And Here We Flood Again

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 Most maps are utterly out of date and many vastly underestimate present flood risk.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 They do, but these requirements may very well be based upon outdated data on flood risk.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.

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Everyday Farming is Food Security

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

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China's earthquake- damage and rescue

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.

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