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.

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The forgotten disaster

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.

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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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Earthquake scenario and planning

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.

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Disaster as Process

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.

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Post-Disaster Housing Woes

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.

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The solar system is ending

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.

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