Civil Service In A Time Of Need

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.

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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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Farming and floods

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.

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No Federal Funding for Flood Works

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.

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Disaster Caused Increased Food Stamp Participation in Washington?

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.

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New Katrina Documentary

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.

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The future of flooding

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.

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Corn has duped us again

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.

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businesses in Centralia and Chehalis

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.

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Make a recovery plan....or not

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

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

Flynn offers no suggestions for why this may be.

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

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

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Is Safeway the Safe Way?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Who has it worse?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everyone knows not to build in the floodplains, right?

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

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

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

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

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

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A Convenient Half-Truth

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

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

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

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

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Behind the Scenes of a Disaster Declaration

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

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

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

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

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

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