Warren Edwards

The Power of Community Assessments

January 3rd, 2012 - Warren Edwards  

We often view assessments of our communities as mechanical processes accomplished by outside experts who tell us what’s wrong with our community. But community resilience assessments collaboratively accomplished by the full fabric of the community using its own “experts” can be a powerful tool for building community unity, creating positive energy and amplifying what is right.

Community resilience assessments can be powerful team building exercises. Rather than calling on outside specialists, the process relies on community-based practitioners with inside knowledge of how common services are provided to their community. The process brings the community members with the greatest stake in a service together to assess it objectively. These stakeholders from throughout the community include elected or appointed officials, business leaders, naturally emergent leaders and ordinary citizens. By assembling these assessment teams for each service, the community creates a dedicated, insightful, group of advocates that can assess present conditions, envision a future and consider positive, practical and innovative actions.

Rather than simply using the traditional process of examining the community’s infrastructure and processes for vulnerabilities and risks, a community-conducted resilience assessment seeks community developed answers to the questions, “Who are we?” and What are we?” in preparation for answering the question “Who and what do we want to be?” The assessment is holistic in examining the community services that all communities provide, evidence based in that it is grounded in measurable community data, but it is also inward looking in a way that allows the community to collectively understand what makes it unique. In addition to examining vulnerabilities and risks, a comprehensive assessment acknowledges that a resilient community has a strong sense of identity – the special qualities and characteristics that make it unique. When a crisis occurs a resilient community works quickly to restore the positive aspects of its identity. But a resilient community is also aware of the negative aspects of its identity and recognizes that crisis can provide opportunities to change. The community resilience assessment provides an opportunity for the community to gain knowledge of itself in both aspects of its identity.

Building robust, community-based assessment teams and focusing them on the uniqueness of their community creates the conditions for objective, participative analysis of community services and the systems that provide them. The groups look at capacity – how well the service meets the community’s needs. They identify critical assets – which components of the services are essential to meeting community requirements. They identify the critical assets at risk – which assets are most at risk to the threats that the community has identified as the most significant. Finally, the teams look for the recovery resources – those resources that can be mobilized in the event of a crisis identifying gaps and shortfalls that must be addressed in the action planning phase of resilience development.

Objective assessments are critical to the community resilience development process. The assessment process imaginatively constructed, however, can be powerful in ways that help encourage community cohesion and commonality of purpose. Bringing together groups of stakeholders, creating a common view of community identity, and collaboratively but objectively assessing the unique characteristics of a community creates a powerful step on the road to resilience.

John Plodinec

Resilience and the Hole in the Rock Expedition

December 5th, 2011 - John Plodinec  

Jenae Holtzhafer in the Emmaus (PA) Patch posed this question in a posting this summer.

“What if our circumstances on this Earth suddenly changed? Would we be able to endure the extreme physical and mental challenges faced by our ancestors to push through the hardships and survive with nothing more than basic necessities?”

She pointed to the Hole in the Rock expedition of 1879 as an example of the resilience of our forebears. For those who don’t know the story, in late 1879, 236 Mormons set out on a missionary expedition to southeastern Utah. They had selected the shortest path to their destination – they expected it to take only six weeks, but one that was largely unexplored. Trapped by snow behind them two weeks after they started, they were forced to go forward. Perhaps their most difficult feat was building a wagon road through the hole in the rock – a narrow cut in the cliffs surrounding the Colorado River gorge – and crossing the river. It took them about 8 weeks to build the road and get all of their supplies across, and another 10 to reach the site they choose to establish their “colony.” Amazingly, no one died on the five-month trek, and 238 arrived at the new settlement – two babies were born en route.

Holtzhafer’s gut answer were “No, we are not as resilient – we have lost the skills to survive these hardships.” A closer reading of history, though, makes her conclusion less compelling. The intrepid party – even though they set out as winter neared – was reasonably well-prepared. Eighty wagons, over 1,000 head of cattle, tools, dynamite and other necessary supplies – they were ready to confront what they faced. They had taken full advantage of the technology available to them. In similar circumstances today, most of us we would do the same. While we may have lost some of the skills those hardy Mormons possessed, we have other skills and technologies they did not have.

However, the expedition has an important lesson to teach us – being ready for surprises. The missionaries expected to be gone about 40 days; instead, they were on the road for 100 more. They didn’t expect to have to build a bridge across the Colorado, but they did.

Most communities try to prepare for specific threats – hurricanes, earthquakes, human-induced crises. But look at some of the events the Gulf Coast has experienced in the last decade – a recession in 2001-2; Hurricane Katrina and the levee break; the BP oil spill; the Great Recession…what’s next?

The pessimist looks at this list and says “Why bother to prepare? The next event may well be different. We’ll just adapt to it when it comes.”

The optimist says, “We’re strong, we will weather whatever comes; let’s prepare for what we know.

But the resilient realist says, “Prepare for the known threats, but be sure to include in your preparations those things that will help you survive and thrive in the face of any threat. Most importantly, make sure your people know each other and will help each other, no matter what threat they face.”

A simple thought, but with some profound implications. First, it means we shouldn’t rely on institutions to pull us through a crisis, but on ourselves. Second, we can’t count on getting resources from outside in a crisis – we can only count on what we have in our homes and our neighborhood. Most importantly, the one thing “Government” in general is not doing but could do to prepare us is to hammer these messages home.

Yesterday, I was speaking to a victim of one of the many floods that have hit the St. Louis area. Her house up to the top of the first story was flooded – she had to live in the upper floors. She “commuted” to wherever she had to go in her neighbors’ boats. She pointed out that it took 45 days before the floodwaters had receded enough for safe vehicular traffic to her home. By the time she and her family were ready to begin recovering, the news cameras had moved on; her story was old news; most of the government assistance was gone. With good grace and a sense of humor, she is coming back more or less on her own, with the help of her friends and neighbors.

Her experience shows that some of us, at least, are as resilient as any who came before. Her experience also testifies to the wisdom of the resilient realist: people are the best preparation for surprises.

John Plodinec

A Path to Economic Recovery and Resilience

November 10th, 2011 - John Plodinec  

Just over a year ago, I wrote about what a more resilient economy might look like (see Recovering from the Great Recession – What Might a More Resilient Economy Look Like?). I talked about a value-driven rather than a consumer driven economy. That post begged the question, though – how do we get there from here? In the next few paragraphs, I’ll try to outline an answer to that.

Before I do, however, my disclaimer. I am clearly not an economist (I’m not sure that’s a disqualification, since the economists are all over the map on how to recover!). Further, politicians will be making the most crucial economic decisions over the next few months, and they are clearly not economists (not to mention their roles in getting us into this mess in the first place).

Our national economy is in what economists call a liquidity trap. In a liquidity trap, there is relatively little investment because those with money are very risk averse. Consumers don’t spend, businesses don’t hire, and everyone looks at the economic glass as half empty. And that’s what we’re seeing right now – individuals and businesses are paying off their debts, individual debt is at levels not seen since the early 1990’s; those who can are saving at rates not seen since the 1970’s; and businesses are sitting on their cash (and not borrowing) rather than investing in new products and jobs.

The two antipodes of the debate over how to fix our economy – escape the trap – are characterized by the “Spend, Baby, Spend” school and the Tea Party’s call for government austerity. The Spend, Baby, Spend school is epitomized by economists such as Paul Krugman, who vehemently believe that our federal government should be spending more, much more, to spur demand for goods and services. This group points to our nation’s crumbling infrastructure as a place where investment would create jobs, creating demand, and facilitating economic recovery. At its core, this view sees lack of demand for goods and services as the problem that needs to be addressed.

The Tea Party-ers, on the other hand, see the size of our government as the core problem. In this view, a smaller government, with fewer regulations and lower taxes, would put money back into people’s hands to spend on goods and services, thus jump starting the economy.

You’ll notice, however, that neither view really addresses the core problem – how we get out of the liquidity trap. Or, said a little differently, how do we help businesses, in particular, become less risk averse so that they will invest the cash they are now sitting on in new equipment or new jobs. Framed this way, it seems that government spending per se is somewhat irrelevant to getting out of the trap. Recovery will come only when people have confidence once again that there is a secure future. That’s not to say that government spending is unimportant, just that stimulus spending doesn’t really seem to be the right answer.

If this is true, then what should government do to put us on the road to a resilient economy? Simply put, governments should do those things that will remove uncertainty from people’s minds and those things that will make people more confident in their futures. In this light, it seems that we need to take some of the medicines prescribed by both schools of thought to help bring us out of our national malaise.

We need to recognize that the current pace of regulation creation is creating great uncertainties for businesses and individuals. In the first two years of the present administration in Washington, we created more regulations than we did in eight years of the previous administration. Further, whether we like it or not, small businesses are already telling us they won’t be hiring in the near term because of the possible impacts of health insurance reform (and those impacts won’t be fully known until 2014 at the earliest!).

We also need to recognize that our national debt is unsustainable – if we continue on our present path, we as individuals eventually will end up paying exorbitant amounts in taxes to support intolerably high interest rates to service both our national and personal debt. We as individuals or investors or business owners recognize this and are saving at almost unprecedented rates to provide our own safety nets for ourselves.

However, we also have to recognize that the government must continue to make investments that will help us to have a more certain future. We must invest in our infrastructure – not to stimulate spending but to ensure that we can continue to move goods, people, and information where they are needed. If we don’t, we will spend far more to respond to and recover from the disasters that will expose our infrastructure’s fragility.

We also need to heed the lessons we have already learned about what went wrong and put regulations in place that address the root causes of those problems. The current regulatory framework for the financial industry has much that is wrong with it; recently passed legislation is likely to drive smaller community banks – who in the main were not at fault in getting us into this trap – out of business. This will make it more difficult for entrepreneurs and small businesses to get the capital they need to start up or expand their businesses, i.e., will make our economy even less resilient. Meanwhile, many of the more speculative financial sectors remain unregulated even though they were prime actors in our economic tragedy (and are doing nothing to help us recover).

We must provide a safety net to those of our citizens with special needs. Not because of their vulnerability but as an investment in their future and in ours. The safety net should be focused on outcomes – for example, living healthier and more productive lives – rather than means, for example insurance. Just as with our physical infrastructure, if we don’t make these kinds of investments we will spend far more to respond to and recover from the human tragedies that will result.

I don’t think it requires a rocket scientist (or a Ph.D. economist!) to see a path to recovery. It only requires a clear recognition of where we are as a nation, and then some common sense actions to move to where we need to be. We have to cut government spending and the pace of regulation, but we also need to invest in ourselves and take actions to prevent us from falling in the same trap again. At its core, we have to restore our confidence in ourselves if we are to recover. Neither school of thought, neither political party, can or will be successful unless they grasp this simple truth – this is the only path to economic recovery and greater national resilience.

John Plodinec

Searching for Resilience: A Walk in the Woods

October 20th, 2011 - John Plodinec  

I read an interesting article recently that crystallized several other thoughts for me. The paper – with the somewhat dry title of Resilience as Resource-based Design of Anticipated Situations (www.resilience-engineering-asso.org/ACTES/2011/Papers/13.pdf) – is couched in the language of safety and risk, but takes a very different approach to identifying resilience than I’ve seen before.

The authors start by talking about traditional safety and risk management approaches. To paraphrase the authors, these approaches have inherent limitations:

• They are based on analysis of failures. They do not reflect either that risks can emerge from “normal” situations, or that some of the greatest risks may actually be unanticipated surprises.
• They seek to mitigate without considering either the real gap between intended actions and real capabilities, or that coping with crises is dependent on “the strategies, initiatives, tinkering and ingenuity brought by individual and collective skills in real time.

The application of these to emergency management seems straightforward and very appropriate.

The authors then go on to quote a definition of resilience by Hollnagel:

The intrinsic ability of a system to adjust its functioning prior to, during, or following changes and disturbances, so that it can sustain required operations under both expected and unexpected conditions.

I’m not a big fan of defining resilience – too many have spent too much time in what becomes an unproductive exercise in navel contemplation – but the authors put legs under this one by trying to determine how anesthesiologists make decisions both in routine cases and in complex ones. Their conclusions are worth noting because they seem to apply so well to the relationship between the federal government and local community leadership.

• Resilience – in addition to vulnerability assessment – involves consideration of local resources and capabilities.
• Decisions are designed to empower those coping with crisis, and not to control them.
• Organizations should be structured so that local standard practices can be shared.

While some may argue about the conclusions, what was striking to me is the very different way of trying to find resilience. Most of the resilience literature focuses either on vulnerability or on case studies of past disasters. What the authors have done is look at behavior – both in routine and unexpected situations – to try to find clues to resilient behavior.

Thus, if we are trying to judge the resilience of a tree to a high wind, we may walk through the woods looking at one that has fallen and try to judge the cause and how to prevent it from falling. Or, as the authors have done, we can study the forest, during both calm days and those with brisk winds, and see how each tree adapts in its own context.

As we were putting the Community Resilience System (CRS) together, one of the strongest sentiments expressed by our Community Leaders Group was that the CRS had to improve normal operations as well as easing the transition to a new normal. This paper not only agrees with that, but shows that understanding how the community functions in normal conditions is a key to understanding its resilience to a crisis.

In other words, watching how trees bend and sway in the wind can often tell us more about the resilience of trees than exhaustively researching why one fell.

Arthur (Andy) Felts

It can’t happen to me

September 12th, 2011 - Arthur (Andy) Felts  

As we watched Irene skirt along the East Coast, it became very clear that many buildings in both coastal and inland communities could see serious flooding. Also of note was that evidently many owners do not have flood insurance.

Many may not know that regular homeowner’s insurance does not cover flooding. This was the reason for protracted legal cases on insurance reimbursement after Katrina. If a home was destroyed by water (flood), then private insurers did not have to reimburse for damages. If the owner had enough foresight to buy flood insurance—separately purchased through an insurance agent but backed by the US government’s National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP)—then they would be reimbursed. If the home was destroyed by wind, then private insurance would cover—but when a home was simply gone in an area that had both high wind and water, it was very difficult to say which destroyed it.

Homes and buildings in high-risk flood areas with mortgages from federally regulated or insured lenders are required to have flood insurance. But many homes that could flood in an exceptional event are not required to have flood insurance. Such homes are not within a FEMA defined “flood zone.”

 Zones that begin with “A” or “V” are high-risk flood zones, and the purchase of flood insurance is federally mandated on loans secured by properties located in communities that participate in the National Flood Insurance Program. Zones “C,” “B,” and “X” have a lower risk of flooding, and the federal mandatory purchase requirements do not apply. “V” flood zones are on the coast and are subject to wind-driven water, i.e., waves. “A” zones are subject to a 1% or greater chance of flooding in any given year; in short, they are in the 100-year flood plain.

Since most people buy their homes with a mortgage, if they are not required to buy flood insurance they assume they do not need it. With water forced many miles inland and torrential rains, many Katrina property owners found out the hard way that they were not going to be reimbursed or only partially reimbursed for their loss.

Access to outside resources—in this case, insurance money—is a critical part of community resilience. In lower flood risk areas, NFIP-backed insurance can be as low as $129 a year. That seems like a very small amount to insure against the risk of total loss.

Resilient communities build public awareness of the risks they face and the potential losses—they do not rely on mortgage companies to tell them their risk. No doubt many without flood insurance wished they had known this as they watched Irene move up the coast.

Arthur (Andy) Felts

Social Capital: A necessary but not sufficicent condition for a resilient recovery

July 8th, 2011 - Arthur (Andy) Felts  

There is a growing (and welcome) recognition amongst many disaster recovery researchers on the importance of social capital in rapid and equitable recovery. This is welcome because all too often disaster mitigation and recovery strategies have ignored this important dimension of our lives.

Welcome as well is a recognition that some actions taken during emergency response may actually erode social capital. Before Hurricane Hugo, in the Charleston region, there was one vehicle access point to Sullivan’s Island and the Isle of Palms. That was the Sawyer Bridge—a drawbridge that was literally spun off its balance point by Hugo’s winds.

Residents of Sullivan’s Island and the Isle of Palms were denied boat access to the island by National Guardsmen. The argument was the islands were overrun with snakes (an unlikely event since a surge would have swept them inland) and that structures were unstable and dangerous. The latter point is valid, but in many other areas throughout the region that actually were harder hit that the two islands, residents could not be stopped from entering because they had multiple points of access. I walked down King Street in downtown Charleston two days after the Hurricane when the street was littered with broken glass and everything from pieces of metal roofs to downed street lights.

From a risk analysis standpoint, the issue was one of someone stepping on a nail or getting cut from a sharp object. I do not question the good intentions of emergency managers here—rather only whether or not they factored social capital into their decision. Some individuals had a chance to sift through their wrecked homes and salvage things that were personally valuable to them. After several days of rain and weeks of being denied access, much of what they could have recovered was no longer recoverable.

Social capital is about holding on to a sense of place and that includes connections to the past. This is why it should be included in our analysis of community resilience.

But at the same time, by vaulting social capital to the forefront, I wonder if there is too much of a backlash.

In the social sciences, we speak of “necessary” and “sufficient” conditions for something to happen. A sufficient condition is one that in and of itself is enough to cause something to happen. A necessary condition is just that, but not sufficient to cause something to happen. Water in the atmosphere is necessary for rain, but not sufficient in and of itself. It needs other factors—temperature, etc. to make rain occur.

In terms of resilience, we should see social capital as necessary. Absent strong bonds to community and place, both created by social capital, community resilience will be seriously degraded. But social capital is not sufficient in and of itself to create community resilience.

Aside from social capital, communities need access to resources for effective and efficient recovery. Resources can come in many forms—help from outside volunteers, insurance, donations, government aid, savings accounts, etc. But these are not sufficient for recovery absent a resolve on the part of community members to stay and rebuild.

In addition, a community whose infrastructure is in bad shape before a disaster will have recovery hindered no matter how much social capital they have.

Recovery is about time in a very important way—how quickly a community can rebound from a disaster. Strong reserves of social capital are necessary, but so are access to resources. So is ensuring that a community’s infrastructure is maintained. There are a lot of necessary parts of recovery. None, alone, are sufficient.

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.

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…

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.

admin

Flood Resilient Communities: National Flood Insurance Program Saves Money, Property, Lives

May 25th, 2010 - admin  

Note: This is the first of three blog entries on flood resilient communities

Flooding is the one disaster to which every community is vulnerable. And as we have learned from the recent flood devastation in Nashville and New Jersey, property owners considered outside delineated flood zones can have a rude awakening if the rains hit hard and fast. Many residents and business owners outside the 100-year floodplain believed themselves safe from flooding and did not have flood insurance. They had a harsh lesson from which we can all learn.

Since standard insurance policies do not cover flooding, property owners have the opportunity to purchase protection through the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) if their community meets FEMA requirements to adopt and enforce ordinances for reducing flood risks.

While community participation in the NFIP is voluntary, nearly 21,000 communities across the United States and its territories participate. Only in participating communities do homeowners, renters and business owners have access to federally backed flood insurance.

Having and enforcing an adequate floodplain management plan is a mark of a resilient community. Adopting standards that exceed NFIP standards means a community might sustain even less damage and recover more quickly. Translated: floodplain management saves money, property, and lives.

Beyond that, there are costs to a community for not participating in the NFIP. Federal officers or agencies, such as Veterans Affairs or Federal Housing Administration, are prohibited from approving any form of financial assistance related to land located in a Special Flood Hazard Area. If a Presidential disaster is declared, no federal financial aid can be used to repair or reconstruct flood-damaged homes.

Without community oversight of building activities in the floodplain, the best efforts of some to reduce future flood losses can be compromised by the careless practices of others. Likewise, insurance rates will be adversely affected.

After a disaster, non-participating communities can apply to join the NFIP within six months and, if accepted, limitations on federal disaster assistance will be lifted. But after a disaster is not the best time for a community to undertake an application. Neither is it wise for individuals to secure insurance after the flood damages or destroys a home or business, or to wait for the forecast that predicts severe flooding since most insurance programs don’t allow for last minute policies.

There are distinct benefits for living in a flood resilient community. Exceeding the minimum NFIP requirements can mean insurance discounts of between 5 and 45 percent. Further, the program has resulted in insurance reductions of nearly $1 billion annually. According to the NFIP, buildings that meet flood construction standards suffer approximately 80 percent less damage than non-compliant structures.

It’s worth noting that FEMA reports that up to 25 percent of NFIP flood insurance claims are paid on buildings that are outside the mapped Special Flood Hazard Area, those areas where floodplain management regulations must be enforced and where flood insurance is mandatory.

Resilience begins at home. The best way to protect your investment in your home is to have adequate coverage. If you live in a community that is not in the NFIP, private insurance can be purchased. Visit www.floodsmart.gov for a listing of agents by community. You can find out if your community participates in the NFIP by going to www.fema.gov/fema/csb.  If your community is not part of the program, you can petition your local government to participate.

For those not subject to the NRIP regulations requiring flood insurance, it is especially important to self-regulate and purchase insurance and use flood damage-resistant materials and building practices. Stay tuned, this is the subject of the next blog on flood resilient communities.

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