BounceBack

Slow Food

2009-03-23T15:08:00.000-07:00

Slow Food “street,” in Bra, Italy

In February, WWU took advantage of the opportunity to enter into an agreement with Slow Food click here for details. What does this mean? Within 24 hours of the press release, already I had received e-mails from all over Whatcom county (as well as from the university) about “Well, what does this all mean?” Here’s a start: This agreement is meaningful because

• it affirms Western Washington University’s commitment to sustainable and resilient farming and food cultures on campus, as well as in the larger community

• it ties together our work in risk reduction in food production systems with healthy eating• it helps us to understand food security as a disruption of usual and customary ways of growing and procuring food

• it highlights the importance of food appreciation and eating as a cultural as well as political act – all very important tenets of Carlo Petrini’s popular Slow Food.

• it brings together business interests (e.g., agritourism) and environmental studies under a sustainable food production umbrella, and poses some new possibilities for interdisciplinary work at Western in so many areas.

Slow Food in recent years, has reached out to universities. WWU now joins 135 other universities (including departments and centers) in forming a network of collaboration. WWU students, staff, and faculty are eager for such collaboration. Already at Western, there are numerous student groups centered around food issues, as well as active individuals, advocating for more food choice on campus – in terms of what I call global green (sustainable practices, worldwide) as well as true blue (local sourcing of food). This relates to ideas I’ve written about “everyday farming” see here.

The University of Gastronomic Sciences, in Pollenzo, Italy

Student interest is huge. Look at the major commitment students and staff have put into the Outback, efforts to recycle food wastes and locally source food as evidenced by Seth Vidana’s WWU Office of Sustainability work, and other efforts on campus. In the fall, a new course I’m teaching, Ecogastronomy: The Art and Science of Food will use considerable materials and project ideas from Slow Food offices and cooperating universities. All other help, ideas, effort with, and participation in, this course is gratefully appreciated!

The “presidi” translates as “garrisons” (from the French word, “to equip”), as protectors of traditional food production practices

There are so many ideas for collaboration! I could rattle off any number of them, quickly…but we are then perhaps reminded of the Slow Food mascot here, la piccola lumaca, the snail, which elevates slow plodding, and the importance of time.It’s taken us a long time to get here, but the time is right to take advantage of the overwhelming student and faculty/staff interest and expertise throughout courses and projects in place. Forza!For more information on Slow Food, click here.

Traditional Foods

2009-03-23T11:24:00.000-07:00

This past year, I have had rewarding opportunities to observe traditional food cultures in varied regions of the world. These are:

Athabascan Indian in the interior of Alaska (the traditional Tanana Chiefs Conference tribal lands) in July, 2008 (for more, read below);

Fort Yukon king, subsistence (gill net) fishing in Fort Yukon river

Swahili coastal tribes in the area of Munje village (population about 300), near Msambweni, close to the Tanzania border in December, 2008-January, 2009 (for more, read below); and,

Families in Munje village

Fresh or unprocessed dairy products and non-GMO oils in the Laikipia region of Kenya (January, 2009), a German canton of Switzerland (March, 2009), and the Piemonte-Toscana region of northern/central Italy (images only, February-March, 2009).

Vending machine for fresh, unpasteurized (and organic) cow’s milk in Bra, Italy (the home of SLOW FOOD)________________________________________

In Fort Yukon, Alaska, salmon is a mainstay of the diet. Yet, among the Athabascan Indians, threats to subsistence foods and stresses on household economics abound. In particular, high prices for external energy sources (as of July, 2008, almost $8 for a gallon of gasoline and $6.50 for a gallon of diesel, which is essential for home heating), as well as low Chinook salmon runs for information click here, and moose numbers.

Preserving King salmon in a community kitchen in Fort Yukon

Additional resource management issues pose threats to sustaining village life – for example, stream bank erosion along the Yukon River, as well as uneven management in the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge. People are worried about ever-rising prices for fuels and store-bought staples, and fewer and fewer sources of wage income. The result? Villagers are moving out from outlying areas into “hub” communities like Fort Yukon -- or another example, Bethel in Southwest Alaska – even when offered additional subsidies, such as for home heating. But, in reality, “hubs” often offer neither much employment nor relief from high prices.

In Munje village in Kenya, the Digo, a Bantu-speaking, mostly Islamic tribe in the southern coastal area of Kenya, enjoy the possibilities of a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, and fish/oils.

With my rudimentary sentences in Swahili (to explain who I was and what I was interested in, what foods villagers eat and how much they must pay for store-bought foods…-- “I’m a teacher…” “I want to understand what you eat……”). I saw how things are changing slowly in the village, in part due to the high costs for store-bought staples of their foods -- Sh 90 for a kg of ugali, which is maize flour or ground maize, Sh 70 for a kg of rice, Sh 150 for a kg of vegetable oil, Sh 70 for a kg of dried beans, Sh 50 for a forearm’s-length of cassava, and Sh 15 for a handful of spinach-like greens (at approximately Sh 80 to a U.S. dollar). Some foods in major cities, such as Nairobi, are much cheaper -- ugali and cassava, for example, presumably due to transportation costs. Yet, much of the pricing seems counterintuitive. For more information click here.

Breakfast in the village typically consists of mandazi (a fried bread similar to a doughnut), and tea with sugar. Lunch and dinner is typically ugali and samaki (fish), maybe with some dried cassava or chickpeas.

On individual shambas (small farms), tomatoes, cassava, maize, cowpeas, bananas, mangos, and coconut are typically grown. Ugali is consumed every day, as are cassava, beans, oil, fish -- and rice, coconut, and chicken, depending on availability.

Even with their own crops, villagers today want very much to enter the market economy and will sell products from their shambas to buy staples and the flour needed to make mandazis, which they in turn sell. Sales of mandazis (and mango and coconut, to a lesser extent) bring in some cash for villagers.

Fresh, unpasteurized cow’s milk in Laikipia

Fresh, unpasteurized camel’s milk in Laikipia

Villagers in Munje enjoy a wide variety of fruits

A treasured food is, in fact, the coconut. This set of pictures show how coconut is used in the village. True, coconut oil now is reserved only for frying mandazi. But it also is used as a hair conditioner, and the coconut meat is eaten between meals. I noted also that dental hygiene and health were good in the village. Perhaps the coconut and fish oils influence this (as per the work of Dr. Weston A. Price).

Kimbo hydrogenated vegetable oil is replacing oils found in coconut products

Photos L-R: Using a traditional conical basket (kikatu), coconut milk is pressed from the grated meat; Straining coconut milk from the grated meat, which is then heated to make oil; Common breakfast food (and the main source of cash income), the mandazi, is still cooked in coconut oil

Money is needed in the village to build homes

Note: All photos were taken by G. Berardi

Kenya — Starvation and Food Insecurity in the Land of Plenty

2009-02-19T10:44:00.000-08:00

My last month in Kenya has been sobering. Ten million Kenyans were reportedly facing starvation. There were daily reports on affected districts, those most vulnerable, and the government’s mishandling of the disaster. Newspapers reported heavily on the incompetency of the National Cereals and Produce Board (NCPB), which is responsible, under the guidance of Trustees, in maintaining a Strategic Grain Reserve of about 6 million bags of maize cereal. How best to do this? An obvious way is through purchase of local grain supplies. Despite drought and resultant famine, poor infrastructure, high farm input costs, serious planting disruption after last year’s post-election violence, and destruction of grain stores in the same violence – food is available. Maize, a Kenyan staple, is available.

Despite maize in the fields, it is widely known that farmers are hoarding stocks in many districts. Farmers are refusing the NCPB/government price of Sh1,950 per 90-kg bag. They are waiting to be offered at least the same amount of money as that which was being assigned to imports (Bii, 2009b). “The country will continue to experience food shortages unless the Government addresses the high cost of farm inputs to motivate farmers to increase production,” said Mr. Jonathan Bii of Uasin Gish (Bartoo & Lucheli, 2009; Bii, 2009a, 2009b; Bungee, 2009).

Pride and politics, racism and corruption are to blame for food deficits (Kihara & Marete, 2009; KNA, 2009; Muluka, 2009; Siele, 2009). Clearly, what are needed in Kenya are food system planning, disaster management planning, and protection and development of agricultural and rural economies.

Click here for the full text.

Photos taken by G. Berardi

Cabbage, an imported food (originally), and susceptible to much pest damage.

Camps still remain for Kenya’s Internally Displaced Persons resulting from post-election violence forced migrations. Food security is poor.

Offices of Rural Focus, an important NGO in Kenya focused on water resource development.

Lack of sustained recent short rains have resulted in failed maize harvests.

Disaster reduction and the sustainability challenge

2009-01-16T15:04:00.000-08:00

Today I went to a lunch time discussion of sustainability. This concept promoted development with an equitable eye to the triple bottom line - financial, social, and ecological costs. We discussed the how it seemed relatively easier to discuss the connections between financial and ecological costs, than between social costs and other costs. Sustainable development often comes down to "green" designs that consider environmental impacts or critiques of the capitalist model of financing.

As I thought about sustainable development, or sustainable community management if you are a bit queasy with the feasibility of continuous expansion, I considered its corollaries in the field of disaster risk reduction. It struck me again that it is somewhat easier to focus on some components of the triple bottom line in relation to disasters.

The vulnerability approach to disasters has rightly brought into focus the fact that not all people are equally exposed to or impacted by disasters. Rather, it is often the poor or socially marginalized most at risk and least able to recover. This approach certainly brings into focus the social aspects of disasters.

The disaster trap theory, likewise, brings into focus the financial bottom line. This perspective is most often discussed in international development and disaster reduction circles. It argues that disasters destroy development gains and cause communities to de-develop unless both disaster reduction and development occur in tandem. Building a cheaper, non-earthquake resistant school in an earthquake zone, may make short-term financial sense. However,over the long term, this approach is likely to result in loss of physical infrastructure, human life, and learning opportunities when an earthquake does occur.

What seems least developed to me, though I would enjoy being rebutted, is the ecological bottom line of disasters. Perhaps it is an oxymoron to discuss the ecological costs of disasters, given that many disasters are triggered natural ecological processes like cyclones, forest fires, and floods. It might also be an oxymoron simply because a natural hazard disaster is really looking at an ecological event from an almost exclusively human perspective. Its not a disaster if it doesn't destroy human lives and human infrastructure. But, the lunch-time discussion made me wonder if there wasn't something of an ecological bottom line to disasters in there somewhere. Perhaps it is in the difference between an ecological process heavily or lightly impacted by human ecological modification. Is a forest fire in a heavily managed forest different from that in an unmanaged forest? Certainly logging can heighten the impacts of heavy rains by inducing landslides, resulting in a landscape heavily rather than lightly impacted by the rains. Similar processes might also be true in the case of heavily managed floodplains. Flooding is concentrated and increased in areas outside of levee systems. What does that mean for the ecology of these locations? Does a marsh manage just as well in low as high flooding? My guess would be no.

And of course, there is the big, looming disaster of climate change. This is a human-induced change that may prove quite disasterous to many an ecological system, everything from our pine forests here, to arctic wildlife, and tropical coral reefs.

Perhaps, we disaster researchers, need to also consider a triple bottom line when making arguments for the benefits of disaster risk reduction.

Civil Service In A Time Of Need

2009-01-13T07:37:00.000-08:00

This past week the Northwest experienced a severe barrage of weather systems back to back. Everyone seemed to be affected. Folks were re-routed on detours, got soaked, slipped on ice, or had to spend money to stay a little warmer. In Whatcom and Skagit Counties, there are hundreds to thousands of people currently in the process of recovering and cleaning-up after the floods. These people live in the rural areas throughout the county, with fewer people knowing about their devastation and having greater vulnerability to flood hazards.

Luckily, there are local agencies and non-profits who are ready at a moment’s call to help anyone in need. The primary organization that came to the aid of the flood victims was the American Red Cross.

The last week I began interning and volunteering with one of these non-profits, the Mt. Baker American Red Cross (ARC) Chapter. While I am still in the process of getting screened and officially trained, I received first-hand experience and saw how important this organization is to the community.

With the flood waters rising throughout the week, people were flooded out of their homes and rescued from the overflowing rivers and creeks. As the needs for help increased, hundreds of ARC volunteers were called to service. Throughout the floods there have been several shelters opened to accommodate the needs of these flood victims. On Saturday I was asked to help staff one of these shelters overnight in Ferndale.

While I talked with parents and children, I became more aware of the stark reality of how these people have to recover from having all their possessions covered in sewage and mud and damaged by flood waters. In the meantime, these flood victims have all their privacy exposed to others in a public shelter, while they work to find stability in the middle of all the traumas of the events. As I sat talking and playing with the children, another thought struck me. Children are young and resilient, but it must be very difficult when they connect with a volunteer and then lose that connection soon after. Sharing a shelter with the folks over the weekend showed a higher degree of reality and humanity to the situation than the news coverage ever could.

I posted this bit about my volunteer experience because it made me realize something about my education and degree track in disaster reduction and emergency planning. We look at ways to create a more sustainable community, and we need to remember that community service is an important part of creating this ideal. Underlying sustainable development is the triple bottom line (social, economy, and environment). Volunteers and non-profits are a major part of this social line of sustainability. Organizations like the American Red Cross only exist because of volunteers. So embrace President-elect Obama’s call for a culture of civil service this coming week and make a commitment to the organization of your choice with your actions or even your pocketbook. Know that sustainable development cannot exist with out social responsibility.

And Here We Flood Again

2009-01-08T17:11:00.000-08:00

Its been two days now that schools have been closed in Whatcom County, not for snow, but for rain and flooding. This unusual event coincides with record flooding throughout Western Washington, just a year after record flooding closed I5 for three days and Lewis County businesses experienced what they then called an unprecedented 500 year flood. I guess not.

There are many strange things about flood risk notation, and this idea that a 500 year flood often trips people up. They often believe a flood of that size will happen only once in 500 years. On a probabilistic level, this is inaccurate. A 500 year flood simply has a .2% probability of happening each year. A more useful analogy might be to tell people they are rolling a 500 sided die every year and hoping that it doesn’t come up with a 1. Next year they’ll be forced to roll again.

But, this focus on misunderstandings of probability often hides an even larger societal misunderstanding . Flood risk changes when we change the environment in which it occurs. If a flood map tells you that you are not in the flood plain, better check the date of the map. Most maps are utterly out of date and many vastly underestimate present flood risk. There are several reasons this happens. Urban development, especially development with a lot of parking lots and buildings that don’t let water seep into the ground, will cause rainwater to move quickly into rivers rather than seep into the ground and slowly release. Developers might complain that they are required to create runoff catchment wetlands when they do build. They do, but these requirements may very well be based upon outdated data on flood risk. Thus, each new development never fully compensates for its runoff, a small problem for each site but a mammoth problem when compounded downstream.

Deforesting can have the same effect, with the added potential for house-crushing and river-clogging mudslides. Timber harvesting is certainly an important industry in our neck of the woods. Not only is commercial logging an important source of jobs for many rural and small towns, logging on state Department of Natural Resource land is the major source of funding for K-12 education. Yet, commercial logging, like other industries, suffers from a problem of cost externalization. When massive mudslides occurred during last year’s storm, Weyerhaeuser complained that it wasn’t it’s logging practices, but the fact that it was an unprecedented, out of the blue, 500 year storm that caused it. While it is doubtful the slides would have occurred uncut land, that isn’t the only fallacy. When the slide did occur, the costs of repairing roads, treatment plants, and bridges went to the county and often was passed on to the nation’s tax payers through state and federal recovery grants. Thus, what should have been paid by Weyerhaeuser, 500 year probability or not, was paid by someone else.

Finally, there is local government. Various folks within local governments set regulations for zoning, deciding what will be built and where. Here is the real crux of the problem. Local government also gets an increase in revenue in the form of property, sales, and business income taxes. Suppress the updating of flood plain maps, and you get a short term profit and often, a steady supply of happy voters. You might think these local governments will have to pay when the next big flood comes, but often that can be avoided. Certainly, they must comply with federal regulations on flood plain management to be part of the National Flood Insurance program, but that plan has significant leeway and little monitoring. Like the commercial logging, disaster-stricken local governments can often push the recovery costs off to individual homeowners through the FEMA homeowner’s assistance program, and off to state and federal agencies by receiving disaster recovery and community development grants and loans. Certainly, some communities are so regularly devastated, and are so few resources, that disasters simply knock them down before they can given stand up again. But others have found loopholes and can profit by continuing to use old food maps and failing to aggressively control flood plain development.

What is it going to take to really change this system and make it unprofitable to profit from bad land use management?

Here’s a good in-depth article on last year’s landslides in Lewis County. http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2008048848_logging13m.html

An interesting article on the failure of best management practices in development catchment basins can be found here: Hur, J. et al (2008) Does current management of storm water runoff adequately protect water resources in developing catchments? Journal of Soil and Water Conservation, 63 (2) pp. 77-90.

Simone Goes to the Market: A Children's Book of Colors Connecting Face and Food

2008-12-29T09:50:00.000-08:00

It’s difficult to imagine a more colorful book, celebrating locally-grown and –marketed foods, than David Westerlund’s Simone Goes to the Market: A Children’s Book of Colors Connecting Face and Food. This book is aimed at families and the foods they eat. Who doesn’t want to know where their food is coming from – the terroir, the kind of microclimate it’s produced in, as well as who’s selling it? Gretchen sells her pole beans (purple), Maria her Serrano peppers (green), Dana and Matt sell their freshly-roasted coffee (black), Katie her carrots (orange), a blue poem from Matthew, brown potatoes from Roslyn, yellow patty pan squash from Jed, red tomatoes (soft and ripe) from Diana, and golden honey from Bill (and his bees). This is a book perfect for children of any age who want to connect to and with the food systems that sustain community. Order from faceandfood@gmail.com.

Food and farm security, farmland preservation, and resilience

2008-12-19T14:22:00.000-08:00

Reflections on agriculture and food security, farm living and livelihoods, and urban-rural encroachment -- Whatcom County agriculture’s biggest challenge
Can be found at the IGCR website (http://igcr.blogspot.com/) shortly.

The following are some excerpts from those reflections, as they relate to Whatcom County farming, resilience and vulnerability, and decision-making in times of uncertainty.

Over the past 350 years, the North American landscape has been rapidly “tamed” from wildlands to agricultural fields, with settlers claiming, often brutally, traditional homelands of American Indians. Once appropriated, settlers cleared land by cutting forests and burning woods to cultivate plants and raise livestock for human consumption (and some export). In the last 150 years, though, another force has been claiming the land base – urban-rural development. Such development seeks the same kind of land used for much of agriculture – level, well-drained soils; it is a kind of development that is the subject of study in academic planning departments as well as in state agencies. The reader is referred to the excellent work of faculty members in the Planning and Environmental Policy degree program at Huxley College of the Environment for examples of land use planning cases and planning tools and vehicles for preserving farm land and promoting wise land use. This paper, however, highlights the implications of such development pressures as well as trends in the industrialization of agriculture.

One consequence of such industrialization is increases in certain efficiencies, for example, related to land productivity – the production of more food on less land. Implications for the structure of agriculture also are considered, in light of the geography of place, and, lastly, the implications for food security, a term which we use to mean, quite simply, knowing with some certainty how much food one is likely to have and from where it is coming from. We also include a few case studies of farm diversification in Whatcom County. This paper is put forth for purposes of discussion only, and continued development and improvement.

……..

U.S. farm policy has typically emphasized intensification of cultivation and production for export, ultimately increasing agriculture’s share of U.S. exports and favorably impacting our national balance of payments. Global trade in cheaper food products sourced elsewhere to “free” American soil for other uses besides agriculture for domestic use, has made possible the expansion of the land base for residential development. The phenomenon of residential development encroaching on or consuming farmland has been known as urban encroachment, but perhaps is better described as urban-rural encroachment, as development occurs further and further outside a metropolitan core. (see Encroachment and historically agricultural areas
http://japr.fass.org/cgi/reprint/14/2/378).

………
It is understandable that consumers want low-priced food, but such “cheap” food may come at a high price – for example, compromised environmental health. Further, across all stakeholder groups, there is increasing concern about farmers’ resilience to extreme events. We are grouping such concerns, under the umbrella of “food security” – which includes considerations of vulnerabilities to food shortages, i.e., to extreme events, as well as environmental and personal health concerns, and economic robustness of economies. For more on this, please see the excellent 2008 work titled, “Issues in Emergency Food Distribution for Whatcom County,WA.” written by Abby Vincent, Chris Phillips, Matt Hoss, and Casey Diamond (with revisions by Rebekah Green and Jon Lowes-Ditch; Dr. Green is currently working on a 3-5 page policy brief based on the longer work, which will appear on the Institute for Global and Community Resilience (IGCR) website (http://www.wwu.edu/resilience/); she can be contacted at Rebekah.Green@wwu.edu).

A critical question here is “Can industrial farms feed us in an emergency where access to imports is denied?” and is discussed some in the Vincent et al “Issues in Emergency Food Distribution” report. This key question will be further explored in subsequent IGCR work.
…….
…..

In our Backyards: Whatcom County?
………..
Clearly, Whatcom County acreage is being used for the production of a select number of products (other specialty crops include, for example, potatoes and nursery stock) geared primarily for exports. This is due to some combination of comparative advantage, economies of scale, history and markets, and production and reproduction of knowledge systems. However, what would happen in the county if, for any reason, we were cut off from our customary food supply? Would we be surprised to find ourselves with a food shortage, in such a highly productive agricultural area

Hunger amidst plenty is ironic in such an agricultural county. Whatcom County, alone, is the largest producer of powdered milk in the United States, producing enough dairy to meet as much as 75% of the demand for dairy products in Washington state (http://www.whatcomcounts.org/whatcom/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1811). Yet, production is threatened due to looming poor market prices; in such an economic climate only the most resilient farms, able to adjust production practices and product mix may be able to survive (http://www.bellinghamherald.com/602/story/714074.html).

Through Whatcom County’s farmers’ markets, Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) or subscription buying, and “Eat Local” campaigns, Whatcom County is proud of its agricultural identity

…..What is clear, however, is that land “lost to development” is very difficult to later develop for food production. It would be exceptionally difficult in Whatcom County, for example, to recapitalize a dairy farm after the real loss of “dairy infrastructure,” upon development.

…….
An important hypothesis to consider in the discussion of land productivity and development pressures in light of food security questions, is whether or not it is in the economic interest of a particular region to prioritize agriculture by preserving its farm land and diversifying crop/livestock production. But is the diversification of crops essential to a community’s food security? If so, then policymakers need to consider boosting support for small- and medium-sized farms. According to the 2002 National Agricultural Statistics Service and other sources mentioned in this paper, of the 1,485 farms in Whatcom County, 1,061 had less than $50,000 in value of sales; the value of sales category that represented the most number of farms was ‘less than $1,000,’ with 396 farms in this category. These figures reveal that the majority of Whatcom farms are small and medium sized operations. In 2002, 923 farms -- 62% of all county farms –- were less than 50 acres in size (http://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/2002/Volume_1,_Chapter_2_County_Level/Washington/st53_2_001_001.pdf http://www.co.whatcom.wa.us/assessor/taxguides/openspace/openspace.jsp).

An interesting consideration here also is that such small- and medium-sized farms seem to figure prominently in conservation programs. For example, such farms accounted for 82% of the land enrolled by farmers in the Conservation Reserve and Wetlands Reserve Programs (see http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/EIB12/EIB12_reportsummary.pdf). These farms also accounted for considerable crop diversification. It’s a trend spreading throughout Whatcom County. In the past decade, for example, roughly 100 Whatcom mid-sized raspberry growers have supplemented their revenue streams by adding blueberries and some strawberries (http://www.thebellinghambusinessjournal.com/september2007/cultivation.php) in order to mitigate unpredictable weather and the low prices offered by central distributors.

…..
What can be concluded from this discussion? For one, scale matters. And policymakers need to consider an all-inclusive structure of agriculture that values place and locale, production that is environmentally sound and economically robust – i.e., able to withstand uncertainties in weather, production costs, and markets.

What can be done? Consumers need to be interested in food and farm systems that use sustainable connections between growers and producers. As discussed in the Vincent et al “Issues in Emergency Food Distribution” work mentioned earlier, Whatcom County is no different than the other counties in the U.S. – all are vulnerable to consumer food shortfalls due to extreme events (subduction-zone earthquake to seasonal flooding, uncertain energy prices to seed shortfalls) or endemic poverty. It is ironic that Whatcom County is rich with agricultural land, but produces little food for people to eat. The dependence on one or two crops “make it vulnerable to a disease outbreak or even climate variations” (Vincent et al, “Issues in Emergency Food Distribution”). How best, then, to decrease such vulnerability? Many approaches are possible, but one thing is certain – none are likely unless farmland can be protected.

As Whatcom County’s population grows, development pressures in farmland areas will continue to increase, especially since farmland is prime for building given its generally flat and well drained soil characteristics. Nevertheless, there are a number of tools available to protect farmland. For example, the county’s ‘preferential agricultural open space taxation’ program designates various zoning to protect agricultural lands. Further efforts to preserve farmland in Whatcom County reside with the State of Washington and its Open Space Taxation Act, enacted decades ago, which allows for differential property valuation of open space lands for the production of food, fiber, and forest crops.

Beyond state legislation to protect agricultural land from development, there are over a dozen nonprofit organizations working on behalf of Whatcom County agriculture -- Whatcom Farm Friends, Sustainable Connections, the Whatcom County Farm Bureau, Small Potatoes Gleaning Project are notable examples. The number of small farms in the county has actually increased in the past decade, indicating a growing interest from young and new farmers to establish farming businesses. Clearly, prioritizing food security, knowing with some certainty how much food one is likely to have and from where it is coming from is one way forward – and warrants further consideration by policymakers and politicians and the constituencies they represent.

America's "death map" - heat is the big problem

2008-12-17T14:21:00.000-08:00

I have been remiss about blogging these days, but this just out on Reuters. It comes from Susan Cutter's work on mapping disaster vulnerability. The work is a first take on creating an American death map. As such, it focuses on threats to human life, showing that heat and severe winter weather are major concerns, even as these culprits often go unnoticed on the national and global scale. A map of American "disaster-caused economic damage" showing what disasters caused the most dollar losses would likely prove to be much different. Together, the two would show what many already know - in the US, changes in codes and emergency response have lowered the loss of life from earthquakes, fires, and to a lesser extent, hurricanes. This has made it possible to put more of our stuff, houses and people, in harms way. Thus, we've lowered the death tolls, but raised the costs of earthquakes, hurricanes, fire and floods. What is left is the silent kills of extreme heat and cold where the lack of economic loss has meant little resources aimed at reducing loss of life.

I'm sure more nuanced work will likely follow this initial death map.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Heat is more likely to kill an American than an earthquake, and thunderstorms kill more than hurricanes do, according to a "death map" published on Tuesday.
Researchers who compiled the county-by-county look at what natural disasters kill Americans said they hope their study will help emergency preparedness officials plan better.
Heat and drought caused 19.6 percent of total deaths from natural hazards, with summer thunderstorms causing 18.8 percent and winter weather causing 18.1 percent, the team at the University of South Carolina found.
Earthquakes, wildfires and hurricanes combined were responsible for fewer than 5 percent of all hazard deaths.
Writing in BioMed Central's International Journal of Health Geographics, they said they hoped to dispel some myths about what the biggest threats to life and limb are.
"According to our results, the answer is heat," Susan Cutter and Kevin Borden of the University of South Carolina wrote in their report, which gathered data from 1970 to 2004.
"I think what most people would think, if you say what is the major cause of death and destruction, they would say hurricanes and earthquakes and flooding," Cutter said in a telephone interview. "They wouldn't say heat."
"What is noteworthy here is that over time, highly destructive, highly publicized, often-catastrophic singular events such as hurricanes and earthquakes are responsible for relatively few deaths when compared to the more frequent, less catastrophic such as heat waves and severe weather," they wrote.
The most dangerous places to live are much of the South, because of the heat risk, the hurricane coasts and the Great Plains states with their severe weather, Cutter said.
The south central United States is also a dangerous area, with floods and tornadoes.
California is relatively safe, they found.
"It illustrates the impact of better building codes in seismically prone areas because the fatalities in earthquakes have gone down from 1900 because things don't collapse on people any more," Cutter said.
"It shows that simple improvements in building codes in high-wind environments like hurricane coasts, and the effectiveness of evacuation in advance of hurricanes, has reduced the mortality from hurricanes and tropical storms," she added.
"So there are some things we are pretty good at in getting people out of harm's way and reducing fatalities."
Cutter said there is no national database on such deaths and this was a first try at getting one together.
(Editing by Will Dunham)

Everyday Farming is Food Security

2008-11-17T14:00:00.000-08:00

So many books, so little time. Having just returned from a visit at UC Santa Cruz and the 8th annual Wise Traditions conference in San Francisco, and lunched with raw milk activist, Michael Schmidt (see the Harper’s story, http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/04/0081992), I am even more enthused about our Everyday Farming project.

This includes works entitled:

Making Piece with Local.
Building Resilient Food Systems: Culture, Choice Change, Context.
A Food Sabbatical: One year. One summer. One month. One week. One day. One life.

Our Everyday Farming project is similarly titled to work in South Australia (see Gendered Bodies, Gendered Knowledge: Information Technology in Everyday Farming by Lia Bryant, which looks at gendered interactions, understandings, and communications in everyday work practices), but includes study of the production and consumption of all aspects of sustenance – food, clothing, housing, arts. Food, however, figures most prominently in the mix.

A top priority in the research is to look at entry points into everyday farming and the common barriers: land acquisition, start up costs, seed affordability and procurement, knowledge barriers in practices, markets and marketing, sustainable incomes. Some of the work relates to our newest grant at the Institute for Global and Community Resilience, which I’m hoping will take the form of a Food and Farm project: Everyday Farming for Resilient Community Living. One meal at a time.

We’re certainly fortunate to be living in a community and region that has such favorable resources (energy and water issue notwithstanding), know-how, and interest in supporting agriculture and fishing. From Sustainable Connections to the Food Bank Farm, Uprising Organics to Twin Brook Creamery, Boxx Berry Farm to Edaleen Dairy, Ciao Thyme to the Whatcom County-Bellingham City Peak Oil Task Force, growers, farm suppliers, and community members are united on the need to protect farmland. The question is how. Fortunately, Whatcom farm friends weighs in heavily here; advisory boards to various non profits counsel as well. Protecting the land base is a first step in achieving system resiliency in food production (see “urban-rural encroachment” working paper from the IGCR website, forthcoming).

Our new grant, hopefully, will help us tease out/identify factors of resilience that reduce social vulnerability. A goal of the work is to focus on what policies can reduce vulnerabilities and what economic accounting systems can validate the worth of resilient practices and systems. We also are working on case studies, and invite community members to offer stories related to how everyday farming – focused on what and where food is coming from as a part of increased community resilience – should be promoted.

Dedicated to the Tuba
Guy…
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/jamieson/386267_robert04xx.html
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/jamieson/387025_Robertweb.html

2008-09-25T11:07:00.001-07:00

Here's a video that will make you chuckle, but also illustrates the importance of robust, creative, and prepared communities when it comes to disaster response. We should all be looking for ways to build internal community resilience, and moving away from assumptions that rely upon external support and aid.

The forgotten disaster

2008-09-23T09:34:00.000-07:00

Its been a week since Hurricane Ike slammed into Galvaston and Houston, Texas. The devestation is reminiscent of the worst disaster ever in the United States, the 1900 Galvaston Hurricane that, a mere hundred years ago, leveled the island of all inhabitants.

I've been struck by the almost complete lack of coverage of this event. Is it that after Katrina, our sense of risk has been recalibrated? A hurricane with *only several dozen deaths is great? Is it the lack of residents screaming for rescue from rooftops with its titillating specter of a modern-day, horrific replay of Swiss Family Robinson? Is it that in this looming slow-motion economic crisis? With the threat of loosing retirement savings and homes, do losses from a Hurricane seem more trivial? Do people subconsciously quip that at least the Texans impacted will get aid from FEMA? Or is it that at the end of a presidential cycle that has so blatantly mismanaged Katrina, people don't want to think about disasters until someone new is in the White House? Or is the destruction of Galvaston once a century simply an acceptable level of risk? I really don't know.

What I do know is that we are loosing an opportunity to continue the national conversation about how our Gulf Coast will relate to it natural environment.

Here is a slide show of images from Texas, sent to me by Diane Knutson, head of the Environmental Studies office here at Western Washington University. Unfortunately, I don't know the original source, but thanks to whomever took the photos and compiled the images.

Farming and floods

2008-09-19T17:43:00.001-07:00

The local Seattle public radio station KUOW has been doing a series on farming and the eat local movement Sweet Earth: Lessons from the Land. The series covers a range of challenges to farming, including the relationship with government, urban encroachment, and interactions with environmentalists.

One particularly interesting segment, Winter Flood's Silver Lining, looks at Thurston County farmers recovering from the devastating 2007 Winter floods. The farmer interviewed speaks eloquently about the advantages but occasional shock of farming in fertile floodplains.

Earthquake scenario and planning

2008-09-19T17:08:00.000-07:00

This week I participated in EERI's very engaging Earthquake Scenario Planning Workshop. It was a fascinating mix of seismologist, engineers, planners, and a smattering of social scientists and public officials. While we were all bent on using developing earthquake scenarios, there was considerable fuzziness over what these scenarios could and should do.

Many scenarios have been developed as emergency response planning tools for massive planning exercises. The Great Southern California ShakeOut - a hybrid response exercise and public awareness campaign - is an upcoming example. For these purposes, the scenario development process seems rather straight forward, though often very labor intensive. Develop your hazard model, add in your infrastructure inventory and census data, develop fragility curves, etc. The results are typically presented as maps of shaking intensity, building damage, and calculations of death, injuries, and people displaced from their homes.

But what if the scenario is not for response planning, but for mitigation and planning? Are these outputs useful for people like city council members, majors,urban planners, and community service providers? The general assumption at the workshop was yes, but I have strong doubts. I'm not convinced that these decision makers would necessarily know what to do given maps of shaking, damage, deaths, injuries and displacement. These aren't exactly the indicators they work with on a daily basis. Nor are they, I suspect, the indicators that they consider when campaigning for re-election.

What is probably much more salient for this crowd is indicators such as poverty rate, unemployment, housing vacancy rates, and school overcrowding. If this is the case, perhaps we should challenge ourselves to further push our scenarios and models forward into the often fuzzy areas of social consequence. While it may be much more difficult, such enhanced scenarios may catch the imagination and raise concerns among planners, policy makers and service providers. These are the very groups needed to successfully develop and implement the mitigation and community resilience policies necessary to make a massive emergency response unnecessary.

It behooves us to think about the users of our scenarios. We should ask them early on what indicators they need...and what will jolt them into taking earthquake risk seriously.

Disaster as Process

2008-09-03T17:57:00.000-07:00

Residents of New Orleans are returning after the recent evacuations in front of Hurricane Gustav. The hurricane passed to the south and west of the city, only causing storm surge waves that occasionally splashed over the city's weakest Industrial Canal levees.

Many people view disasters as events and will see Gustav as the disaster near-miss, the disaster that didn't happen. Other disaster researchers have come to understand disasters as a process:

Quarantelli: "we should conceive of disasters for sociological purposes only"

Beck: "threats are produced industrially, externalized economically, individualized juridically, legitimized scientifically, and minimized politically."

Disaster as process means we should move away from an intense focus on disaster events. Instead we should look at the ongoing social process, power disparities, resource disparities, and cultural understandings of the environment and environmental risk that may exacerbate the consequences of a natural hazard event. With this view, disasters are no more than clarifying moments when these social processes are often most apparent.

For New Orleans, this is certainly apparent in both Katrina and Gustav. Katrina, more than any other recent event, exposed a significant disregard for the needs and resources of the urban poor (e.g. in the planning of evacuation protocol and the development of recovery grants based upon pre-storm housing values). Both Katrina and Gustav continue to highlight a hurricane-exposed city that relies almost exclusively on levees and pumps for disaster risk reduction. Gustav’s surge again highlighted that the Lower and Upper Ninth Ward – low and moderate income African American neighborhoods – continue to be the most vulnerable. Both events continue to point to major issues of coastal erosion and the ever increasing risks of un-fettered storm surge straight in from the Gulf.

The idea of disaster as an event may help response and emergency preparedness, but it certainly does us all a disservice when we can then ignore the everyday and ongoing social and ecological issues that are the real disaster.

Post-Disaster Housing Woes

2008-07-30T16:49:00.000-07:00

Its been three years since Hurricane Katrina and the FEMA has finally issued a much-awaited draft of a new disaster housing strategy, commissioned by the Bush administration. This proposed strategy is much overdue, and so I read it eagerly when it came out.

What an utter disappointment.

I was hoping for some innovative ideas to address the significant problems we've all seen in relation to post-disaster housing. Research on housing-related policies and outcomes after numerous U.S. natural disasters documents consistent disparities based on race, class, and gender. Peacock and Girard (1997) found that racial and ethnic minorities tended to receive insufficient insurance settlements because they are less often insured by major national carriers. Blanchard-Boehm (1997) reported that financial constraints reduce the likelihood that African-Americans made structural improvements so their houses could withstand natural disasters, resulting in more serious damage to the homes of African-Americans. Enarson (2008) pinpoints elderly women as more vulnerable during disasters. Similarly, temporary housing put in place after a disaster is often not designed with the needs of women and children in mind.

More recently, we've all heard a long string of exposes on the significant social and health costs associated with FEMA travel trailers issued to Hurricane Katrina and Rita survivors. Formaldehyde levels in the trailers caused respiratory problems and made many inhabitants sick. Trailer camps were often far away from commercial and residential centers making it nearly impossible for inhabitants to find employment or other housing. Cramped conditions, isolation, and post-disaster depression created a toxic mix. Domestic violence, mental illness and suicide skyrocketed. As a nation, our approach to post-disaster housing seems to be on-par or worse than the primitive tents and survivor camps in mega-disasters overseas.

So, with all of these problems, what did the 2008 Disaster Housing Plan recommend? Almost nothing new. The plan is basically a description of a mixed-plan approach based on the rental voucher and trailer solutions used in the past. While they have now put a 6-month limit on travel trailer occupancy, they have pushed the ethical and legal issues to the states. Now it is the states who have to determine acceptable levels of formaldehyde and bear legal responsibility if anything goes wrong. More significantly, the plan leaves many of the big challenges to a currently unformed housing task force. They have left the important equity and recovery questions posed by Congress to an even later set of annexes. I'm unimpressed.

If you want to read and comment on the proposal, you can to FEMA's press release here.

On a brighter note, four students in our Practical Applications of Emergency Management class and over two dozen students in a complementary design class tackled the issue of post-disaster housing this Spring semester. A draft policy brief based upon their work is available on the IGCR website, here, including a few innovative conceptual alternatives to travel trailers and FEMA camps.

The solar system is ending

2008-06-30T13:01:00.000-07:00

Taking off on Scott's post below, the Atlantic Monthly's July issue takes an even more extreme view of the world is ending. This month features a very interesting and informative look at space rock risk. The author discusses evidence of quite frequent meteors slamming into the earth or burning up right above the earth's surface, causing mass extinctions, dismal growing seasons, and the like. Some aren't even that long ago. The basic thesis of the article is an argument against NASA's current mission of Moon and Mars races, and a more pragmatic disaster-prevention mission. Someone needs to chart and preventative strike any space rocks that may get a bit too close to good ol' earth. The issue is out on newsstands, but should be up on the website soon.

And just on a side note, if you've ever wondered how it feels to work in disaster risk reduction in many developing countries, read the Atlantic article. The incomprehensibility of dealing with a continent-wide evacuation and major, multi-year diminishing of sunlight is the same sort of overwhelm many of our colleagues feel with more earthly disasters. When faced with massive urban migration, rampant illegal construction, rapid mangrove destruction and the loom of cyclones or sea-level rise or a host of other natural hazards, mitigation and risk reduction seems just as daunting.

The World Has Ended

2008-06-22T09:34:00.001-07:00

According to this cheery article by the AP.

No More CERT At University of Washington

2008-06-11T16:16:00.001-07:00

Story broken by The Stranger.

According to UW Spokesman Norm Arkans, CERT, the loss of federal funding—along with CERT’s director—led to the termination of the program. “The grant expired and we don’t have the resources to pick up the funding,” Arkans says. “It’s a great thing to have if you’ve got the funding for it. It has people out who can be of assistance on the ground when you have emergencies.”

Next?

End of Katrina Trailer Parks; New FEMA Expectations?

2008-06-07T11:14:00.001-07:00

Here's a poignant and pointed story by the NYT on the shuttering of the last FEMA trailer parks and the still-vulnerable people who are struggling to leave. The tone that reporter Shaila Dewan takes in this story with respect to FEMA is an appropriate one -- painting them as an highly imperfect agency (who isn't?) that has had egregiously unfair expectations put on them.

FEMA, which ultimately is a disaster-response agency, not a social service department, endured years of blistering criticism for its failure to understand that many New Orleans residents needed more than just a roof over their heads after the hurricane. The agency now is quick to admit that other agencies are better equipped to handle persistent social ills. Its job in cases like that of Ms. August, FEMA officials say, is limited to getting her housed.

Now I'm the first to criticize our country's (over-)emphasis on emergency preparedness and emergency management, rather than social vulnerability reduction and sustainable development. However, I think a lot of the specific criticisms of post-Katrina/Rita FEMA were unwarranted. First, it wasn't FEMA that made cuts to itself and made it a small fish in a ginormous Department of Homeland Security pond. Second, as the above quote hints at, FEMA is an *emergency management* agency. It should be supported in this role and not overstretched to meet public demands that can be met better by other agencies and perhaps even the private sector. The point ultimately is that we as a government and society need to mainstream disaster risk reduction and sustainable development (two sides of the same coin).

California's unsafe schools

2008-06-05T09:14:00.000-07:00

Scott Mile's earlier post on school earthquake safety is interesting, especially in light of the many collapsed school structures in China's recent earthquake. I certainly agree with Yumei Wang that Oregon and Washington schools are in serious need of attention. However, the implicit argument that California has passed laws and has safe schools, is a fallacy. We need to look to California to see and hopefully emulate the successes, but we also need to be painfully aware that even California still has serious school safety issues to consider.

Here are just a few of the issues:

A. The Field Act, requiring higher design standards, dedicated plan reviews and continuous inspection for public school buildings does increase building resistance to shaking. However, the higher standards only bring these structures up to somewhere between "life-safe" and ready for immediate occupancy.

Many of the Field Act school buildings will still sustain moderate structural damage and perhaps, significant non-structural damage. Many will not be able to be used for emergency community centers or even as schools until repairs are made. This is certainly better than buildings in danger of collapse, but remains far below ideal.

B. Private schools are and school out buildings used for after-school care are not covered by the act.

C. Portable classrooms used throughout school districts in California and other states are a significant hazard. These account for a whopping 30% of public classrooms in California. I was not able to really visualize the threat of these portable classrooms and was emailing colleagues in California about this issue. Here was the explanation of Fred Turner, a consulting structure engineer in Sacramento:
1) If unattached classrooms move relative to their stair systems(which can be structurally separated from the classroom) doors that open outward can be prevented from opening by creation of an offset, gap or obstruction that forms between the classrooms and the stairs during the earthquake, potentially obstructing egress. Obstructed egress coupled with a post-earthquake fire threat can create casualty risks.

2) Some improperly attached classrooms are on steel or concrete supports that include steel bearing plates and height adjusters. When classroom supports dislodge from the chassis during earthquakes, the steel bearing plates and height adjusters can penetrate through the floor of the classroom unit and protrude into the floor space where occupants may be dropping, covering and holding on under furniture. Occupants may come in contact with the protruding support height adjusters and bearing plates. To date, post-earthquake images document supports protruding through floors, and no records of injuries.

D. Additionally, there are legal catch 22 situations where schools desiring to tie down portable classrooms to make them more earthquake resistant wind up having to suddenly count these portables as "permanent" structures. The school then looses capital funds needed for constructing truly permanent classrooms.

The issue of school safety is immense in China, in the Pacific Northwest and, unfortunately, even in California.

the cavalry

2008-06-05T08:12:00.000-07:00

I have spent the week at the FEMA Higher Education Conference at the National Emergency Management Institute. While emergency management and the four phases of disaster (mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery) are a part of what we teach and research at the IGCR, it is not everything. It was clear that the emergency management field is focus on management, tactics, and coordination. All are important aspects of disaster reduction. Yet, aspects of sustainable planning, strategizing, and integrated vulnerability reduction are not top agenda items.....especially within Department of Homeland Security's dictates of a heavy focus on terrorism.

Being somewhat on the margins of the conference focus is always a fascinating position. This time I was struck (again) with the underlying oxymoron present in the FEMA mandate. On the one hand, the average resident understands FEMA's role as the knight on a white stallion, the cavalry, the agency that is going to sweep in and save them from a catastrophic event. Of course, Katrina greatly tarnished this image, but the expectation remains. On the other hand, one of FEMA's missions is to promote disaster preparedness. This promoting of preparedness requires a host of risk education and risk communication activities, many of which require FEMA to say that there is risk, that people are unsafe, and that people need to DO SOMETHING to prepared themselves. The implicit and unintended message underneath it all is, "We're the cavalry, but we can't really do our job, so you need to prepare yourself."

Its a challenging position for emergency managers to work within.

Homeless in New Orleans

2008-05-28T08:42:00.001-07:00

Disasters are most disastrous for those on the "margins," whether it be a business struggling with debt or an individual struggling with chronic illness and poverty. That seems obvious. But the thing that folks don't often think about is how the "margins" expand with each disaster if we don't work to reduce their everyday vulnerability.

Here we see that the homeless population has nearly doubled in New Orleans post-Katrina while the efforts to deal with homelessness have not.

By one very rough estimate, the number of homeless people in New Orleans has doubled since Katrina struck in 2005. ...

New Orleans had 2,800 beds for the homeless before the storm; now it has 2,000...

So what happens after the next hurricane or heat wave in New Orleans?

NYT's Andrew Revkin Keeps Asking Good Questions

2008-05-28T08:32:00.001-07:00

In this blog post:

While California, thanks to wakeup calls in 1906 and 1933, has pushed to bolster schools and other vital structures, there, too, experts say, there are gaps, particularly in poorer school districts. In Oregon, the gaps are truly scary, according to Yumei Wang, the head of the state’s geohazards team. When the anticipated earthquake there comes, it could well be an 9.0-magnitude event.

If hundreds of the 1,300 Oregon schools estimated to be inadequately reinforced fall, will that be seen as a cruel twist of fate or somebody’s fault?

And if it’s somebody’s fault, who is the somebody? The person in office? The voters who don’t clamor for safe schools before a disaster strikes? State agencies that perhaps didn’t catch a contractor’s shortcut? Engineers or scientists who haven’t tried hard enough to explain what this kind of threat means? The media for focusing on politicians’ gaffes and celebrities’ stunts?

FlypMedia on Future Earthquake Disasters in the US

2008-05-23T11:23:00.001-07:00

Definitely check this out. Not only is yours truly quoted a couple times, flypmedia.com is a rich online magazine experience with some great writers.

(Full disclosure: The author of the piece is my USGS mentor's son.)

School Vulnerability in OR & WA

2008-05-22T08:59:00.001-07:00

Been a bit too busy to catch lots of the good stuff in the NYT. I was reading along today and read the name of a friend, Yumei Wang, who wrote the NYT about seismic safety of school in the US and in particular Oregon. She answered this question for us:

I hope that the problem with seismically unsafe schools in the U.S. does not get overlooked. Although California has had school safety laws since 1933, other states have not. As you know, I work in Oregon. Last year, we conducted “screenings” on 3,300 public schools and emergency buildings. Our results, which are available online, indicate that 1,300 have high to very high probability of collapse. We will apply another screening “filter” to reduce that number; however, in the end, Oregon will need to mitigate about 1,000 school buildings.

And on the topic of Washington and their schools? She wrote, "They are still sleeping (except the city of Seattle has done stuff)."

Considering that Washington State's constitution states that "[i]t is the paramount duty of the state to make ample provision for the education of all children residing within its borders, without distinction or preference on account of race, color, caste, or sex" it would seem like seismic safety of all public schools, regardless of location, is also of "paramount duty."

China's earthquake- damage and rescue

2008-05-20T12:03:00.000-07:00

I've been watching the news coming out of China for a week now and it feels so much like déjà vu. from the 1999 Marmara Earthquakes in Turkey. In Turkey, as in China, development had been achieved at a break neck speed. Rural people had poured into the major industrial cities of the Marmara regions -Istanbul, Kocaeli, Izmit, Duzce, Adapazarı and others.

With such a rapid increase of population, density was achieved through reinforced concrete construction. Replacing 1 and 2 story wood and brick buildings were towering concrete apartment buildings. It house the people, but so much of it was built before a robust and transparent building inspection process could be fully enforced. This looks to be the case in China as well.

In Turkey, much of the construction from 1960-1999 was also built illegally by self-builders who neither understood what made reinforced concrete earthquake resistant, nor understood the important of construction quality. That may not be the case in China. I'm sure it will be studied in great detail over the next few years.

In the mean time, a CNN video of the minutes after the earthquake was posted to the ENDRR-L list serve hosted by Prevention Web. The video is very dramatic, but also very telling. Survivors engage in a strong self-organizing response to rescue trapped victims, treat the wounded and find needed supplies. Watching the video, I look at it and empathize with the survivors. But I also find myself making a mental note of what supplies would be helpful in that sort of aftermath. Think I'll go check what I've got in my emergency supply kit...

Also telling are the injuries people sustained from non-structural damage....damage resulting from the shifting or collapse of personal contents or things like partition walls and light fixtures. Its a reminder of the importance to secure your furniture if you live in earthquake country.

Birch Bay Drill

2008-05-15T14:48:00.000-07:00

As an intern for IGCR I had the opportunity to participate in an emergency drill in Birch Bay, Washington. The drill was created around the idea that a terrorist attack occurred at Camp Horizon. The scenario is as follows:

*Excercise*
A terrorist attack has occurred at Camp Horizon in Birch Bay, Washington. A tank of isocyanate exploded injuring and kill many resulting in an order to shelter in place for all

As a player (pink arm band) and field observer (yellow arm band), I was able to explore the command center located at the local firehouse, the explosion site, and the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH).

First stop: the command center. Located at the firehouse, this was a place for tracking events (see photo at left) and exchanging information; authorities inside, media OUTSIDE. Even though this was a drill, the annoyance with the faux media seemed genuine. It was interesting to see that many found it difficult to find the line between reality and fantasy. At one point I was told I could not go into the field until it was declared "safe." Isn't the drill over when it is safe? The information flow was so constant that it was difficult to catch anyone's attention as they roamed from room to room. Somehow, I managed to get some vague directions to the site.

Upon reaching Camp Horizon, myself and a fellow Western student were greeted by a man with a large assault rifle and a smile; even the acting students with corpse-like make-up broke character. We were waved in safely thanks to our green arm bands. There were ambulances from near and far lined along the road to the entrance. I wondered if importing ambulances left towns vulnerable to their own disaster.

The actual site of the supposed explosion was teeming with marines and people in hazmat suits. In order to make the task of finding the injured and deceased, dummies with realistic injuries were thrown in trees on strewn across the grass. Actors were also integrated in the mix. Both were dragged on yellow boards to a tent where they were decontaminated (hosed off). A controller/evaluator commented that marines do not have medical training and do not practice the caution with the injured that they should. He also noted that the drill had an unexplained mistake. Less protected participants had entered the site before it had been declared clear. In reality, this could have posed a serious health risk.

The final stop was the fairgrounds where the MASH hospital was located. A less lively scene, a barn doubled as a hospital with rows of injured dummies taggged by injury. Injured people sat in chairs. Another decontamination tent was set up nearby. An injured man decided he would not like to be to decontaminated and was quickly taken down by three marines.

The drill ended with the landing of two black hawk helicopters in an open field of the fairgrounds. They arrived 3-4 hours later than expected which does not bode well for a real disaster. Six of the injured were helicoptered off the site.

The drill ended abruptly with the deconstruction of the decontamination tents and departure of fire trucks and ambulances. The great thing about a drill is you can pack up and leave, feeling a sense of adventure even. Ironically, the same set of events can occur in reality but setting off a the exact opposite range of emotions. Perhaps this says something for the ineffectiveness of raising awareness through morbid or disheartening images. If one doesn't experience the real thing, it is easy for the mind to discount it as fantasy.

School Vulnerability... Not In Our Backyard!?

2008-05-14T09:17:00.001-07:00

The New York Times has a good side-bar article about the vulnerability of schools around the world. They interview disaster luminaries Brian Tucker and Ben Wisner -- probably the most knowledgeable folks out there. (Part of the email interview of Dr. Wisner is in this NYT blog post.)

(Dr. Tucker won the MacArthur Award because of work he did related to earthquake risk reduction for schools, particularly in Katmandu in association with his organization GeoHazards International. Dr. Wisner has written volumes on disaster risk reduction, most notably on this topic is this report [pdf].)

The NYT article observes that...

[e]xperts on earthquake dangers have warned for years that tens of millions of students in thousands of schools, from Asia to the Americas, face similar risks, yet programs to reinforce existing schools or require that new ones be built to extra-sturdy standards are inconsistent, slow and inadequately financed.

Well, of course. That sounds obvious -- schools are vulnerable in places around the world that we associate with being most vulnerable. When the experts says schools are vulnerable in "the Americas," they mean Central and South America.

Right?

Yes.

Well, and North America...

... the risks are not limited to poor or emerging countries. In Vancouver, British Columbia, parents’ groups have been agitating to accelerate a decades-long program aimed at bringing schools up to modern earthquake standards.

Because of the Sichuan earthquake, the Seattle PI is reporting on building vulnerability in Seattle, citing a report for the City of Seattle [big pdf] on unreinforced masonry (URM) buildings that was published in December 2007. The report notes that some of the URMs in Seattle are schools -- not surprising given the age of construction:

Among the more notable buildings on the list are West Seattle High School, John Marshall School in the Roosevelt area, First United Methodist Church downtown, and the Merchants Cafe and the Union Gospel Mission in Pioneer Square.

To my knowledge, the State of Washington has not publicly disclosed schools in the state that are seismically vulnerable, particularly URMs. I'm not even certain if they have them inventoried. Obviously, this is a first step in mobilizing political will to retrofit or replace these schools.

Anyone know about a school seismic-safety inventory in WA?

Other states?

UPDATE

If True, It'll Leave You...

2008-05-12T12:57:00.000-07:00

Speechless.

Red Cross on the Death Toll from the Sichuan Earthquake

2008-05-12T09:14:00.001-07:00

From the BBC.

News on the Sichuan Earthquake

2008-05-12T08:58:00.001-07:00

It's a bit of paradox looking for news in the immediate aftermath of any large hazard event, since the bigger the event the more difficult it will be to get reliable information quickly (or at all), but alas that's the world we live in. So far, the New York Times seems to have the most insightful coverage -- particularly the audio interview (left hand side) include with this story.

The reporter interviewed makes a very good point about the indicators of the scale of the disaster -- the heads of state went immediately to the region:

Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, who arrived in the earthquake region on Monday night, described the situation as a “severe disaster” and called for “calm, confidence, courage and efficient organization.”

President Hu Jintao ordered an “all out” effort to aid people in the earthquake region and soldiers were dispatched for disaster relief efforts.

The government also has released significant fatality estimates (certainly not actual counts), in contrast to the 1976 event where the Chinese government tried to cover up the more than 200,000 deaths to the world media. This is surprisingly common. I remember after the 1999 Izmet earthquake that the Turkish government was denying any major death toll while at the same time it came to light that they had ordered thousands of body bags.

It's a good lesson to remember: As consumers, maintain low expectations for news in the near aftermath, but producers should not try downplay what they already know.

When Can't You Recover?

2008-05-12T08:26:00.001-07:00

Apparently, according to this story, when your town is a Superfund site, like Picher, OK where the EPA was in the process of buying out homeowners as part of their CERCLA cleanup effort:

Because of Picher's Superfund status, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is unlikely to grant assistance to homeowners to rebuild in the town, said Oklahoma Emergency Management Director Albert Ashwood. But he echoed Henry's assurances about the federal buyout program, which is funded by the Environmental Protection Agency.

So what happens if your neighborhood becomes a Superfund site as the result of a hazard event?

Information Disasters

2008-05-10T09:56:00.001-07:00

The New York Times has another to-the-point editorial about the Burma (Myanmar) disaster. (The other one.) This one deals with issues of information flow and freedom of the press and reinforces our understanding that there is no such thing as a natural disaster:

If information can flow as freely as nature’s elements, the consequences of many calamities — be they earthquakes, floods, droughts, hurricanes or storms — are manageable and even preventable. Absent such freedom in news and information, all “natural” disasters are ultimately man-made.

Hold on to your hat, here come the disasters...

2008-05-08T11:01:00.000-07:00

While at an OECD sponsored conference on Financial Literacy, I had the opportunity to present with Dr. Erwann Michel-Kerjan from the Wharton School's Risk Management and Decision Processes Center. He was presenting their newly released MANAGING LARGE‐SCALE RISKS IN A NEW ERA OF CATASTROPHES: Insuring, Mitigating and Financing Recovery from Natural Disasters in the United States. The report is a great read, especially for those interested in the financial aspects of disaster management.

While Dr. Michel-Kerjan was a bit too pessimistic in his assessment of disasters....he saw rising disaster costs as a unassailable trend, not seeing that recent hurricanes in the Gulf have also led to implementation of building codes that could, eventually, help bring disaster costs under control....he showed a great graph from his recent work looking at the politics of disasters. The graph shows disaster declarations over time, highlighting election years.

Its clear that disaster declarations are on the rise. And they are heavily influenced by our election cycle. If the trend holds, being in an election year, we should expect a higher number of declarations than recent years. Chances are that most countries have means of funneling development money to favored communities based upon assumed or hoped for electoral support. In Turkey, amnesties for illegal building are regularly handed out in exchange for political support. Here, transportation and urban renewal funding have also used in this way. I suspect we are in an era where DHS terrorism grants and, to a lesser extent, recovery funds that come with disaster declarations are a growing and preferred method of getting a bit more of the pie to one's constituents.

Burma's Vulnerability

2008-05-07T08:24:00.001-07:00

What are some root causes?

The New York Times editorial sums them concisely:

[The junta's] repressive policies contributed greatly to the the disaster. Crushing poverty left many coastal communities more vulnerable to the storm than they otherwise might have been, and, as Laura Bush observed, the government-controlled news media failed to issue timely warnings. The fear now is that the generals may create obstacles to the rescue operation, which will require moving volumes of supplies as well as large numbers of aid workers, many from countries hostile to the regime.

Retail's Woes Point to Local Gold?

2008-04-27T11:17:00.001-07:00

Okay, folks would probably suspect that I'd want to talk about the recent earthquake in Reno that caused a sewer-treatment-plant-damaging rock fall. (Remember, you don't need big earthquakes to cause big problems!) True, true: Renoites (Renoans?) need to be cognizant of their earthquake hazard and get prepared, as the seismologists and emergency managers are saying.

But us resilience researchers, we get excited about subtler things.

Like retail.

I've been wanting to write about retail for a couple weeks now. There have been a lot of numbers coming out showing that retail is struggling right now, with sales down and bankruptcies up.

At some level, bankruptcy is a normal part of the economic cycle. But when a lot of businesses start going under or having to drastically reorganize, I'm starting to wonder about the resilience of the system.

But we're in a recession. (Aren't we?!) You'd expect that if the dominant discourse is that our country and, noting global food prices, the world is in an economic slump, then people would change their buying behavior. This I think is not too dissimilar to how attitudes and priorities would shift in the weeks and months and maybe years after a significant hazard event, such as an earthquake.

Well, maybe, maybe not. According the New York Times, take a look at the changes in consumer purchases during our current GDP stalling:

In March, Americans spent less on women’s clothing (down 4.9 percent), furniture (3.1 percent), luxury goods (1.3 percent) and airline tickets (1.1 percent) compared with a year ago...

Wal-Mart Stores reports stronger-than-usual sales of peanut butter and spaghetti, while restaurants like Domino’s Pizza and Ruby Tuesday have suffered a falloff in orders, suggesting that many Americans are sticking to low-cost home-cooked meals.

Over the last year, purchases of brand name cookies and crackers have fallen, according to Information Resources, which tracks retail sales.

...

Not even beer is immune. Sales of inexpensive domestic beers, like Keystone Light, are up; sales of higher-price imports, like Corona Extra, are down, the firm said.

...

By no means has the economic downturn been bad for all product categories. For instance, sales of big-ticket electronics, like $1,000 flat-panel televisions and $300 video game systems, are on the rise, according to retailers and research firms.

Uh.

Okay.

So apparently when Americans are having to "tighten the belt" they need about as much or more as usual on "luxury goods," airline tickets, flat screen TVs, and video games.

I'm not so sure though. Those sales statistics are based on total receipts, not number of purchases. So while clothing and furniture and food sales may be "down," the demand and, I suspect, the number of transactions (in some form, such as repurposing or remodeling a piece of furniture), is not.

What this data is talking to me about is people's attitudes about substitutes -- how flexible they are in what they buy for a particular need or want.

Airline tickets, flat screen TVs, and video games? Well, there is not enough flexibility in preferences to provide significantly cheaper substitutes.

Food, clothing, and furniture? There is. The Keebler Elves and the Budweiser Clydesdales are really not that important to people, as long as their need is met for a reasonable price (or there is some other incentive).

Where am I going with this, you ask?

Import substitution and replacement.

Wuh?

Import substitution/replacement is a strategy for increasing community resilience by decreasing reliance on importing goods (and services) into the community. The (arguable?) potential benefits are many, including reduced monetary and environmental costs of transportation, increased local multiplier effect (i.e., dollars spent stay inside the community), insurance against failed systems outside of the community (of which the community has little or no control), and higher wages (shifting emphasis of an economy from retail to wholesale and manufacturing/processing).

These data that the New York Times are writing about show me where there is potential for import substitution/replacement: day-to-day needs. Food, clothing, shelter (including furniture) -- these are items that people apparently are not picky about who produces them and where they come from.

In other words, in implementing a strategy of import substitution/replacement to increase community resilience, these are the areas that a community should develop first. (Energy would be another category, as often promoted in the green power movement.)

And when should a community attempt to push an import substitution/replacement strategy? Well, obviously times like now would be good, when consumers are looking for convenient, lower-cost alternatives.

Or perhaps, in the recovery phase of a major disaster. Hmm....

Do Presidential Candidates Understand Disaster Risk Reduction?

2008-04-25T10:57:00.001-07:00

The recent news cycle describing John McCain's visit to New Orleans to criticize the Bush administration's response to the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe made me curious how the three current presidential candidates compare on the issue of community resilience and each compares with what the experts say on the topic.

To see my quick comparison, keep reading.

John McCain

Unfortunately, the McCain campaign doesn't have anything on its website related specifically to Hurricane Katrina, emergency management, hazard mitigation, etc. Interestingly, they don't even have links to the New Orleans news coverage in the "In the News Section." So all I can go on are the news stories about his New Orleans campaign stop. For example, this New York Times article describes McCain as making three general recommendations:

Use qualified people

Allocate as much money in the recovery phase as is necessary

Utilize the private sector, like FedEx, UPS, etc. in the response phase

Hilary Clinton

Clinton's campaign does have a section on their website specifically devoted to Hurricane Katrina and what could be done to prevent future catastrophe. The campaign lists 10 points related to disaster response and mitigation, though most of them are specific to on-going recovery in the Gulf Coast:

Elevate the Gulf Coast federal rebuilding director

Cut red tape

Attract workers to rebuild New Orleans and the region

Build a reliable hurricane protection system so there is not another Katrina

Expand affordable housing

Combat rising crime and give first responders needed tools

Build 21st Century schools in New Orleans

Revitalize a lagging health care system

Promote smart development

Revamp federal response so we are ready next time

Barack Obama

Obama's campaign definitely gets the nod for having the most verbiage on the issue, with a Hurricane Katrina fact sheet [PDF file] posted. The major points in the fact sheet are the following (caps below are theirs):

REBUILD NOW STRONGER THAN EVER

SAFETY AND SECURITY

Strengthen the Levees

Restore the Wetlands

Fight Crime

INFRASTRUCTURE

Shake the Money Loose

Rebuild Hospitals

Rebuild Schools

Restore Housing

Improve Transportation

ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Ensure Locals Can Get Recovery Jobs

Provide Incentives to Employers in Hardest-Hit Areas

Support Financial Infrastructure

Fix FEMA Insurance Rules

NEVER AGAIN

Fix FEMA

Fix the Small Business Administration

Adequately Plan for Emergency

Direct Rebuilding Efforts from the White House

Minimize Waste and Abuse

Provide an Insurance Backstop

The "Experts"

Of course there are many experts related to various facets of emergencies and disasters and there is not a enough room to put all their views here. So I chose one expert, Kathleen Tierney, who gave congressional testimony on this subject [PDF file]. As part of her testimony she discussed the following seven points towards reducing the potential for another Katrina-scale disaster:

Ensure that the nation develops a fully-functional intergovernmental emergency management system, placing a priority on the nation’s most vulnerable urban areas.

Ensure that an all-hazards approach to emergency management is implemented at all levels of government.

Ensure that FEMA and other crisis-relevant organizations center their efforts on comprehensive emergency management [meaning all phases: mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery].

Explore organizational arrangements and authorities that de-politicize high leadership positions within FEMA, DHS, and other crisis-relevant organizations.

Invest in and mobilize institutions that provide the “backbone” for effective emergency management.
Develop and implement a strategic emergency management workforce strategy for the nation.

Build oversight, accountability, and evaluation into emergency management programs at all levels of government.

The Verdict

Sorry, there's no verdict. This is just a quick (i.e., way longer than intended) blog post and the information synthesized is incomplete and not directly comparable.

That said, it's interesting to note the emphasis of each of the above on the components of resilience (loss reduction and recovery facilitation). The emphasis overall seems to be on response/recovery, rather than risk reduction.

Isn't it always? [Sigh.]

McCain makes no mention of loss reduction, unless of course the qualified person he would appoint will focus on it. Clinton does not specifically mention loss reduction, but certainly investing in flood protection, smart development, good schools, and quality housing could count as risk reduction, depending on how implemented. Obama mentions several similar points, in addition to restoring wetlands, investing in transportation infrastructure, and taking a local approach to economic development. Tierney was asked to testify specifically on issues of response and recovery, but if you read her testimony she takes many opportunities to emphasize the important of loss reduction, particularly in her points 1, 2, and 3.

Emergency planning in our schools

2008-04-17T10:56:00.000-07:00

Over the last week, I have been in Los Angeles talking with school administrators about emergency plans. This is in preparation for the largest earthquake drill California has ever done - the Great Southern California ShakeOut scheduled for November 13, 2008. In the process I have been inducted into some of the real-world headaches of school emergency planning.

At the Team Safe-T office, a non-profit organization helping to create education material on safety, emegency preparedness and social responsibility, I learned of the hazards of doing earthquake drills....not the hazards of a real earthquake, but the hazards of the drill.

Every time there is a fire drill or earthquake drill, the students file out of the building. In some inner city LA schools, some students go to the designated field and are accounted for. Others just disappear- and get in trouble. Following the drill, teachers cannot account for all of their students. The number of hall fights and vandalism goes up that day. Police report increased gang violence on the days schools do such drills.

Fire and earthquake drills are mandated by the state of California, yet so is keeping students in school and learning. Its a tough call and some school administrators have chosen to stop doing drills. This does not bode well for an actual emergency. Students and staff will be unprepared and unpracticed. Moreover, what is occuring in drills may very well indicate major issues that could arise in a real emergency. Following a major earthquake, staff charged with accounting for students and searching for injured and unaccounted students may be looking for students who have left the premises all together. Looting may also be an intensified issue if students take off after the shaking subsides. I also do not envy the school administrators facing anxious parents and telling them then have no idea where their kids are.

In other conversations, I heard about issues of special needs kids. Students on life-saving medication may not have extra supplies to last until their parents can re-unify with them. Nor may staff have the authority to administer needed medications, even if it was on the premises.

Finally, I read a recent new report out of Florida where post-hurricane building code improvements for schools is interfering with police radios. You can look at the article yourself here. Hurricane-resistant concrete walls are so thick they block police radios and have led to difficulties in on-premise police calling for back-up when dealing with security issues.

There are obviously a lot of questions to ask about how to better address the underlying causes of school violence and how to address the needs of disabled students. Those larger questions aside, I was reminded of the vast difference between clear-cut emergency plans on paper and the complicated reality that occurs when they are implemented.

No Federal Funding for Flood Works

2008-04-11T08:21:00.001-07:00

So... if there isn't money to repair and retrofit levees, like say on the Chehalis River in Lewis County, what should be done?

From the Bellingham Herald:

Sen. Patty Murray sharply criticized the Bush administration Thursday for failing to include any money in its budget request for flood-control projects along the Chehalis River and summoned U.S. Army Corps of Engineers officials to explain why.

Popular Mechanics on Our Ailing Infrastructure

2008-04-08T09:13:00.001-07:00

The Stranger is boasting that Seattle's Alaskan Way viaduct made Popular Mechanic's list of most deficient infrastructure. It's number five on the list!

This top 10 list is part of a bigger feature on the US's ailing infrastructure and what we can do about it. I haven't read much of it -- there seems to be some sensationalizing and I may not agree with all of the solutions proposed in dealing with the failing infrastructure (i.e., we don't always have to repair and replace; we can remove or repurpose). I absolutely agree though that our risk of disaster is directly tied to our inability to repair and maintain our most critical infrastructure. Perhaps we should fix it first before we build something new.

Disaster Caused Increased Food Stamp Participation in Washington?

2008-04-04T15:56:00.001-07:00

In this New York Times article about the near-record rise in food stamp recipients over the past year, a graphic is included with a map showing that Washington State participants in the USDA's Food Stamp Program (FSP) has risen by about 25% -- unfortunately, the highest enrollment increase in the country.

Clark Williams-Derry over at Sightline, who I recently linked to on the related issue of public health and the wealth gap, read the NYT's article and took note of one cited reason for increased FSP participation: natural disasters. The NYT article was specifically referring to the effect of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita on FSP enrollment, not Washington State. However, Clark suggested that the December 2007 flood disaster in Western Washington (Lewis, Thurston, and Grays Harbor County) might be associated with Washington State's FSP statistics for last year.

Typically, rising food stamp enrollment is a clear sign of a slowing economy. But Washington's worst-in-nation food stamp surge likely had another cause: the flooding in west-central Washington late last fall that put many folks in shelters, and still more in dire financial straits.

He uses this supposition to support two claims: 1) That disaster's aren't natural and 2) that this provides even more reason for "stopping global climate change."

I had three reactions to Clark's interesting post:

1) Right on! The idea (fact!?) that disasters are not "natural" is a major theme that we teach here at WWU. It's great to see people who are not in disaster studies making this link and putting it out there.

2) Sightline really likes to use flooding in Washington as evidence for global climate change. I worry about over-selling this point. Flood disasters as the result of unsustainable residential, commercial, and economic development practices are a major issue we need to contend with regardless of climate change. And I would argue that development practices are ultimately more important (and easier) to focus on than the vague notion of "stopping climate change."

3) So what's the deal with the FSP and the Western Washington flood disaster anyway? Did the flooding increase FSP enrollment? And, if so, does this explain the 25% increase in FSP recipients in Washington State?

To answer these questions I did a bit of data compilation and crunching. For those who just want the answers without the explanation: Yes, the flooding likely increased participation in the FSP, but not for the reason you'd probably think. And no; it's unlikely that the flood disaster in Lewis, Thurston, and Grays Harbor Counties accounted for the 25% FSP increase in Washington State from 2006 to 2007.

The upshot is that Washington State lawmakers (and other concerned folks) should not brush of this 25% increase in FSP participants as the result of the December 2007 flood disaster. It's a signal, but not a big one, not even big enough to bump Washington State out of the top spot in terms of FSP participant increase compared to other states. It's important that we do figure out what the bigger signal is. (Anyone?) We need policies and plans to increase our resilience to flooding, but more importantly we need to first increase the resilience of folks to economic disaster who don't experience a natural hazard.

If you're interested in the lengthy details of what I found and how I found it, keep reading.

Before I get into things, let me say that this should be considered a "back of the envelope" analysis. I've done several hours of synthesis and analysis on this, but much more could be done and I wasn't able to find all the data I want.

So like what kind of data couldn't I find? Data on how many FSP participants enrolled as a result of the December 2007 disaster declaration in the three counties.

A minor issue.

So I did what any geographer geek would do: construct a census data spreadsheet to in order evaluate my two questions.

Question 1: Did enrollment in the FSP increase as a result of the December 2007 flooding?

To lighten the analytical load, I only looked at Lewis County for this question. After compiling the household and family income data from 2006 (the most current available), I realized that I didn't even need to compile the data to determine that more Lewis County residents were eligible (if not enrolled) for the FSP than normal.

The USDA has different eligibility requirements [pdf file] in the case of disaster declarations. In many instances, the income level (minus deductions or, in the case of disasters, losses) required to be eligible is higher. That is, it's easier for people to qualify for the disaster FSP.

Well, some people.

The maximum one-month income for a single person to qualify for the FSP goes from $1107 to $1416 -- a 28% increase -- in the event of a disaster declaration.

This appears to make sense -- in the case of disaster more money is available to assist more people in need. However...

The maximum one-month income for a family of four goes from $2238 to $2295 -- a measly 2.5% increase.

Does this make sense? It's significantly easier for an individual to be eligible for food stamps in the event of a disaster, but for a family of four it's negligibly easier.

Perhaps someone with more knowledge about this policy could tell us why the difference.

Regardless of the apparent disparity in disaster FSP eligibility, the fact remains that more people are eligible as the result of the higher income thresholds and thus more people are likely to be participants. In addition to the easier income requirements, of course one would assume that the disaster losses would increase the number of eligible people even without a change in the income requirement. That is, those people who would not qualify for the basic FSP based on income would qualify after the disaster because they can deduct their losses from their gross income.

I was curious which would have the bigger effect on eligibility: the easier income requirements or the increased deductions from flood loss.

Based on the little "what if" analysis I did with the census data, it appears the change in income level has a much greater effect on eligibility than direct disaster losses, in the case of Lewis County specifically. I estimate there was about a 40% more people eligible for the FSP just based on the income requirement difference. Conversely, the eligibility numbers were not very sensitive to losses, which I modeled as proportional to one month of home ownership cost -- data available in the census. In fact, I had to assume that every household incurred over 80% damage to their house to include the next income bracket, resulting in 92% more people being eligible for the FSP. (If anyone wants to look at the spreadsheet, just email me.)

Now obviously, this is as an estimate based on several assumptions, but I'm confident of the relative upshot: there was increased participation due to expanded eligibility, but that eligibility is more related to a policy decision (income threshold increase) than from direct losses from the flooding.

I don't have actual numbers on flood-related participants from the December disaster, but the USDA certainly keeps track of these numbers for all disasters [word document]. The USDA's data for past disasters, including Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, clearly shows an increase in FSP participation.

The first question that came to mind when I looked through their data from Katrina and Rita is why didn't the NYT (or whoever they interviewed) actually crunch the numbers to see IF those disasters contributed to the increase of participants in the Gulf Coast states? Because, honestly, it's rather unintuitive that a disaster that started in 2005 resulted in a bigger FSP enrollment spike between 2006 and 2007, then it did between 2005 and 2006. The disaster FSP benefit period after Katrina and Rita was, as far as I can tell, less than a year in all cases. So the NYT (or their source) is arguing that Katrina and Rita had knock on effects that lead to folks enrolling in the basic (non-diaster) FSP in 2007, but not in 2006. Disasters unfold. It certainly is possible that there are folks who live(d) in the Gulf Coast states who have fallen on worse times in the past year than in 2005 and 2006. But I'm not sure the numbers would be that large.

And this brings us to my second question....

Question 2: Did the December 2007 flood disaster in Western Washington result in the 25% increase in FSP participants in Washington State?

First of all, I'm not even sure if the USDA would consider the disaster enrollees from the December 2007 flood disaster part of 2007 reporting. The application period was December 10-14th, 2007. I'm guessing that all disaster FSP enrollees were authorized before 2008, but it's not unimaginable that they weren't.

Second, and most importantly, it doesn't appear to me that there were even enough eligible people in Lewis, Thurston, and Grays Harbor County to represent a dominant portion of the 25% increase of Washington State FSP participants. I estimate that in 2006 there were about 540,000 FSP participants in Washington State. A Washington State press release from 2007 say there are 500,000 participants in the state. The 2002 (the most recently available) Washington State Department of Social and Health Services "Blue Book" says there were 527,000.

The entire population in the three counties represents about 70% of the number of FSP participants in Washington State (depending on which of the above numbers you use!). In other words, about 35% of the population of the three counties would need to be new FSP participants as a result of the disaster to comprise the full 25% FSP participant increase for the entire state. Based on DSHS's "Blue Book," this represents over 100 times more FSP participants in Region 6 (which includes the three counties and eight others) than normal. My estimate for Lewis County was that an additional 18% of the population of Lewis County were eligible for the disaster FSP. Lewis County was the hardest hit, while Thurston County has the highest population, and certainly not all 18% of eligible people enrolled in the FSP.

The take home message is that, even though these numbers are very rough and the analysis quick, it's unlikely that the December 2007 flood disaster contributed to a majority of the 25% FSP participant increase in the State of Washington. My estimate is that the disaster represents 20 to 40% of the increase. So even without out the December 2007 floods, the State of Washington still had the greatest increase in FSP enrollment in the country between 2006 and 2007.

Now let's start talking about what we should do about this....

UPDATE: In response to Rebekah's comment, I looked a little harder at what counties were eligible for the disaster FSP. The info I read referred to just Lewis and Grays Harbor (and I included Thurston as an assumption for larger population numbers). The confusion was from the fact that more counties were deemed eligible later [Word doc]:

Those counties approved for the food stamp assistance are Clallam, Grays Harbor, Kitsap, Lewis, Mason, Pacific, and Thurston counties.

Deadlines for processing and receiving the benefits are January 2, 2008, for Grays Harbor, Lewis, Mason, Pacific, and Thurston counties, and January 7 for Clallam and Kitsap counties.

This snippet from DSHS answers two questions for me: 1) I haven't rerun the population count, but Thurston I think is still the biggest county, so the general conclusion above would remain the same. 2) The deadline for application was in 2008. The 25% increase in FSP recipients refer to the change from 2006 to 2007. So there were participants associated with the flood who could not be in that statistic.

New Katrina Documentary

2008-03-31T09:38:00.000-07:00

The New York Times today has a brief review about a new documentary film called "Trouble The Water" about Hurricane Katrina's effects on New Orleans and the Lower Ninth Ward. It sounds interesting, focusing on the story of a young black couple rather than a whirlwind tour of what happened.

Social Determinants of Health

2008-03-26T11:07:00.000-07:00

Kudos to Clark Williams-Derry at the Sightline Institute for his post skewering the New York Times' recent article on growing life expectancy disparities between rich and poor.

While I don't entirely agree with him that the article will not be surprising to some (maybe I'm more cynical?), I do agree that the article does a poor job discussing the links between wealth and health. If you read Clark's post, you'll get a great overview (and links to more) of issues related to socio-economic determinants of health. To the disaster folks out there, this is basically the progression of vulnerability from root causes to dynamic pressures to unsafe conditions.

By the way, Western Washington University is lucky to have a (recently hired) expert on this subject: Liz Mogford.

(Sub)urban Demise

2008-03-26T10:36:00.000-07:00

Slog posted this outstanding article from the Boston Review. The article is a retrospective on the demise of Chicago suburbs (and in the telling the previous demise of Chicago and New York), some reasons, and some solutions. It's a must read for those interested in fostering urban (i.e., human-dominated areas) resilience.

A little sneak peak:

A ... conclusion is that many of the current political structures and leaders are either unable or unwilling to deal with these new realities. ...waiting for most to act or blaming them when they don’t are often not constructive responses. This puts the burden of thinking and acting back on a new type of civic leader: a volunteer with a real following in a local community, but also with a range of analysis and understanding that crosses town or county or city boundaries. The renewal of most of the failed cities ... depends on men and women who live in and care about those cities. But they will need to relate to leaders well beyond their own towns. And they will need to become a kind of ad hoc economic strategy team for their area, for their state...

Covering Up What They Already Told Us

2008-03-26T10:11:00.000-07:00

The Associated Press is running a story about how the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) has been accused of covering up reconnaissance study findings related to the 9/11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina. I don't have much insight on this, though I do respect Dr. Ray Seed -- a professor cited as one of the "whistle blowers." Obviously, there is no point to doing reconnaissance if you do not take every opportunity to reveal and learn from failures.

That said, the ASCE has been putting out a report card on the US's infrastructure since 1988. And let me tell you, they don't pull any punches in that report card. If you click the above link, you'll see our infrastructure's overall "GPA" is a depressing (scary?), big fat "D." (There is no grade above a C; though the ASCE did not look at infrastructure like fiber optics and cellular networks, which I assume would rank higher.) They estimate that the US needs to invest $1.6 Trillion dollars in the next five years to get our infrastructure up to snuff.

So perhaps the ASCE did cover up small (?) details in their reconn reports. But excuse me if I'm not that upset with them. They have been trying to tell us something much bigger for 20 years: the condition of our nation's infrastructure is severely increasing our risk of disaster.

Targeting New Families for DRR

2008-03-25T14:16:00.001-07:00

Today I was chatting with a British colleague, Justin Sharpe, about disaster risk reduction public education. He lamented the low level of public awareness about natural hazard risk, but also the lack of public action when that risk is known.

The empirical research shows that natural hazard risks are often perceived as less critical than other more daily hazards. Crime and pollution, for example, have immediate visible signals. Yet, even when people live in relatively high risk areas like California, and even when preventative measures are relatively simple, people put off disaster preparation.

Justin Sharpe pointed out that the research he read suggested that being married and having children leads to greater preventative action. Living in a place of high risk has the opposite effect. It leads to a sort of risk tolerance calibration where people become less likely to take action the longer they live in a place. These trends certainly seem to have been true in Turkey and New Orleans, where I have worked previously.

The question Justin posed to me, and which I now send out as a challenge/suggestion is this:

Why haven't Disaster Risk Reduction practitioners targeted 'new' families through ante and neo-natal groups, for instance, showing how simple adjustments can protect both them and their young family?

Recipes for Disaster

2008-03-04T10:11:00.000-08:00

Here.

Local food systems

2008-03-03T11:16:00.000-08:00

I just finished a fascinating autobiographical account of a young BC couple that decides to eat only food produced within 100 miles of their home for a year. The book, Plenty by by Alisa Smith and J.B. Mackinnon, suggests what locally-based, resilient communities of the future may look like.

The authors discover that most of the items on the shelves of their neighborhood grocery stores and co-ops are off limits. However, they also slowly come to appreciate the utter bounty that does surround them. They learn to eat seasonally, can and store for the winter but they also discover that they enjoy a more varied diet and that the tastes of their new diet are profoundly better than before.
Living in the region where this experiment commenced, the chapters that described past and present ecological abundance in our temperate "rain forest" are particularly interesting. Finishing the book, however, I now hunger for not only for some fresh local food, but for a stronger analysis of this and similar movements towards regional food systems.

Being a first person narrative, the book focused on the logistics and emotions of a 100 mile diet. The authors do not spend much space debating the merits or short comings of various local and regional food systems approaches. One study they do mention indicated that it was more energy efficient to ship fresh food from New Zealand to British eaters than to get the same food to them from the English countryside. Inefficiencies and waste are apparently replete in the local British farms.

I completely agree with the authors that this suggests that the British system needs improvement (not that the trans-global food system is necessarily better). But still, there are questions that need deeper discussion. Is the trans-global trade more energy efficient because regional markets try to replicate what can be grown better elsewhere? What does the balance sheet look like when comparing a standard no-season trans-global diet with a local, seasonal diet?

And how to include the energy costs that the authors induced during their 100 mile diet? One of the reasons they put forth for attempting a 100 year diet is that it was ecologically unconscionable and wasteful to have fresh food, on average, travel 1500 miles to their plate. Yet, they seems to also log many miles in their car that year driving out to local farms for the small amounts needed to sustain two people. The authors learned much in the process and came to emotionally connect with their food suppliers. This is important and cannot be discounted, but it was likely also a lot less energy efficient than a more centralized distribution system (certainly a centralized, regional distribution system).

They also did not address the politics of food distribution. While this made the book less provincial, I just happened to read a New York Times op-ed, entitled My Forbidden Fruits (and Vegetables) by Jack Hedin, the day after completing Plenty. The op-ed discusses how federal farm subsidies penalize a farmer who switches from soybean, rice, wheat, or cotton to fruits and vegetables in order to meet rising demands for local fresh produce. The piece is eye-opening, and suggests that there is a lot more politics to a wider adoption of a local foods diet (100 miles or not), than appears.

The future of flooding

2008-02-27T12:56:00.000-08:00

Today, Alex Prud'homme wrote an interesting opinion piece in the New York Times entitled There Will Be Floods. The piece discusses the likely increases in levee failure. As Pred'homme states, levees fail and reach their limit - rodents and tree roots, land subsidence and rising water and trigger events like earthquakes.

The US Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees many of the nations levees, has suffered budget losses for decades. This, as more development occurs behind levees and deterioration of existing levees grows. The Corps has listed 122 levees as at risk of failure, 19 of which are in Washington State. While the Netherlands has moved towards levees that protect against a 1 in 10,000 year event, many of our levees do not even meet the 1 in 100 year flood event protection criteria. With this rather depressing statistics, Prud'homme argues that the situation may be an opportunity to work towards a greener flood management system, one that combines current levees construction and dredging with wetlands and land use restrictions.

Corn has duped us again

2008-02-14T17:07:00.000-08:00

I found this video of Michael Pollan on the TED.com lecture series. Here he argues that perhaps humans aren't the pinnacle of evolution, but just one species duped by another into fertilizing and spreading another. It's a humorous but fascinating view of ecological systems - one that he argues may help us all address current and future food security crises.

The approach is also useful for considering other natural hazards. Much flood mitigation debate is stuck in the "nature wins, we loose" or vise versa. Lewis county commentaries on the recent December flooding often pit environmental policies for preserving stream ecological systems for salmon habitat against flood victims, arguing that debris buildup and dredging restrictions causes more extensive flooding. Others arguments for why flooding occurred pit marshland protection against developers. What we need to look for is solutions enhance human and non-human system interactions.

businesses in Centralia and Chehalis

2008-02-06T17:19:00.000-08:00

Over the last week, I have been talking with local business association leaders and economic development officers in Chehalis and Centralia, two towns heavily impacted in the December flooding that closed Interstate 5 for 4 days.

Concerns are starting to mount. Directly after the flood waters receded, local businesses were able to gut and clean out their businesses. Many of them had a flood of support from friends, families, and even their clients. This represents the best of what small towns and dense social networks have to offer. It offered bright hopes of recovery for local businesses.

Two and a half months after the flood, association leaders and the economic development officers say that things are bleaker. Taxes are being filed and bills are coming in. Many younger businesses cannot apply for SBA loans. Others are concerned about getting further into debt. The downtown business association president says most businesses are reporting a loss of sales of about 35% for the 2007 year. This area was not hit by the flood directly. But with many local clients devastated by the flood, Christmas sales were minimal. Others didn't come shopping in the city, assuming everything was closed. A few businesses are closing.

There is also a need to retain manufacturing and outwardly oriented businesses. Businesses that have a non-local client base may find that it is easier to start over in a less risky location. A location that hasn't had 3 floods in the last 17 years...

The towns are struggling, as all cities do after a disaster. IGCR is going to be working with them to survey the businesses. We all want to try and learn what policies, incentives, education or support would help these cities bounce back from this event. The goal, however, needs to be bouncing back in a way that reduces future flood risks. Like elsewhere in the world, disasters wipe out (unsustainable) development. These events also undermine the resources a city has for moving towards sustainable planning and development.

Getting out of that negative feedback loop is going to be Centralia and Chehalis' grand challenge in the years ahead.

The Future of Food

2008-02-04T17:14:00.001-08:00

Last week, I participated in a panel discussion on the "Future of Food " at Western Washington University (contact me for copies). I was greatly encouraged that we can well easily have a 20 mile diet in this county! A diet that includes healthy fats! In a recent review of Performance without Pain: A Step-by-Step Nutritional Program for Healing Pain, Inflammation and Chronic Ailments in Musicians, Athletes, Dancers…and Everyone Else I wrote of the extensive work on refined grains and sweeteners, and refined and pasteurized food products in general and how such relates to degenerative diseases. King Corn (see http://www.kingcorn.net/) provides more information on "metabolic disease" and the "plague of corn" (in the word of nutritionist Daphne Roe) in this country. Such books and films tell the sad story of how lack of quality fats (including saturated fats from farm-fresh dairy and pasture-fed meat animals, and healthy doses of high-nutrient cod liver oils) and an overdependence on all refined foods, including sugar, has resulted in epidemics of obesity and other diseases. Basically, this is all a call for nutritional ecology -- establish a healthy digestive ecosystem and follow a nutrient-dense diet, guided by the maxim “It’s not what you eat, it’s what you absorb!” Both on the screen, and off.

Gigi Berardi

Basic needs

2008-01-28T23:25:00.000-08:00

I’ve been reading several different books and articles suggested by colleagues and all dealing with environmentalism and pro-environmental behavior. One of these was suggested by Scott Miles - Breakthrough: From the death of environmentalism to the politics of possibility, authored by Nordhaus and Shellenberger. This provocative, though not particularly academically-disciplined, book suggests that concerns over clean air, clean water and environmental protection historically emerged out of the post-WWII era of expansiveness. There was a wide-spread sense of economic and physical security, in sharp contrast to earlier decades of economic depression, food insecurity, and then physical security threats during the war years. Moreover, a sense of global status and purpose was provided with the new world order. With basic materialistic needs met, post-materialist needs concerns emerged for post-WWII Americans. These included a concern over quality of life and personal expression needs, some of which were to become the basis for the environmentalist movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

The corollary to their argument is that for many nations, for insecure sub-populations here in the United States, and even for the broader US society during times of increased insecurity, environmentalist concerns will usually remain far down on the list of people’s priorities.

There are certainly criticisms to be made about their often simplistic painting of the environmentalist movement (e.g. NY Times, here at IGCR Miles intends to write another). However, I think their arguments are still interesting to consider in light of the issues of disaster risk reduction and emergency planning.

Certainly, it is a challenge to promote long-term strategy thinking about disaster risk reduction in a community where more immediate “first order” needs have not been met. In Istanbul, where I worked on risk awareness for years, the 1950s-1990s was a period of housing insecurity due to rapid population growth. Everyone’s concern (and it shows up in the legislation, the movies, the books and people’s recollections) was on the quantity of housing, not the quality. As the housing shortage has lessened, and following a major earthquake that killed over 17,000 people, the concern has shifted towards the seismic resistance of the housing. . . that is housing quality. Yet, in the lowest income neighborhoods, the concern is still about jobs and food security and tenure security. Residents repeatedly told me that the government had to solve those issues first. Then they would worry about earthquakes.

Given the constant tensions between immediate needs and long-term threats from disasters, how do we advocate for disaster risk reduction policies? Certainly decisions made now to address these first order needs often impact our community’s future disaster resilience. Job creation, economic growth and inexpensive construction in an economically insecure community (whether that be someplace in a developing nation or right here in our own formerly forestry-oriented counties) can “build in” vulnerability to disasters years or decades down the road. Once poorly built construction is in place, it often takes an earthquake to tear it down. Flood plane encroachment has the same effect. Its hard to tear it down, once its been built. There is rarely enough political will to undo poor planning decisions prior to a disaster.

There is also a second, more hidden process that is also related to Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s argument. It difficult to sustain interest in some future disaster risk when more immediate concerns loom large, thus, without a disaster its hard to get people to prepare for one. Investment in other quality of life issues is often viewed as more important and regarded as having more immediate returns.

But, following a disaster, the situation may not improve. Following a disaster, basic needs are often not even met. In a major disaster, people are without homes, clothes, livelihoods and even without loved-ones. Their concern is once again, reverted to meeting basic needs, and meeting them fast. Concern about how decisions may impact future risk is again subservient to concerns over meeting basic needs. Following Hurricane Katrina, residents I worked with were many times more concerned about getting the right to return to their homes and neighborhoods than they were with the very substantial risk of loss and even death in future hurricanes and levee breakages if they did return. Their concerns were rational, if not unfortunate from a disaster risk reduction, policy and planning perspective.

So, what is to be done in a profession where the public will, in large, remain impassive to our major concern? I am still reading Breakthough, but the authors have some suggestions for dealing with climate change that might also apply to disaster risk reduction. They suggest that environmentalist concerned over climate change, must champion solutions that address people’s lower-level concerns for security, status and purpose. For example, be concerned about developing country debt relief if you care about the rain forests of Brazil.

The pressure and release model of disasters does the same for disaster risk reduction, highlighting root causes of disasters in other more basic human needs issues. Current international efforts are pushing this envelope. Including disaster risk reduction in the MDGs, arguing for the twins of development and risk reduction, focusing on livelihoods and disasters are all strategies that combine strict disaster risk reduction. NSET advocates better building in Nepal but appealing to the job security and status of traditional masons. Even the current US obsession with natural hazard emergencies as a mere subset of terrorism can be seen as a way of making disaster risk reduction and emergency planning as salient to people’s current perceived needs. While surely not a fool-proof strategy, methods that address risk reduction and preparedness within a framework of more basic needs may be more promising than a stricter risk reduction focus alone.

Vulnerability paradox

2008-01-07T10:26:00.000-08:00

In some disaster recovery research I've been reading recently, Rodney Runyan, in his article Small Business in the Face of Crisis, notes:

" With the technological advances societies have seen over the past century, we often feel that disasters can be safely predicted or controlled. But the paradox is that the safer our world becomes, the more vulnerable we are when a disaster actually happens."

This strikes true for New Orleans. The levee system reduced seasonal flooding and loss from storm surge during smaller hurricanes. However, when Katrina did hit, the loss was catastrophic. Much of the housing was built with little or no thought to flooding and was quickly destroyed by the water. Residential and commercial construction expanded into previous swamp land that had been uninhabitable before the levees. The Corps and FEMA furthered an unwarranted sense of safety by basing flood maps on rainfall and drainage, rather than on levee breach scenarios.

It seems obvious that people who regularly experience the inconveniences and losses from hurricanes, earthquakes, floods are more used to the experience. They may also have less to loose because they do not accumulate what can be easily destroyed by such events.

With technological strategies for disaster reduction in place, it is definitely more of an affront to our sense of safety when a unexpectedly large hazard does occur. We are less physically prepared when we don't regularly experience disasters. Nor are we able to as easily pass down disaster resilience knowledge or a sense of continued watchfulness from one generation to the next when the period between disasters is long.

But, on the other hand, technology has also done much to reduce losses (especially loss of life) from disasters....even if it also creates a false sense of complete safety. I certainly want the best in building codes, early warning systems, urban planning ... and yes, the occasional levee, even if I know that are only technological tools for disaster reduction, not the complete solution.

Perhaps it isn't that we are better or worse off with newer technologies, but that the pattern of losses, vulnerabilities and capacities shift. It is these shifts that we need to really pay attention to. Following a comment below by HonSanto, its not that we are overdeveloped, but that we may be dysfunctionally developed. It's an interesting paradox to ponder. Thoughts?

Make a recovery plan....or not

2007-12-19T13:52:00.000-08:00

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.

This is Preparedness, Pre-Disaster Memorials

2007-12-14T21:29:00.000-08:00

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

Is Safeway the Safe Way?

2007-12-13T23:49:00.001-08:00

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:
Transportation
Fuel links
Electricity
Telecommunications
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?

Gore and Pachauri speeches

2007-12-12T16:06:00.000-08:00

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

Who has it worse?

2007-12-12T11:27:00.001-08:00

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.

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

2007-12-12T10:53:00.001-08:00

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!

A Convenient Half-Truth

2007-12-09T19:21:00.001-08:00

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.

Growth Management Increased Grays Harbor's Risk?

2007-12-09T19:01:00.000-08:00

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...

Behind the Scenes of a Disaster Declaration

2007-12-09T18:15:00.000-08:00

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...

Hummers: Our response to climate change?

2007-12-04T07:40:00.000-08:00

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).

Some New Old News About Sumatra

2007-12-03T06:55:00.001-08:00

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.

The Role of Rentals in Recovery

2007-12-03T06:37:00.000-08:00

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.

Triumph in Bangladesh

2007-11-19T17:42:00.000-08:00

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.

Insurance: To Buy or Not To Buy?

2007-11-15T09:04:00.000-08:00

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."

Vulnerability and gender

2007-11-14T17:13:00.001-08:00

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.

John Stewart on the Cycle of Emergency Management

2007-11-13T23:35:00.000-08:00

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.

Climate Engineering; Risk Reduction or Amplification?

2007-11-13T22:56:00.000-08:00

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:

New MCEER Technical Report

2007-11-08T16:59:00.000-08:00

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.

CRHNET a Great Success!

2007-11-08T16:37:00.000-08:00

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...

When cultural assumptions meet with disaster

2007-11-08T15:33:00.000-08:00

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.

Privatizing emergency response

2007-11-06T15:30:00.000-08:00

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.

The Media and Communities Resilient to Wildfires

2007-11-05T15:28:00.000-08:00

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