From the Center for Disaster Philanthropy, this article on Long Term Recovery Groups. An excerpt:
The structure of an LTRG will vary depending upon impact of disasters, size of community, number of VOADs in the community, pre-existing strengths of community organizations, etc.; ideally, staff should be hired to run an LTRG or there here should be an organization dedicated to providing backbone support to help call meetings, form agendas, take minutes and enable communications. A fiscal sponsor is also needed to support fund development activities; this could be a community agency or a philanthropic partner.
From the NY Times: ‘We Cannot Save Everything’: A Historic Neighborhood Confronts Rising Seas. Colonial-era homes line the streets of The Point in Newport, R.I. Climate change is forcing experts to reimagine the future of historic preservation here.
Review of Out of the Whirlwind; Supply and Demand After Hurricane Maria by Philip J. Palin. Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield.ISBN: 978-1-5381-1820-7 (paperback); 109 pps; from $27; May 2019.
Reviewer: Jono Anzalone, CEM®, Airbnb Global Disaster Response and Relief Partnerships and former Vice President of International Services with the American Red Cross. Jono has been a volunteer with the Red Cross since 1995.
Palin’s expertise in food security and supply chain management provides an unparalleled creative narrative inquiry into the aftermath of Hurricane Maria which is both unique and educational. While the title suggests a quantitative look at the supply and demand conditions after the hurricane, the qualitative approach is one that provides valuable insights into the essential economic conditions that persist after a catastrophic disaster. Running parallel to the characters in Thorton Wilder’s The Bridget of San Luis Rey, each of the characters within the text offer insight into both the emotional toils of hurricane survival as well as a demonstration of the variables of post-disaster community resilience.
Having met Palin in 2016 at a food-security workshop in Berlin, Germany, I was pleasantly surprised by the clever poetic approach that manages to illuminate some of the many political tendencies of Federal disaster response. Having led the Hurricane Sandy New York City Multi-Agency Feeding Task Force, I found the story of particular interest and would highly recommend it for mass care feeding professionals. This is one of the only publications I am aware of that specifically calls out the potential perils of a federal aid heavy Multi-Agency Feeding Task Force, at the expense of local grocers. The text should prompt readers within the emergency management profession to carefully examine basic economic conditions of supply, demand and, and economic signaling to be aware of the fallacy that comes with mistaking a lack of supply versus critical supply chain blockers.
The text should serve as an important lesson learned for future federally funded relief operations with particular caution for future federally funded declarations in becoming subject to a slight variation of Parksinson’s law; work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. In lieu of work and time, substitute commodities and perceived demand.
While the focus of Palin’s text is self-declared as for supply chain students or practitioners, the text offers something educational for just about any reader.
Global Natural Disaster Information for 2018. (8 pp.) This is a significant report that contains a lot of interesting information.
Thanks to Chris Jones for the link.
From the Wash Post: Southern California reels from magnitude 7.1 quake. Some details:
LOS ANGELES — A quake with a magnitude of 7.1 jolted much of California, cracking buildings, setting fires, breaking roads and causing several injuries while seismologists warned that large aftershocks were expected to continue for days, if not weeks.
The Friday night quake — preceded by Thursday’s 6.4-magnitude temblor in the Mojave Desert — was the largest Southern California quake in at least 20 years and was followed by a series of large and small aftershocks, including a few above magnitude 5.0. There is about a 1-in-10 chance that another 7.0 quake could hit within the next week, said Lucy Jones, a seismologist at the California Institute of Technology and a former science adviser at the U.S. Geological Survey.
Here is a more dramatic account from CNN: A second earthquake hit Southern California in as many days. It’s five times bigger than Thursday’s
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NOTE: Several years ago, the Diva and some colleagues prepared a time line chart titled Earthquake Planning In CA (1906-2008). You can tell at a glance that there has been an unusually long period of no major earthquakes. Plus the chart provides a lot of background about related actions in the past century.
Review of Social Sustainability, Climate Resilience and Community-based Urban Development: What About the People? by Helen Baldwin and Robin King. Routledge Focus on Environment and Sustainability, New York and London, 2018. ISBN: 978-1-138-47801-5 (hbk); ISBN: 978-1-351-10332-9 (e-bk)/ Hardcover $48.00 eBook $12.50 (www.routledge.com)
Reviewed by Donald Watson, author of Design For Flooding: Resilience to Climate Change (Wiley 2011), editor Time-Saver Standards for Urban Design (McGraw-Will 2003) and the web-based library of resources, “Organizations Addressing Resilience and Sustainability.” http://www.theOARSlist.com.
It is a pleasure to read and to review a well-written book. Especially one that is crucial to community resilience, our capacity to survive, recover, and heal after disaster. The book’s title, Social Sustainability, Climate Resilience and Community-based Urban Development, being a bit of a mouthful, the subtitle, What About the People? serves better as a mnemonic. It’s thesis and main point is stated on its first page:
“Strong social networks and social cohesion can be more important for a community’s resilience than the actual physical structures of a city. But how can urban plan and design support these critical collective social strengths?”
The answer is presented in 154 pages of texts and table. Co-authored by Dr. Cathy Baldwin, an anthropologist with a public health background, and Dr. Robin King of World Resources Institute, the book is fully annotated with glossary, case studies, and citations sufficient to serve as reference for public policy, academic coursework, and further research. It is served up within the 5 x 9 in. [14×21 cm.] format of Routledge Focus books, a worthy addition to their earthscan series.
Authors of any book will find here an exemplar on how to present complex information. In addition to a summary on its first page, the preface gives a five-page précis, and its opening chapters gives further context and rationale, repeated in a summary chapter.
This book’s message could be the lead sentence in any proposal to create resilient organizations, communities, and cities: the direct and full participation of people most affected by the threats of climate change should be fully engaged for planning for resilience to succeed. Citizen engagement must, for the outset, be part of any proposal for rebuilding after disaster or plan for emergency preparedness.
This is not a new proposition or recommendation. It is familiar to emergency managers and planners in the United States who work on FEMA mitigation planning and preparedness assignments, particularly after Katrina after-action reports and FEMA’s “philosophy” developed shortly thereafter to engage the “whole community” in FEMA plans for mitigation and resilience.
Baldwin and King’s recommendations will be familiar to professionals engaged with community development in both the developed and developing world, of how best to listen, draw from local strengths and resources, gaining full participation of community groups by involvement with project design. A weakness of prior community development work had been a bit too much reliance on the anecdotal, but lack of documented “best practices.” Those most skilled at the art of facilitating community participation have been busy “doers,” not having time or resources to document what works and what does not. Facilitating community participation, called for by “social sustainability,” is indeed an art with a set of skills that must be learned in practice (Ivan Illich’s Watch one, Do one, Teach one” is a good model for aspirants). These skills are all the more demanded in any project in the real life-and-death situations of disaster response and recovery. Baldwin and King here provide in their little book a detailed set of examples and recommendations of how best to do so.
Their closing Chapter 10 details twenty-one recommendations that give some of the nitty-gritty of effective citizen engagement. They describe “four stages” to characterize a sequential process, beginning with “Stage 1” schematic design and real estate “pre-development,” to account for social, health, and community well-being impacts. [..In major development projects in the U.S., such accounting is done if an “environmental impact” is required…after the major planning and engineering design costs are invested and documents are completed, long after the easily gained opportunities are lost.]
The “Stage 2” recommendations includes documenting social capital and community cohesion as resources, following practices of participatory planning and co-design, as well as seeing social-demographic diversity as a source of strength. […Implementing these steps is not easy or simple. Major projects take many years, players often change, those involved early on may not be present to follow through on prior decisions and commitments].
“Stage 3” recommendations include providing social spaces (“infrastructure”) for community events within housing (and other) developments, with many examples given in earlier chapters. […suggesting the need and promise to provide for social networking, contacts, and continuity in emergency sheltering and community recovery projects].
The “Stage 4” recommendation is to establish “community participation in monitoring and evaluation,” […a practice familiar to U.S. social scientists, exemplified by the work of Dr. Shirley Laska and colleagues at Univ. of New Orleans-Center for Hazards Assessment, Response & Technology].
The strengths and contribution of this book are its diligent research, clear exposition (though limited by the academic format), and recommendations that meet the test of “evidence-based” best practices of citizen engagement.
As such the book deserves a place alongside other “key references” essential for scholars and practitioners in the emerging field that the New Orleans Times-Picayune once aptly described as “disaster knowledge.” Two additional references are worth noting in this review because they give further substance to the principles and practices of “social sustainability:”
The takeaway from these texts is simply stated: To what extent is the community of impacted people, groups, and resources directly engaged in local plans for sustainability and climate-resilience?
The answer you are able to give will be a gauge of its value and worth, a simple measure of resilience.
Professionals engaged in resilience planning will be well guided by each and all of these three publications.
From Politico: What we learned in Texas after Hurricane Harvey. Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush has two fixes Washington should make before the next superstorm.
From InsideClimateNews: Health Groups Declare Climate Change as a Public Health Emergency
