Make a recovery plan....or not

I recently read a short article in Disasters by David T. Flynn entitled The Impact of Disasters on Small Business Disaster Planning.

Interestingly, Flynn's research suggests that businesses that have experienced disasters may be less likely to create a plan than those who only watch others misfortunes. In a survey of businesses that had experienced the 1997 severe flooding of Grand Forks, ND, and those that started operation after the flood, he found just the opposite. For the group that experienced the flood, having a disaster recovery plan went from about 5% before the flood to about 11% after the flood. But, businesses that started after the flood had double this rate, 24%, a significant difference.

Flynn offers no suggestions for why this may be.

Did the businesses that experienced this extreme flooding event decide that they had survived and could do so again? Did they reap the benefits of federal disaster aid and see no need for such plans? Is there something in the way the surviving businesses operate that is inherently resilient and already incorporating disaster recovery planning concepts? Was the flooding so catastrophic that those who experienced now believe that no plan would have made any difference? And what of the businesses who came along afterward. Are painful lessons easier to incorporate when you see them happen to someone else?

It is generally assumed that disaster recovery plans help business deal with disruptions and more quickly recover from disasters and help reduce their financial losses. Flynn's research and the prospect of looking into small business damage and recovery to flooding here in Washington State has got me pondering all this. Perhaps disaster recovery plans are not useful in the way disaster professionals promote .... and these Grand Forks businesses have figured it out. This definitely calls for some qualitative research.

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This is Preparedness, Pre-Disaster Memorials

This video, while humorous, has a lot of truth in it. It is all to often that government's budgetary allocation bypasses disaster mitigation/preparedness activities. It seems that since the probability of a disaster happening is statistically low, funding for mitigating such disasters follows the same suite. Luckily for all of us the government in Folsom County, California has developed a concept that will solve every government's disaster mitigation funding issues.


See video below to see what Folsom County, CA is doing to deal with a potential dam failure.

Preemptive Memorial Honors Future Victims Of Imminent Dam Disaster

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Is Safeway the Safe Way?

Rebekah and I went to the Pacific NorthWest Economic Region's Critical Infrastructure Resilience Summit today.

It was a stat-filled day about various aspects of the Pacific Northwest's critical infrastructure. I learned things like how many automobile bridges we have in Washington State (2900), the average age of our bridges, (41 years), and how many bridges are structurally deficient (82...though I was unclear if that included the Hood Canal, Evergreen Point, and Alaskan Way Viaduct bridges). I learned that 80-85% of critical infrastructure is privately owned (a US figure). I heard that it took around 8 hours for the city of Centralia to reroute wayward cars and frieght out of their downtown after I-5 was shut down by flooding....

But my favorite bunch of stats given are about Safeway and their just-in-time (JIT) inventory system. This is what I had time to jot down:

• The majority of products delivered to the stores are from outside the PNWER region
  
• Every store receives 2 deliveries a day on a 12 hour cycle
  
• 120-150 trucks make deliveries in a day
  
• Deliveries are made 6 days a week
  
• Around 1.2 to 3.2 miliion pounds of food are delivered to stores a day
  
• 90% of trucks are on the road (i.e., not at the store or distribution center) at any one time
  
• There is no communication system on board the trucks to link them to distribution centers
  
• Alaska and Hawaii get deliveries from the Auburn, WA distribution center
  
• Their most critical infrastructure (in rough order) is:
  
  1. Transportation
     
  2. Fuel links
     
  3. Electricity
     
  4. Telecommunications
     
  5. Water
  
  
• Each distribution center has no more than 3 days of fuel on site
  
• A fork lift battery will last 12 to 24 hours without needing to be recharged
  
• Water is required to operate the compressors of the refrigeration systems

At the end of the session, they had us write our questions on a card and hand it up to the moderator for asking. My question never got asked:

Assuming JIT, wasn't invented/designed to be disaster resilient, what would a distribution system look like that was?
What did the distribution system of Safeway look 50 years ago and how did it perform in past disasters?

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Gore and Pachauri speeches

Under Democracy Now's "Weeks' top stories" at http://www.democracynow.org/ you can listen to or download Monday's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speeches in Oslo by Al Gore and Rajendra Pachauri (chair of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).
Pachauri's is accessed by the 'next item' link on the Gore page. Both are worth the time.

Gene Myers

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Who has it worse?

I found myself having an interesting conversation last night with a person, whom I will call Sally. We began discussing the record breaking flooding here in Washington State, flooding that severely impacted local farms and dairies in the Chehalis river valley. Several farms have lost almost all of their herds and now are owners of flood-soaked homes, destroyed equipment, and fields covered with a thick layer of rapidly hardening sludge.

I remarked that the destruction was very much like New Orleans, albeit on a much smaller and more dispersed scale. Sally countered that this event was so much worse for the farmers because they had something to lose, they actually had livelihoods. And, she added, it was worse because it was the middle of winter and so miserable to be without a home now.

The remark momentarily threw me off guard, but did not really surprise me. Sally vocalized an implicit empathy for people with whom she felt more of a commonality and which she was geographically closer. This can positive thing. Local communities are often in the best position to help survivors in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. A strong sense of empathy with ones neighbors, at the local and regional scale, has certainly contributed to the strong outpouring of supplies, offers of housing, and voluntary clean-up crews that have developed during and immediately after the Chehalis flooding. Locals and people with which one has a commonality may also give the most appropriate aid.

However, implicit in Sally's remarks was also the vocalization of stereotypes many have come to believe about New Orleanians. There is an implicit racism, an "othering" of Katrina survivors, that has shaped response.

The depth of this differentiated understanding of pain and loss is disturbing to say the least, and has resulted in significantly delayed recovery for low-income African-Americans in New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward. You can read more that in an article I wrote for the December issue of Disasters and in an editorial posted here.

What struck me most about Sally's remark was, firstly, the disturbing comparison of loss of cattle herds to the excruciating losses of over 1000 human beings. There is also unwarranted assumption that New Orleanians "didn't have anything to lose." The hardest hit Lower Ninth Ward was a neighborhood with high African-American homeowners (much higher than national averages) and many established small businesses. Residents had much to lose, including mortgage free homes and close-knit family networks of support. And even beyond the wrong assumption that "those" people in New Orleans were too poor and unemployed and marginalized to really lose anything valuable, is that really the criteria for empathy? Research has show that it is the poor that have the hardest time recovering to pre-disaster levels. When you have much to lose, you also have many resources by which to regain your losses. The whole conversation rather rattled me.

Its so easy to distance ones self from the experiences of people who do not look or act like us or may be in some distant place....whether that be on the other side of the world, the country or the proverbial train tracks.

I don't think its even logical to compare the destruction along the Gulf Coast and the drowning of New Orleans with flooding here in Washington State. The destruction of cattle herds and the destruction of the entire economy of a city are very different and the recovery trajectory will show this. But, on the other hand, at the individual scale, physical loss, depression and the economic struggle that set in after a disaster are very similar for the families and individuals that experience them. I wouldn't want to be in any of their shoes.

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"It was supposed to be OK; they told me it was in a 100-year flood plain"

The title quote of this post was taken from the this article in The Olympian.

I read this article because Crosscut linked to it saying that it implicated development as the reason for the intense flooding in Thurston County, WA (similar to this article for Lewis County, WA). And folks interviewed definitely do:

"They've got to stop building where the water is supposed to go," Judy McWhinney said. "They say don't blame Wal-Mart; I blame Wal-Mart." ... Others pointed to silt-filled creeks, clear-cutting of timber and ill-placed dikes as the culprits.

Everyone knows not to build in the floodplains, right?

"Flood plains are beautiful, rich, fertile land, good for agriculture," Snyder said. "Really, nothing much else works on the flood plain."

Well, not according to the title quote of this post... Apparently, some people think that being told that living in a 100-year floodplain means they are safe. Obviously, FEMA or the local government was successful in getting the word out that people were living in a 100-year floodplain. But this is a good reminder that communication is not just about transmission of words. Perhaps rather than telling people they are in a 100-year floodplain, we should show them a chart showing the number of significant floods in their area.

Be that as it may, it does sound like some people in Lewis County couldn't have known they were in the 100-year floodplain. Well, unless they moved there in 1982:

"The flood map Lewis County uses is a 1982 flood map," DePuis said. "Before anything else happens, Lewis County should adopt a 2007 flood map."

To what degree development has altered the floodplains in Thurston and Lewis Counties, I certainly don't know. But it does seem like floodplain delineation should be redone when there is major development in the existing floodplain. Maybe the delineation should be done before the development!

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A Convenient Half-Truth

Excuse me for losing my cool, but man I'm sick of the climate-change scare-mongering like this recent post by the Sightline Institute's Eric De Place.

Sure, blogs are a casual venue, but organizations like the Sightline Institute or knowledgeable folks like Al Gore, who spuriously linked the Hurricane Katrina disaster to climate change in "Inconvenient Truth," should hold themselves to higher standards than these convenient half-truths.

Is climate change real? It's beyond discussion. Will climate change result in changes in global precipitation patterns? You bet. Will there be more precipitation in the Pacific Northwest? Maybe, maybe not. Would major floods occur in the absence of climate change? For sure.

And there are more immediate causes to flood disasters that are critical to address, especially in light of climate change. The half-truths of "[insert disaster here] was caused by climate change" does nothing to build this awareness. If anything it distracts from this awareness and serves to reduce the credibility of climate science that is based on entirely different (and more reliable) data, showing that CO2 emissions have and are changing our climate.

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Growth Management Increased Grays Harbor's Risk?

In the David Postman entry I cited below, he mentions something that I can't find more about:

Officials with the Grays Harbor Public Utilities District said that laws restricting how far back trees can be cut from streams and rivers left too many tall trees standing too close to electrical towers. When the winds and floods came, the trees hit the towers which "just crumpled like an accordion," said Richard Lovely, general manager of the PUD. He said five towers on the BPA line into the county were lost. "We just kept watching things collapse and collapse," he said.

He and others blamed the state law requiring buffers of trees between sensitive habitat and cleared land, whether for logging or a utility right-of-way. Rep. Brian Blake, D-Aberdeen, told me that some trees that took down utility towers had been required to be left standing because they were designated habitat for the endangered marbeled murrelet.

Hm. If anyone reads or hears more about this and what the particular situation was, I sure would like to hear. I'm a bit skeptical that the Growth Management Act has increased risk. But perhaps there are some situations where variances are necessary to reduce some forms of particular damage due to flooding. (Actually, I would have thought if the Grays Harbors officials knew about the situation beforehand a variance would have been possible with Grays Harbor county.) So if this isn't just politicking, a review of the case should be made. But I need convincing...

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Behind the Scenes of a Disaster Declaration

David Postman over at the Seattle Times has a must-read write up on his blog about riding in the helicopter with Washington State politicians and various federal officials in the aftermath of the Western Washington floods.

If you've ever wondered what the purpose of politicians riding high in a helicopter after a disaster, Postman really puts you behind the scenes to understand what they're up to (or why they're up there):

I spent most of yesterday flying around southwest Washington as the state's top politicians viewed flood damage, made announcements of aid and thanks emergency officials and volunteers. But as I write in this morning's paper, this was a lobbying trip. Gov. Chris Gregoire, senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell and Congressman Norm Dicks were the well-known names on board the Washington National Guard helicopter. But much of the day's activities were aimed at convincing federal officials of the need, and the urgency, of federal flood relief.

The helicopter ride is not about response, it's about recovery -- trying to demonstrate that the damage meets criteria for federal disaster assistance. Not too surprising!

Postman goes on to describe the political machinations that go on during a disaster -- many of which are simply extensions of the machinations that go on without the disaster. I'll hit on a couple more points in a follow up posts...

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Hummers: Our response to climate change?

Naomi Klein writes in The Nation today about two "growth industries" -- green technology and homeland security -- noting that last year, by revenue, they were neck and neck, and this year homeland security is seen as the better investment:

The market, however, appears to have other ideas about how to meet the challenges of an increasingly disaster-prone world. According to Lloyd, despite all the government incentives, the really big money is turning away from clean energy technologies and banking instead on gadgets promising to seal wealthy countries and individuals into high-tech fortresses. Key growth areas in venture capitalism are private security firms selling surveillance gear and privatized emergency response. Put simply, in the world of venture capitalism, there has been a race going on between greens on the one hand and guns and garrisons on the other--and the guns are winning.

According to Venture Business Research, in 2006 North American and European companies developing green technology and those focused on "homeland security" and weaponry were neck and neck in the contest for new investment: green tech received $3.5 billion, and so did the guns and garrisons sector. But this year garrisons have suddenly leapt ahead. The greens have received $4.2 billion, while the garrisons have nearly doubled their money, collecting $6 billion in new investment funds. And 2007 isn't over yet.

Klein notes that there is more profit in continuous protection, recurring escape, and privatized emergency response -- just what we need: a "pay to save" emergency management program! -- than in investing to mitigate the hazard and reduce risk. This is similar to the argument that pharmaceutical companies focus on developing drugs that treat symptoms, rather than eradicate disease.

This "disaster capitalism" trend (as Klein calls it) is summed up well by HOPE: Hummer Owners Prepared for Emergencies. Buy a Hummer so you can save people from the floods resulting from the more severe and frequent storms caused by high CO2 emissions from your Hummer!

I do agree with Klein's general argument here. But one thing she leaves untouched is the fact that even those who are investing in "green technologies" are taking a similar for-profit, silver-bullet approach, rather than "investing" in behavior changes that require no new technologies and won't make much money for anyone (but will still reduce our risk of disaster).

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Some New Old News About Sumatra

I just got back from the International Conference on Urban Disaster Reduction in Taipei, Taiwan. The plenary talks were above average, focusing on climate change, disasters in developing countries, and putting research into action (though I will say that organizers should have given more time for Q&A). There were several noteworthy talks, which I hope to mention here.

The first one was given by Cal Tech Professor Kerry Sieh about longstanding work he's been doing in Sumatra, which has been covered in the news before. The upshot is that there is much more stress to be released on the fault that caused the Banda Aceh earthquake in 2004. He showed a graph of strain over the past several hundred years, illustrating that the 2004 event was likely the beginning of strain release on the fault similar to centuries past. Amazingly, the magnitude of the earthquake that would result from complete rupture of stress in the fault segment in question would be the same or greater as the 2004 event. Worst of all, the nearby cities of Pedang and Bengkulu are much larger than Banda Aceh, and equally vulnerable to tsunami. Professor Sieh sounded rather pessimistic about the ability to mitigate against another catastrophe in these areas, but clearly put the challenge out there to do so. It's certainly an opportunity to apply lessons learned about disaster risk reduction from a similar context and try to shift focus from reponse to risk reduction.

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The Role of Rentals in Recovery

Relatively speaking, recovery after the 1994 Northridge earthquake was quick and complete, though certainly unequal across space and demographics. One of the main reasons for this was the high vacancy rates for apartments and other rentals at the time of the earthquake. This made it easy to provide temporary and long-term housing for those who lost the service of their residence.

The New York Times today has a story about the severe lack of available rental units in New Orleans and possibly related effects like increased homelessness. Obviously there are many differences between Northridge and New Orleans -- a moderate earthquake and a catastrophic storm surge. But in the seemglingly national push to convert apartments to condos, I think we shouldn't forget the role of a flexible rental stock in recovery and resilience.

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Triumph in Bangladesh

News of Cyclone Sidr is slowly spreading beyond Bangladesh. This powerful cyclone swept across the low-lying country on Thursday and Friday. While the cyclone was a category 4, more powerful in some measurements to Hurricane Katrina, the current death tolls in slightly over 3000 and it looks like they may ultimately remain below 10,000.

So why is this a triumph? Certainly casualties from predictable natural hazards, especially ones that allow for some early warning, are not something to celebrate. However, this current death toll is utterly dwarfed by a similar cyclone 16 years ago. In 1991 a cyclone caused 140,000 deaths. Since then, aid organizations and national disaster risk reduction efforts have worked tirelessly to build early warning systems, elevated evacuation shelters and to educate people on how to respond before during and after such an event. Bangledesh's efforts in this regard clearly show the effectiveness of these efforts. The fact that they achieved such a large reduction of casualties in the context of a populous, developing nation certainly sets a high bar for all of us.

Bangladesh Toll at More Than 3,000, New York Times article.

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Insurance: To Buy or Not To Buy?

Today Crosscut has a story about whether or not local insurance agents, geologists, and emergency managers take out earthquake insurance for their home. (The Seattle PI did a similar story a while back.) The verdict? Looks like insurnace agents and geologists tend not to buy the extra insurance:

"In general I'm [USGS geologist Joan Gomberg] not a fan of insurance," she said via e-mail. "However, I do think it's essential in the Pacific Northwest to have some sort of 'insurance' for earthquakes, and we have chosen to retrofit our house to accomplish this. We've only lived here a little over a year and just bought an old house that needs to have the structure tied to the foundation. Even though it's a major expense I feel it's a better investment than buying earthquake insurance. I want to be sure the house stands when an earthquake happens and that the damage is minimal enough to be reparable – then I'll be comfortable that our safety is insured and our investment."

While emergency managers do:

For what it's worth, local emergency management bosses apparently are more prone to take earthquake coverage. Barb Graff, the city of Seattle's emergency-management chief, said she added it to her homeowner's policy, "practicing what we preach."

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Vulnerability and gender

A colleague asked me to recently review a disaster plan checklist. One of the checklist items was ensuring that the needs of "disabled family members, the elderly, small children and women" be taken into account as needed.

I understand the sentiment, and think it is important to highlight how vulnerability, capacity and disaster experience may change across social groups. For women who are in communities that are ignoring their experience, obviously its critical that they become equal partners in disaster risk reduction. In Bangledesh floods, women have died because they were at home during a flash flood and lacked a familial male escort to evacuate to a safer location. During Hurricane Katrina, the elderly died in higher percentages. Many could not evacuate due to medical conditions; others died due to the tremendous stress all survivors faced. Following the Northridge earthquake, emergency shelters were provided for single men and families. Single women were not initially considered as a group needing their own shelters. Social vulnerability must be carefully considered in disaster risk reduction, emergency response and recovery planning.

Yet, I also cringed when I read "women." This is a category that I would be placed in but it feels very strange
to be put in a list of vulnerable people, especially a category so large as "women." I have no desire to be viewed as someone within a vulnerable group who needs pity. The list of "disabled family members, elderly, small children, and women" gives the unintended impression that all these "poor" and "weaker" members of society need special protection and help because they are powerless to help themselves.

Sometimes these groups are more vulnerable, but there are also a lot of cases where these groups may be better equipped to deal with or reduce disaster threats. Sometimes it is the physically-capable, male who is most at risk from a hazard, due to cultural gender norms that lead them to not ask for help or to engage in dangerous emergency response activities. Other times, it may be men who are most exposed to a hazards.

In the long run, it behooves us to remember that those most at risk may not appreciate being labeled as "vulnerable." It may make more sense to speak to people about their vulnerabilities and capacities or to focus on particular activities or aspects that make a group more vulnerable, allowing for variation among that group. In the short term, perhaps including "men" as a category of people who may have special needs, vulnerabilities and capacities would make the point about gendered vulnerability more broadly and do so without the implicit stigmatization. Doing so means we should include the needs of the "elderly, disabled, children, women and men" wherever appropriate.

For those interested in disasters and gender, there is the Gender and Disaster Network (GDN).


Addendum: After writing this, I saw Maureen Fordham's invited comments on Social Vulnerability and Capacity in the Natural Hazards Observer, November 2007.

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John Stewart on the Cycle of Emergency Management

Criticism is good. We, as scholars, educators, and the merely curious, can all agree on that, right? So in that spirit, I want to link to John Stewart and The Daily Show, who have done an amusing job of criticizing emergency management in the United States. Of course, they have focused primarily on FEMA. One segment in particular, which I use in class, focuses on a general concept of traditional emergency management: the CEM or cycle of emergency management:



And he's right of course: The impact and costs of disasters have and continue to increase. Thus, we need to remind ourselves that much of what we are doing isn't working! We need (and are in the process of experiencing) major shifts in thinking about disasters and how to reduce their likelihood.

We hope criticism, such as above, will be a jumping off point for IGCR, our colleagues far and wide, and citizens of the world for a cultural shift toward disaster risk reduction.

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Climate Engineering; Risk Reduction or Amplification?

Okay, so you probably haven't even heard of climate engineering. But of course, engineering is never far behind science and you have heard of climate science. Climate engineering then is taking our growing "understanding" of climate and applying to methods and tools to manipulate it. (I put "understanding" in scare quotes because human knowledge is always situated and evolving.) So now there are tools and methods, which arguably we could employ immediately, that we can use to modify our climate.

I mean, duh, we're doing it by accident already!

But now we can do it on purpose. But should we? What if we knew it could give some time to reduce our CO2 emissions and reduce some negative climate change impacts? But what would the side effects be? Ultimately would it increase or decrease our climate-related disaster risk?

If this peaks your interest, then a) you're a Luddite (you think about the effects of technology and engineering) and b) you should watch this talk by David Keith on www.ted.com:

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New MCEER Technical Report

MCEER just posted a technical report authored by myself and Stephanie Chang entitled "A Simulation Model of Urban Disaster Recovery and Resilience: Implementation for the 1994 Northridge Earthquake". Unfortunately there is no direct link but you can find it by searching here. The publication number is 07-0014.  

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CRHNET a Great Success!

I attended and presented at the 4th Annual Canadian Risk and Hazards Network Symposium in Vancouver, BC.  There was a lot of talk about how CRHNET should be the Natural Hazards Workshop of Canada.  Well, I think it is well on its way!  The conference was a great success, with an impressive diversity of practitioners and researchers from all over Canada and the globe.  I was particularly impressed by the inclusion of a World Cafe (a method for deliberative dialogue) in the program, organized by Laurie Pearce.

Now if only the next one would be so close to Bellingham...

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When cultural assumptions meet with disaster

Our culture and past experience profoundly shape how each of us experiences a disaster. Yesterday Mark Howard, the Strategic Advisor to the Seattle Office of Emergency Management, spoke of one such example here at Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA when he described how people died in the Hanukkah Eve Wind Storm of 2006.

The unusually heavy rain and wind of the storm felled power poles and trees throughout the Puget Sound Region. Over 1.8 million residents and businesses lost power, some for longer than a week. When power had still not returned days later, residents began using gas-powered generators to light their homes, prepare food and provide desperately needed heat. Despite heavily advertised warnings not to bring these generators into enclosed areas, some residents did so anyway.

The rash of carbon monoxide deaths and illnesses that followed was concentrated in the region’s immigrant communities. In these communities, cultural assumptions and new hazards met in a deadly mix. Immigrants from Africa, Latin American and Southeast Asia came from regions where families often used in-door fires, stoves and generators. Yet, in these regions, homes were built to allow air to flow through open windows and heat to escape. Gases emitted by indoor stoves or grill, while having serious long-term health effects, did not build up in concentration and bring the threat of immediate death. Here in the cold and damp Puget Sound Region, homes are well-sealed. They are designed to retain heat, but are also efficient at retaining carbon monoxide when gas generators or cars are operated indoors.

In the long days with out power that followed the Storm, the Seattle Times posted a front page, multi-language public safety warning. The local Red Cross placed safety tips on their website. Leaflets were posted throughout neighborhoods with high immigrant populations; multi-language public service messages were read over local radio stations.

While the public education was prominent and swift, it was not enough. Eight people died from carbon monoxide poisoning, five from a single Vietnamese family. Over 60 more people had to be treated for severe carbon-monoxide poisoning. Most were Somali immigrants who had brought their charcoal grills inside.

Disaster risk reduction and emergency planning comes with its own cultural assumptions about how and when to help people. In the wake of this event, emergency managers like Mark Howard are considering their own assumptions. What is the best way to inform immigrant communities about hazards? What channels will they trust? What more might they need to know compared to other parts of our community? Where will they seek help?

As a profession we must become more adept at understanding all our diverse communities and including them in emergency planning and preparedness. In doing so, we can help them adjust not only to new opportunities in our cities, but to new hazards.

Additional interesting readings on the interplay of culture in the preparation for, experience of and recovery from disasters.

Douglas, M. and A. Wildavsky (1983). Risk and Culture. Berkeley, University of California Press.

Green, R. A. (2005). Negotiating Risk: Earthquakes, Structural Vulnerability and Clientelism in Istanbul. Civil and Environmental Engineering. Ithaca, Cornell University.

Green, R. A. (2008). "Unauthorized Development and Natural Hazard Vulnerability: A Study of Squatters and Engineers in Istanbul, Turkey." Disasters (forthcoming).


Hoffman, S. and A. Oliver-Smith, Eds. (2001). Catastrophe and Culture. Santa Fe and Oxford, School of American Research Press and James Currey.

Oliver-Smith, A. (1986). The Martyred City: Death and Rebirth in the Andes. Albuquerque, New Mexico, University of New Mexico Press.

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Privatizing emergency response

Here is a thought provoking article in The Nation on the privatization of emergency response in recent disasters. What are the implications of a society where privatized response dominates?

Rapture Rescue 911: Disaster Response for the Chosen
The Nation, post on-line November 1, 2007, in print November 19, 2007
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071119/klein
By Naomi Klein


I used to worry that the United States was in the grip of extremists who sincerely believed that the Apocalypse was coming and that they and their friends would be airlifted to heavenly safety. I have since reconsidered. The country is indeed in the grip of extremists who are determined to act out the biblical climax--the saving of the chosen and the burning of the masses--but without any divine intervention. Heaven can wait. Thanks to the booming business of privatized disaster services, we're getting the Rapture right here on earth.

Just look at what is happening in Southern California. Even as wildfires devoured whole swaths of the region, some homes in the heart of the inferno were left intact, as if saved by a higher power. But it wasn't the hand of God; in several cases it was the handiwork of Firebreak Spray Systems. Firebreak is a special service offered to customers of insurance giant American International Group (AIG)--but only if they happen to live in the wealthiest ZIP codes in the country. Members of the company's Private Client Group pay an average of $19,000 to have their homes sprayed with fire retardant. During the wildfires, the "mobile units"--racing around in red firetrucks--even extinguished fires for their clients.

One customer described a scene of modern-day Revelation. "Just picture it. Here you are in that raging wildfire. Smoke everywhere. Flames everywhere. Plumes of smoke coming up over the hills," he told the Los Angeles Times. "Here's a couple guys showing up in what looks like a firetruck who are experts trained in fighting wildfire and they're there specifically to protect your home."

And your home alone. "There were a few instances," one of the private firefighters told Bloomberg News, "where we were spraying and the neighbor's house went up like a candle." With public fire departments cut to the bone, gone are the days of Rapid Response, when everyone was entitled to equal protection. Now, increasingly intense natural disasters will be met with the new model: Rapture Response.

During last year's hurricane season, Florida homeowners were offered similarly high-priced salvation by HelpJet, a travel agency launched with promises to turn "a hurricane evacuation into a jet-setter vacation." For an annual fee, a company concierge takes care of everything: transport to the air terminal, luxurious travel, bookings at five-star resorts. Most of all, HelpJet is an escape hatch from the kind of government failure on display during Katrina. "No standing in lines, no hassle with crowds, just a first class experience."

HelpJet is about to get some serious competition from some much larger players. In northern Michigan, during the same week that the California fires raged, the rural community of Pellston was in the grip of an intense public debate. The village is about to become the headquarters for the first fully privatized national disaster response center. The plan is the brainchild of Sovereign Deed, a little-known start-up with links to the mercenary firm Triple Canopy. Like HelpJet, Sovereign Deed works on a "country-club type membership fee," according to the company's vice president, retired Brig. Gen. Richard Mills. In exchange for a one-time fee of $50,000 followed by annual dues of $15,000, members receive "comprehensive catastrophe response services" should their city be hit by a manmade disaster that can "cause severe threats to public health and/or well-being" (read: a terrorist attack), a disease outbreak or a natural disaster. Basic membership includes access to medicine, water and food, while those who pay for "premium tiered services" will be eligible for VIP rescue missions.

Like so many private disaster companies, Sovereign Deed is selling escape from climate change and the failed state--by touting the security clearance and connections its executives amassed while working for that same state. So Mills, speaking recently in Pellston, explained, "The reality of FEMA is that it has no infrastructure, and a lot of our National Guard is elsewhere." Sovereign Deed, on the other hand, claims to have "direct access and special arrangements with several national and international information centers. These proprietary arrangements allow our Emergency Operations Center to...give our Members that critical head start in times of crisis." In this secular version of the Rapture, God's hand is unnecessary. Not when you have retired ex-CIA agents and ex-Special Forces lifting the chosen to safety--no need to pray, just pay. And who needs a celestial New Jerusalem when you can have Pellston, with its flexible local politicians and its surprisingly modern regional airport?

Sovereign Deed could soon find itself competing with Blackwater USA, whose CEO, Erik Prince, wrote recently of his plans to offer "full spectrum" services, including humanitarian aid in disasters. When fires broke out in San Diego County, near the proposed site of the controversial Blackwater West base, the company immediately seized the opportunity to make its case. Blackwater could have been the "tactical operation center for East County fires," said company vice president Brian Bonfiglio. "Can you imagine how much of a benefit it would be if we were operational now?" To show off its capacity, Blackwater has been distributing badly needed food and blankets to people of Potrero, California. "This is something we've always done," Bonfiglio said. "This is what we do." Actually, what Blackwater does, as Iraqis have painfully learned, is not protect entire communities or countries but "protect the principal"--the principal being whoever has paid Blackwater for its guns and gear.
The same pay-to-be-saved logic governs this entire new sector of country club disaster management. There is, of course, another principle that could guide our collective responses in a disaster-prone world: the simple conviction that every life is of equal value.

For anyone out there who still believes in that wild idea, the time has urgently arrived to protect the principle.

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The Media and Communities Resilient to Wildfires

This week, the media has covered the many facets of the 2007 California wildfire experience. Fortunately, national media coverage of these events did not focus solely on personal suffering, human vulnerability, and heroism, importantly as these stories may be. This week, reporters from a range of national news agencies dug deeply into the individual and community decisions that went into the making of this Californian disaster.

In “Rethinking Fire Policy in the Tinderbox Zone” Johnson and McKinley’s article in the New York Times suggests that with 1.5 million acres lost to wildfires in the last four years may indicate a failed state and national policy of fire-suppression policy. Rather than reducing wildfires, they argued that suppression reduces the natural process of underbrush burn out, thereby priming the forest for large-scale wildfires that cannot easily be controlled. On Tell Me More, Ron Lester, a democratic pollster suggested that bad land use management contributed to the damage experienced in both Hurricane Katrina and the current 2007 California Wildfires.

Max Moritz, a fire ecologist at UC Berkeley, told National Public Radio (NPR) offered a different perspective. He suggested that better environmental stewardship like prescribed burns and vegetation management is crucial, but not the full answer. Both the fire suppression and the forest management models create the lure of a “safe forest.” Many of the newest development in the state has occurred in that danger zone where urban architecture infringes upon wild space. Rather than carefully placing buffer zones between compact communities and forests, these developments often are about the very forest that can threaten them.

Along side environmental stewardship, building code regulations are also a crucial part of reducing vulnerability to wildfires. Strikingly, James Smalley of Firewise told NPR listeners that patterns of individual home destruction are clearly evident from aerial photographs of the region. In many places, combustible housing materials has made homes more likely to burn than the surrounding vegetation. Yet, even the best built home – the one with clay tile roof, heat resistant siding and implosion resistant windows, sprinkler systems and careful configuration of decking, vegetation and venting – will likely burn if the homes on either side do not have these measures. Max Moritz cautioned that homes may be only as safe as their neighbors. It will be years before the majority of the housing stock in the area incorporates these features, but these stricter requirements are a positive outcome of these earlier tragedies.

After years of wildfire destruction, some communities are incorporating fire resistant concepts into their community development. Jeff Brady of NPR reported on experimental “shelter-in-place” communities with well placed golf courses and other fire breaks integrated into the land use plan. These communities - where all buildings have tile roofs and strict rules on planted vegetation are enforced - were left undamaged. Nearby neighborhoods without fire-resistant building and land use planning measures burned.

After many disasters, we highlight human missteps. In People News, Jamie Lee Curtis acknowledged that the residents like her - people who wanted to live at the interface the urban-wilderness interface without considering wildfire threats - were to blame for the disaster. Yet often we rebuild in a way that recreates our own vulnerability to future events. The 2007 fires will likely strengthen policies like fire-resistant building code regulations enacted after earlier fires. It may also lead to new adoption in communities that has thus far balked at the few percent increase in construction cost.

As consensus grows in regards to the truly human origins of these particular wildfire disasters - not just among those of us who work in disaster risk reduction but also among the public – communities must continue to move from understanding fire vulnerability, to taking actions and enacting policies that will individually and collectively reducing vulnerability to these natural hazards.

Combining strict land use planning, building code requirements, and effective environmental stewardship will save lives, save homes, and vastly reduce the expense of managing and recovering from these events in the future. The media has a vital role to play in reminding us that the burnt out homes and the disrupted communities, were not a direct result of a raging wildfire, but of the choices we make about where and how to live as individuals and as communities. We all need to affirm, repeat and act upon this perspective.


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Some national media coverage of the 2007 California Wildfires, focusing on disaster reduction through environmental stewardship, land use planning and codes.
http://www.firewise.org/resources/homeowner.htm
http://people.monstersandcritics.com/news/article_1368524.php/Jamie_Lee_Curtis_fire_blame
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15739259
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15655340
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15655337
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/27/us/27illegals.html?th&emc=th
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/wildfires/2007-10-28-firerecovery_N.htm?csp=34
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/us/28threat.html?hp

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