Thinking the Unthinkable

May 12th, 2010 - Arthur (Andy) Felts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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How Far We’ve Not Come

April 26th, 2010 - Arthur (Andy) Felts

I teach a Capstone Seminar in the master of public administration program at the College of Charleston—it is designed to bridge the students’ academic experience with the practitioners’ world. One of the assignments for the seminar is for students to work in teams of three or four on a real policy issue/problem. I ask local governments and nonprofits if they have issues or problems and the students choose from the list I get in response.

This semester, one group chose to examine and suggest updates for the City of Charleston’s policy addressing how employees will be expected to perform in the event of a disaster. While some employees, for example, those involved in public safety and health are clearly part of an emergency response plan others are not. Disaster or not, the city’s financial operations cannot shut down, public works crews need to be ready to quickly deploy for emergency repairs to critical infrastructure, and an orderly system of public communication needs to fall in place.

In previous blogs, Dr. John Plodinec and I have hinted at this by suggesting that any recovery plan should factor the critical role that public employees will play. Many employees may be required to work several days straight and then be on-call for an extended period. It is unreasonable for a plan not to acknowledge this and provide assistance to them in meeting family needs. It is unreasonable to expect that an employee will work two or three straight days and not know if their family is safe and secure.

A good plan for public employees would identify ”tiers,” from those that are deemed critical for the ongoing operations of the government, to those that may not be needed for several days. Employees should know in advance what is expected of them in a disaster, what they can expect in return, and, as best they can, make their own personal plans accordingly.

As the students did their research, they naturally decided to contact other East coast communities to see what their employee plans were for disasters.

One community representative, alarmingly, responded they would convene department heads and make a plan if a disaster was imminent. There are two pieces of news here. That is not a plan. Rather it is a plan to plan at what is probably not a very good time. Secondly, and more importantly, they should understand that a disaster is always imminent.

As if that was not enough to set off alarms in my head, the students reported that many communities said they had no plan at all for use of employees during a disaster. The students said they didn’t feel comfortable in asking them ”why not” since they are, after all, still students.

If you are reading this, alarm bells should be ringing loudly in your head as well. Governmental response outside emergency management both during a disaster and in the extended recovery period is crucial. Lack of a plan that employees know and understand will likely not only dramatically affect the time needed to recover, but human lives as well.

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Three things I think I think – about resilience

April 19th, 2010 - John Plodinec

With apologies to Peter King of Sports Illustrated …

I think I think I’m starting to hate resilience. Not the concept, but the word. Like sustainability, it has been adopted as a fad by so many, that it is losing its meaning. In CARRI, we are focused on the concept of being able to bounce back better, but that injects a tincture of resistance into our definition that sometimes confuses people.

I think I think that our ballooning federal deficit is the single greatest threat to the resilience of our communities. From 2005 to today, the federal government has lost one “Katrina” – the federal government’s payments to service our national debt have increased by slightly more than it cost to recover from Katrina. Simply put, communities will have to develop creative ways to find and use the resources they will need to recover from a disaster. This is one area where I hope that CARRI’s Community Resilience System Initiative will have a great impact.

I think I think that we as a nation need to put a spotlight on rural America. In a very real sense, our rural communities are under siege. Their ability to respond to disasters is at its lowest ebb since the Depression. Many are struggling to reinvent themselves because they have lost their original reason for being; others are just holding on trying to stave off their inevitable death. But if some of the predicted impacts of global warming are real, it is likely to eradicate a large number of rural communities across the country. Rural citizens most likely will go to coastal areas that will already be coping with their own impacts from climate change. Ideally, we’d like to see the migration go the other way – away from coastal communities. We need to figure out how to help rural communities become more resilient – in this case, able to recover quickly from acute disasters and respond to the chronic problem of reinventing themselves in a changing world.

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More Thoughts Regarding “Managing for Long-Term Recovery in the Aftermath of a Disaster” – Read it With Us!

April 14th, 2010 - Arthur (Andy) Felts

This is a continuation of last week’s blog on Managing for Long-Term Recovery in the Aftermath of a Disaster, Charles J. Alesch, Lucy A. Arendt, and James N. Holly (Public Entity Research Institute, 2009). This is, as I said, a book I heartily recommend.

The methodology used in the book was qualitative interviewing. They picked several communities that had endured disasters and in varying stages of recovery and simply asked people who were there when the disaster hit, “What happened?”

In listening to people tell their story, the authors gradually arrived at some conclusions put forth in the book. One particularly insightful one was that even as infrastructure was being restored and steps taken toward recovery, the disaster’s effects continued on for several years.

Though undoubtedly communities need some outside support in recovering from major disasters, they note they could find no correlation between the amount of support and how effective the community was at recovering. Some got a lot of support and still appeared to be failing and some not so much and were succeeding.

The last chapters of the book are written from a public practitioner’s perspective. The authors note the incredible strain that disasters put on public workers. Not infrequently, city managers resign after working long days for months on end. This is one more reminder that communities that do not plan to take care of their employees and their families are neglecting a crucial resource.

Recovering from disasters can offer a community an opportunity to undo past mistakes. Many communities tried to do just that in focusing on revitalizing their decaying downtowns as a recovery strategy. Not surprisingly, they didn’t succeed. Even after facades were spiffed up, streets landscaped, and inviting parks built, most in the community continued to prefer the mall on the edge of town.

I am reminded of the many failed efforts that cities undertook to ‘mall-ize’ their downtowns in the 1960s and 70s. Despite spending massive amounts of money and building them, the people did not come.

We at CARRI are always reminding ourselves that the trajectory of a community before a disaster will be exacerbated post-disaster. The point here is a simple one. The decayed, vacant, unappealing downtowns didn’t happen overnight. Their development was an incremental process that occurred building-by-building, street-by-street, and tenant-by-tenant over several years. Attempting to change direction with all of that momentum in the wrong direction is not, as Alesch et. al. observe, good policy.

Restoring, rehabilitating a vacant downtown should be done through careful planning with community involvement and likely will take a long time. While recovery planning can undo some mistakes, it cannot expect to reweave the fabric of the community in a completely new pattern.

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New Publication “Managing for Long-Term Recovery in the Aftermath of a Disaster” – Read it With Us!

April 7th, 2010 - Arthur (Andy) Felts

In my initial relationship with CARRI as the local researcher in Charleston, one of the aspects of disaster recovery was gathering what we called ‘nuggets.’ These were, in our mind, some things that communities did to smooth the path toward ‘getting back to normal.’

An example that comes to mind is that Mayor Riley arranged for utility workers to stay in a vacant hotel (which has since been renovated and is now on the historic register) in Charleston. Rather than having to drive their equipment to a central site, they could leave it where they were working, get on a bus, and come back to a meal and bed. This undoubtedly hastened Charleston’s recovery from Hugo.

An excellent book that contains many ‘nuggets’ has recently been published by the Public Entity Risk Institute (PERI)—Charles J. Alesch, Lucy A. Arendt, and James N. Holly co-authored a book, Managing for Long-Term Recovery in the Aftermath of a Disaster, PERI, 2009. You can find the book at their website: http://www.riskinstitute.org/peri/

The authors are to be praised for taking on the issue of disaster recovery from a holistic perspective and giving a lot of good information in a very readable format. I would encourage any practitioner who has an interest in disaster recovery to read it. This book not only contains many examples of what communities did right in recovering from a disaster, but also others where they made mistakes. All are nuggets making the book a very worthwhile read.

The best parts of the book are in patiently explaining how disasters are really complex socio-economic events. We on the CARRI Team have constantly said that recovery must engage the ‘full fabric’ of the community and that is a different way of saying the same thing.

The book is particularly effective at explaining and categorizing cascading events, the slow unfolding of the consequences of disaster that are often unnoticed and may take years to occur. The authors break out the immediate consequences of disasters and then explain clearly how these can lead to more immediately following consequences and to systemic community consequences that in turn, create ripple reverberations and consequences. They offer excellent, concrete examples of all these, grounding them in their on-the-ground research method that they used in questioning individuals in specific communities on how they endured different disasters.

If all this sounds complicated, it is not—and that I why I recommend the book. One of the things they note, for example, is that sometimes business failures as a result of a disaster may take many more years to occur. The business owner holds on for as long as they can, linked to their communities by a sense of place and community, and simply cannot do it anymore. The success stories they tell are equally as enlightening.

What Alesch et. al, know is that a disaster affects the whole community—recovery is not about any single component—the infrastructure, economy or social aspects.

At this point, what I would invite is for any who are reading this blog to get the book and read it. It is worthwhile. Engage in some commentary and we can begin to exchange our views on it. I have some problems with it, but that is because we are all passionate about disaster recovery. You are welcome to respond to this blog or engage me directly at feltsa@cofc.edu.

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Psychological Effects of Disaster

March 29th, 2010 - Arthur (Andy) Felts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Art of Resilience

March 23rd, 2010 - John Plodinec

Whenever I start a new endeavor, I try to assess it in terms of the factors set down over two millenia ago by Sun Tzu in his great work, The Art of War. According to Sun Tzu, successful generals assess their strategic situation in terms of the weather, the terrain, the leadership, the discipline and the Way. Communities can become more resilient if they assess themselves using the same five factors.

When a community assesses itself in terms of the weather, it shouldn’t literally think only of natural disasters, but rather consider all of the storms that swirl around it, including pandemics, economic disasters, and even civil chaos (think of the riots in the ‘60s). Each of these brings its own challenges. The resilient community anticipates crises, and objectively determines what the consequences might be.

A community’s terrain is not only its geography but also its internal terrain – its networks that actually perform the actions needed by the community. A resilient community understands that just as different neighborhoods may be affected and respond to crises in different ways because of their geography, so, too, different parts of its networks may respond in very different manners to a crisis. Thus, in assessing its terrain, the resilient community recognizes its strengths and weaknesses, and realizes that disasters are likely to magnify its weaknesses, while reducing its strengths.

A resilient community recognizes that its leadership goes beyond government, and is most often a complex network of public and private partners. Time compounds this complexity: the attributes of successful leadership during the response to a disaster (e.g., heroism) have to evolve to the patient perseverance of a saint as the community recovers and redevelops itself. Indeed, the community’s “decisions” made during recovery often will be the sum of hundreds or even thousands of individual decisions made by those in the community.

Resilient communities will exert discipline by planning for disasters, and by practicing those plans. Those plans will identify the human, physical and fiscal resources needed, and where they will come from. Through practice, these plans are refined and revised. Communities seeking to become more resilient will also invest to reduce their vulnerabilities.

The Way is at once the most difficult of these factors to grasp, but likely the most important. The Way is a complex compounding of vision, communication, and trust that provides a signpost to any member of the community in reaching decisions. The resilient community strives to achieve a coherence – a moral accord – an agreement – a shared vision across the entire community about what the community should be. If a community has a recovery plan or – better yet – a strategic plan, it can inform those hundreds or thousands of individual decisions made during recovery so that the overall outcome is positive. Thus, it is useful for communities to develop recovery plans before disasters, to lay out the general principles by which all in the community will act.

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Reinforcing the Need for a Common Framework

March 22nd, 2010 - Arthur (Andy) Felts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Gulf Coast Resilient Home Building Conference March 19-21, 2010

March 8th, 2010 - Ann Farrar

The Gulf Coast Resilient Home Building Conference will be held March 19-21, 2010 at the Mississippi Coast Convention Center in Biloxi, Mississippi. This Conference is presented in cooperation with the Home Builders Association of the Mississippi Coast 23^rd Annual Home and Garden Show. The purpose of the Conference is to help put communities along the Gulf coast on a path toward greater resilience to natural disasters through the construction of strong homes that can withstand high winds and water. The Conference will feature a combination of education sessions, a demonstration exhibit and product vendors.

The Conference Planning Committee would like to thank the Home Builders Association of the Mississippi Coast for their scholarship donations within the continuing education component of the Conference. Registration deadline is March 12, 2010; information regarding the Conference Education Sessions can be found at http://www.resilientus.com/rhbc-education-sessions.html.

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CARRI Implements New Blog!

March 5th, 2010 - Ann Farrar

Welcome to the new CARRI Blog! In addition to a fresh look you will find the following enhancements:

Multiple Contributors/Authors

Along with CARRI Director Warren Edwards, we have additional contributors with John Plodinec, Andy Felts, and myself – we will contribute on a regular basis and invite your comments. Over time, other members of the CARRI Team will most likely become regular bloggers/contributors.

CARRI Blogwatch

This is a rotating “headline” that highlights recent blog entries; a quick “click” takes you to the referenced entry.

Categories

A team worked to identify twenty categories (terms) that are relevant to community resilience. These categories will be used with each blog entry/posting and will aid in the search and archive functions.

Reports and Briefings

This tool is designed to bring you quick access to recent publications that are relevant to community resilience. If you are aware of an item that would be helpful to our Team and CARRI Blog Followers, please send us a note by using the “Contact Us” tab above.

Blogroll

This is a nifty tool that will serve as a fast link to other blogs that are relevant to our interests. Again, if you are aware of a blog that might be of interest to us, please use the “Contact Us” tab above.

We are excited about these enhancements and look forward to your interaction with us as we continue our work in community resilience – let us hear from you!

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