New Report issued this week. See: Faithful Action; Working with Religious Groups in Disaster Planning, Response and Recovery.( Univ. of So. CA, November 2012.) 112 pp.
Working with Religious Groups in Disasters
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Author Archives: recoverydiva
“How Gov’t Can Help the Economy Recovery from Sandy”
This article, How Government Can Help the Economy Recover From Sandy, raises some good points. Even before FEMA was created (1979), some people have argued for a greater role for the Commerce Dept. and economic developement, but it never has happened. Here is a new try, from Bloomberg News, Nov. 5.
If natural disasters such as Hurricane Sandy are becoming more frequent, and their aftermaths more expensive, then the federal response needs to become more dynamic. Especially in fostering economic recovery, there’s more the U.S. government can do.
Some steps are small and obvious, yet still valuable. Barack Obama’s administration, to its credit, has made progress in cutting disaster-relief red tape, for example. Still, the patchwork of application requirements and eligibility criteria businesses must sort through to receive aid can be further streamlined and made more consistent across agencies.
It may also make sense to designate one federal agency as responsible for economic disaster relief. Whatever agency takes the lead (a report from the International Economic Development Council recommends the Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration) should have a consistent, dedicated level of money on hand to respond to disasters. The IEDC suggests $100 million. This would free up cash quickly and help insulate economic disaster relief from political manipulation.
VERY USEFUL REPORT: The direct line to the IEDC report is here; it’s titled ” An Improved Federal Resonse to Post-Disaster Economic Recovery” ,(Jan. 2010)
Recovery Planning for NY and NJ – some ideas
Given the magnitude of the impacts, the population density, and the national economic importance of many of the areas impacted by H. Sandy, I think it is essential to get the best and the brightest talent in the U.S. involved in planning the recovery. We need more imagination and capability in recovery efforts in the U.S., and now is the time to go for it.
To start this off, I offer some ideas below, and invite readers to make suggestions. This is an open-ended endeavor, which I hope to continue.
I. Involve national organizations to form advisory committees; for example,
- National Academy of Sciences
- National Academy of Public Administration
- National Planning Organizations – such as Am. Planning Assoc., Urban Land Institute
II. Involve Think Tanks, such as
- Brookings
- Council on Foreign Relations
- Heritage Foundation
- American Enterprise Institute
III. Organize for Strategic Planning and also Organize by topic, such as
- Infrastructure
- Residential rebuilding
- Small Business Redevelopment
IV Get Advice and Assistance ( loan of personnel) from national professional and trade associations
- International Assoc. of Emergency Managers
- National Emergency Management Assoc.
- National Fire Protection administration
- American Public Works Assoc.
V. Get the academic community involved – faculty from the Higher Education in Emergency Management programs that exist in more than 200 academic institutions throughout the U.S.
And several university-based disaster research centers have highly experienced faculty and staff – eg. Hazards Center at Univ. of CO/Boulder and the Disaster Research Center at Univ. of DE.
VI. Get advice from experienced personnel ( all sectors) who have assisted other cities recover, such as
- New Orleans
- Sendai, Japan
A note on process: I suggest some expert panels to sift the best ideas and the best science and work with the public officials at all levels to get some policies, regulations, programs implemented while the window of opportunity is open. Usually politicians do not consider enough alternatives and the researchers/consultants cannot get ideas synthesized quickly enough for the consideration of harried politicians. We need a new process.
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Hurricane Sandy in Perspective – updates
HURRICANE HISTORY:
Council on Foreign Relations, How Likely Was Hurricane Sandy. Some really chilling scientific research and dire warnings about the likely frequency of future hurricanes with the same path.
“[Scientists are] telling us we shouldn’t be surprised that this 900-mile-wide monster marched up the East Coast this week paralyzing cities and claiming scores of lives…. In a paper published by Nature in February, [Oppenheimer] and three colleagues concluded that the ‘storm of the century’ would become the storm of ‘every twenty years or less.’
Hurricane Sandy in perspective, in HSWired, November 2,2012. Excellent article that provides a wealth of historic and scientific knowledge useful to our current efforts on determining H. Sandy’s place in context of U.S. disaster experience. Comments from Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr. (Univ. of CO).
Hurricane Sandy has left death and destruction in its path, and it broke a few records, but there were worse hurricanes; since 1900, 242 hurricanes have hit the United States; if Sandy causes $20 billion in damage, in 2012 dollars, it would rank as the seventeenth most damaging hurricane or tropical storm out of these 242; the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 tops the list; Hurricane Katrina ranks fourth; from August 1954 through August 1955, the East Coast saw three different storms make landfall — Carol, Hazel, and Diane; each, in 2012, would have caused about twice as much damage as Sandy
FEDERALISM:
Some sensible advice from an experienced disaster researcher at Brookings, Nov. 2.: Feds, States, Cities — The All of the Above Disaster Response
INFRASTRUCTURE:
Insightful article from a Columbia profession in CNN today. New York’s Neglected Infrastruture Fails.
It should come as no surprise to anyone that New York’s infrastructure wasn’t up to Hurricane Sandy. What happened in New York was not all that different than what’s
happened in other places hit by freakish weather events — the infrastructure wasn’t robust enough to withstand nature. It is not the first time it’s happened here, and it won’t be the last.
The problems in New York stem from many factors. For a start, infrastructure investment here is no more a priority than it is in other places across the country:
It’s simply not something that voters want badly. When given a choice between investing in schools, health and housing or investing in sewers, tunnels or roads, the
latter will always lose out. And that’s not just the view of the politicians, but also of the constituents who keep them in office.
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Related articles
- Hurricane expert: ‘Sandy was terrible, but we’re currently in a relative hurricane ‘drought”… (online.wsj.com)
- The Size Of Hurricane Sandy – How Does It Compare? (pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com)
Guide to Federal Disaster Assistance and Relief Funding
Thanks to my friend in NYC, David Pollock, for a link to this useful document. It was smart of Senator Gillibrand to get this information together in a timely way. See:
A Guide to Disaster Assistance and Relief Funding; How to Navigate the Disaster Assistance Process. (20 pp.)
The references to agencies and contacts are NY state and city specific, but the general federal information should be useful to many people in other states.
Recovery After H. Sandy – my opinion
So far, the media has used the term “recovery” rather lightly and incorrectly. For those of us in the disaster business the long-term recovery process has yet to begin for most of the communities affected by H. Sandy.
I think the upcoming recovery process from the wide-ranging outcomes of H. Sandy is going to be extremely difficult, and I predict it will attract the kind of attention to the existing National Disaster Recovery Framework that H. Sandy did for the National Response Plan. (The later led to the Post Katrna Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006.)
Perhaps now is finally the time for some national recovery legislation, regulations, mandates, technical assistance, and programs. The research and practitioner communities in emergency management have been trying for years to call attention to these needs.
Bill Cumming commented as follows:
Because of HAZMATS and destruction of water and sewer systems and large scale hospital evac I have analogized Hurricane Sandy to Fukishima and think that not just FEMA will be stressed but also EPA and HHS!
Related articles
- The Red Guide to Recovery Provides Free Disaster Recovery Mobile App for Hurricane Sandy Victims (FireFighterNation.com)
- Fed recovery aid decisions await Sandy’s departure (republicanherald.com)
- How a Small Business Can Recover from Hurricane Sandy and Other Natural Disasters (forbes.com)
- Long Recovery Ahead for Battered Region (WSJ)
- FEMA and H. Sandy (recoverydiva.com)
FEMA and H. Sandy- updates
Nov. 1, USNews&World Report. FEMA Can Deal With Disasters in a Way States Can’t. [Author is with Brookings.]
Kathleen Tierney’s comments on the NY Time blog re Do We Really Need FEMA?
October 31. Her concluding sentence:
The bottom line is that the U.S. currently has an emergency management system that is second to none in the world. It is by no means perfect, and it needs to continually evolve in response to new threats and disaster experiences. But it is clearly not in need of a radical overhaul.
[Tierney is the Director of the Hazards Center, Univ. of CO/Boulder]
Sandy Shows Why We Need FEMA; Oct. 31.
An excerpt:I hope the storm is a good reminder that when we hear candidates’ soothing words about shedding federal government functions, whether it’s FEMA, Medicaid, or safety nets in recession, we must think about what that actually means in practice. Disasters happen, recessions happen — like it or not, there are market failures and natural disasters in our future. If anything, it seems as though these 100-year storms come about every six months these days. (Which reminds me — here’s a great idea for a big, national infrastructure project that will create millions of jobs for white- and blue-collar workers and save billions in lost output: Bury the power lines!)
At the end of the day, we don’t need “big” government or “small” government. What we need is an amply funded federal government to meet challenges like those we’re facing today, ….
How to Tell if FEMA is Doing a Good Job or a Lousy One; the New Republic, Oct. 31
Superstorm Sandy has pushed on northward, leaving some of the most densely populated areas of the country a mess in its wake. Now, rescue agencies will get in full gear—none moreso than the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). What can the storm’s victims expect from FEMA? And how can we evaluate whether the agency, which so famously bungled its response to Hurricane Katrina, is doing a competent job? To answer these questions, I called on Mark Merritt, a FEMA official under Clinton who spent years coordinating its disaster relief efforts with state and local governments, and who is now the president of a crisis management consulting firm. Merritt and I spoke by phone just after his plane touched down in D.C.—“a ghost town”—on what to watch for as FEMA’s efforts get underway.
The Conservative View: See the article titled: How a Smart Conservative Would Reform FEMA, by Matt Mayer of the Heritiage Foundation, as interviewed in the Atlantic , October 31. In my view, he is the best informed conservative commentator. [I just took issue with a writer in Forbes online.]
Related articles
- Romney Flips on FEMA (drudge.com)
- Absolutely, we need FEMA (voices.kansascity.com)
More Dimensions of the H. Sandy Disaster
Insurance Industry – could it do more to prevent disasters?
You might think Wired magazine is an unlikely place to deal with disaster mitigation, but they did offer this article: How Insurers Can Foil the Next Hurricane Sandy, on October 31.
Weather Forecasting: – why is the U.S. falling behind the Europeans?
Why American Has Fallen Behind the World in Storm Forecasting; October 31.
Americans should take great pride in the fact that computer weather modeling was invented here, along with weather satellites and other scientific and technological marvels. Sadly, the skill of our computer models fell substantially behind that of other nations some decades ago, and by many measures we are in third or even fourth place today. The overall star performer is a computer model operated by a consortium of European nations; that model accurately predicted Sandy’s track and evolution well before U.S. models caught up later last week.
Why have we fallen so far behind? While there are many nuances to this answer, the basic reason is a failure of political will. The Europeans spend somewhat more on numerical weather prediction and run their models on larger and faster computers; they have also been more effective that we have in involving academic researchers in the development and improvement of their models. They appear to recognize that the monetary savings of skillful weather forecasts far outstrip what governments spend on the weather enterprise.
Related articles
Aftermath of Hurricane Sandy – some initial articles
Aftermath of H. Sandy
CNN on October 31. “Is Sandy a Taste of What’s To Come? Lead paragraph:
” We should not be surprised. That’s the view of many climate scientists as they survey the destruction wrought by the superstorm that ravaged the Northeast this week. The melting of Arctic ice, rising sea levels, the warming atmosphere and changes to weather patterns are a potent combination likely to produce storms and tidal surges of unprecedented intensity, according to many experts.”
In the NY Times, Oct. 31, The warnings came, again and again.
For nearly a decade, scientists have told city and state officials that New York faces certain peril: rising sea levels, more frequent flooding and extreme weather patterns. The alarm bells grew louder after Tropical Storm Irene last year, when the city shut down its subway system and water rushed into the Rockaways and Lower Manhattan.
With an almost eerie foreshadowing, the dangers laid out by scientists as they tried to press public officials for change in recent years describes what happened this week: Subway tunnels filled with water, just as they warned. Tens of thousands of people in Manhattan lost power. The city shut down.
Leadership during Disasters:
An interesting article about 3 styles of leadership, from elected officials interested in higher office.
Other articles on disaster and leadership include: The 2011 paper published in the American Journal of Political Science called “Make It Rain? Retrospection and the Attentive Electorate in the Context of Natural Disasters.” The authors claim “…electorates punish presidents and governors for severe weather damage.”
More on the Superstorm in a Climate Context, by Andrew Revkin, NYTimes blogger. October 31.
Related articles
- Yes, Hurricane Sandy is a good reason to worry about climate change (washingtonpost.com)
Disasters and Big Government – political philosophy
This topic keeps growing, so I will add articles that bring out additional dimensions.
As a continuation of the topics I write about yesterday, I want to share an editorial in NYT today: A Big Storm Requires Big Government. Here is the concluding paragraph:
Does Mr. Romney really believe that financially strapped states would do a better job than a properly functioning federal agency? Who would make decisions about where to send federal aid? Or perhaps there would be no federal aid, and every state would bear the burden of billions of dollars in damages. After Mr. Romney’s 2011 remarks recirculated on Monday, his nervous campaign announced that he does not want to abolish FEMA, though he still believes states should be in charge of emergency management. Those in Hurricane Sandy’s path are fortunate that, for now, that ideology has not replaced sound policy.
Another take on the topic of the disaster policies of Romney and Obama, from the Wash. Post on October 28. This one includes quotes from nationally known researchers, such as Kathleen Tierney.
One more perspective, from NBC News.
Rebuttals to the NY Times editorial:
(1) The Heritage Foundation’s response to the NYT article. Matt Mayer commented on October 30 as noted here.
(2) The Wall St. Journal’s article was titled: A Big Storm Requires Big Bird? Necessary government doesn’t justify extravagant government.
(3) A neutral commentary from the Christian Science Monitor.
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An example of bad consequences for failure to use federal money for flood mitigation. Romney is now taking the heat for a 2004 decision in Massachusetts.
The view that politicizing a disaster is normal, is the theme of this article in NY magazine, October 30.
Related articles
- Mitt Romney’s Terrifying Plans for FEMA and Disaster Relief (alternet.org)
- Mitt’s disastrous emergency management plan (salon.com)
- GOP strategist: Romney ‘right on the button’ in knocking FEMA (rawstory.com)
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