a coordinated plan would be useful, relevant and trusted.

 A CARRI community would have well-established, trusted, community networks based on the full fabric of the community (government, private business, faith-based, associational) and those networks would have been proven through collaborative planning and continuous interactions before the catastrophic event.  The community would also have similar networks developed with other communities within its region.  The time to meet your neighbor (individual or community) is not post-disaster.

 A CARRI community would have a vision for a post-disaster community and a plan based on that vision.  The vision would be accepted by the community as a basis for action.  Because time is critical post-event, this vision and plan would help the community rapidly recover in a manner consistent with their long-term vision, goals and interests.

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.

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

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.

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