Author Archives: recoverydiva

“Climate Change Looks Like Today’s Disasters”

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From the AP via the New Haven Register, an article titled  Scientists: Climate change looks like today’s disasters. A short excerpt:

Is it just freakish weather or something more? Climate scientists suggest that if you want a glimpse of some of the worst of global warming, take a look at U.S. weather in recent weeks.

It includes horrendous wildfires, oppressive heat waves, devastating droughts, flooding from giant deluges and a powerful freak wind storm called a derecho.

These are the kinds of extremes experts have predicted will come with climate change, although it’s far too early to say that is the cause. Nor will scientists say global warming is the reason 3,215 daily high temperature records were set in the month of June.

The article goes on to point out some fascinating details about the derecho affecting the eastern states presently. and more details are in the articles below.

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Preparedness in National Capital Region is Questioned

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US Capitol, Washington

A great deal of federal money, not to mention state and local funding, has gone into the National Capital Region since 9/11.  In the four days since the powerful surprise thunderstorm last Friday night, local citizens and reporters are wondering why recovery is so slow. Among the major concerns are the capabilities of local electric utilities and why the 911 system failed.

In the Washington Post, on July 3, an article questioned the preparedness of the local power companies. And it raised questions about utility regulation and appropriate requirements for putting more power lines underground.  And a Washington Post editorial on July 3 asks more hard questions.

On July 4, the Washington Post published an article saying that regulators in both MD and the District of Columbia accepted some of the blame for not effectively doing their job of overseeing the utility companies.  I find that candor  refreshing!  Regardless of who is to blame, a lot of people are working hard to correct the situation. Even the local CERT chapters are helping out.

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Anti-Government Actions Have Dire Consequences for Colorado Springs Fire Fighting

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Tax

From the Seattle Times, July 2, an article titled Colorado’s emergency-response teams burned by anti-tax attitudes. Some excerpts follow:

Because of conservative and libertarian sentiments and a no-tax pledge passed statewide 20 years ago, Colorado police and disaster-response teams are stretched thin as a virulent wildfire ravages land near Colorado Springs.

As Colorado Springs battles a rash of robberies after a wildfire that still licks at its boundaries, it does so with fewer police and firefighters and a limited tax base that may hamper its rebound.

The place where the Waldo Canyon fire destroyed 346 homes and forced more than 34,000 residents to evacuate turned off one-third of its streetlights two years ago, halted park maintenance and cut services to close a $28 million budget gap after sales-tax revenue plummeted and voters rejected a property-tax increase.

The city, the state’s second-largest, with a population of 416,000, auctioned both its police helicopters and shrank its public-safety ranks through attrition by about 8 percent; it has 50 fewer police officers and 39 fewer firefighters than five years ago. More than 180 National Guard troops have been mobilized to secure the city after the state’s most destructive fire. At least 32 evacuated homes were burglarized and dozens of evacuees’ cars were broken into, said Police Chief Pete Carey.

“It has impacted the response,” said accountant Karin White, 54, who returned Thursday to a looted and vandalized home, with a treasured, century-old family heirloom smashed.

“They did above and beyond what they could do with the resources they had,” she said. “If there were more officers, there could have been more manpower in the evacuated areas.”

Since the start of the 18-month recession in December 2007, U.S. cities have faced shrinking revenue and diminishing state support, leading to budget cuts and reductions in services and workforces. Cities faced a fifth-straight year of revenue declines in 2011, according to the National League of Cities, which estimated that municipalities would have to fill budget gaps of as much as $83 billion from 2010-2012.

 

Fires and Urban/Wildlands Interface and Climate Change and * * *

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For a great summary of the issues and an excellent listing of research resources, see Phil Palin’s blog in Homeland Security Watch (June 30).

Two more articles on July 2nd deal with link between the massive fires and climate change. One in the LA Times, and another in the Washington Post.

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Measuring Preparedness – new report

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Although this report focuses on FEMA’s homeland security grants, some of it may be of  general interest. The new report (138 pp.) is titled Improving the National Preparedness System: Developing More Meaningful Grant Performance Measures. It was prepared by the National Academy for Public Administration, June 2012.

Overview
The U.S. Congress asked an expert panel of the NAPA to assist the FEMA Administrator in studying, developing, and implementing quantifiable performance measures to assess the effectiveness of homeland security preparedness grants. The Academy Panel focused the scope of this study on the State Homeland Security Grant Program (SHSGP) and Urban Areas Security Initiative (UASI), as these are the two largest of FEMA’s homeland security grant programs.

Key Findings

The Panel found that measuring the outcomes of these grants poses two challenges:
(1) the preparedness system’s greatest strength—conducting efforts in an integrated fashion that blends resources from multiple sources—is also its greatest weakness from a performance measurement standpoint; and (2) the federal government has not developed measurable standards for preparedness capabilities to guide the performance of the states and urban areas receiving these grants.

The Panel recommended a set of measures that collectively begin to address the effectiveness of the two grant programs.This measures have three parts:

Part 1: Effective and Targeted Grant Investments – These measures examine the elements that are needed to make sure that grant investments are targeted to priorities and effectively carried out.

Part 2: Context Measures – While not performance measures per se, these provide meaningful context to help understand and improve the execution of the grant programs.

Part 3: Collaboration Measures – This part discusses measures the Panel recommends that FEMA should assess preparedness collaborations to capture an important facet of grant performance.

In addition to the recommendations for performance measures, the Panel offers several recommendations to FEMA that will strengthen the performance of these grants. These include pairing quantitative with qualitative measures, starting the grant cycle earlier, communicating performance results more broadly, institutionalizing the nationwide plan review, and assessing how states and urban areas adapt to the decrease in number of federally funded UASIs and decline in funding.

To me the three types of measure seem predictable. The last paragraph mentions the all-important larger context considerations.

Colorado Wildfires – Lessons Known are Not Lessons Learned

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From the Christian Science Monitor, June 29, an article titled have Colorado wildfire – Have We learned Any Lessons? – talks about past wildfires and known risks that have a bearing on the current wildfires.

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Use of Social Media in Disasters – the Colorado wildfires-updates

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Česky: Logo Facebooku English: Facebook logo E...

With all the fire and flooding disasters going on presently, I thought I would pull up some practical resources for people to use.  See this handbook created by residents of Joplin, MO with help from their state university:  The Use of Social Media for Disaster Recovery. Note that the same two ladies who were the creative force in Joplin have created a Facebook page for the Colorado Wildfires.

Additional resources are on Kim Stephen’s blog: idisaster.wordpress.com
Be sure to check out the Resources page.
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Information:

From the Denver Post, resources and assistance available to evacuees.

Website for the CO Voluntary Agencies Active in Disasters.

From USA Today, some interesting facts about why the risk is so high in Colorado and other western states:

Throughout the West, firefighters have toiled for days in searing, record-setting heat against fires fueled by prolonged drought. Most, if not all, of Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana were under red flag warnings, meaning extreme fire danger.

The nation is experiencing “a super-heated spike on top of a decades-long warming trend,” said Derek Arndt, head of climate monitoring at the National Climatic Data Center.

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I keep wondering how you shelter 32,000 people who have evacuated rapidly from an unexpected disaster event. If anyone has details, please let me know.

Anticipating Seismic Hot Spots – new book

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From the HSWire, June 27. Mega-quake hotspots around the world

The 2010 earthquake in Haiti killed hundreds of thousands and destroyed large sections of the capital, Port au Prince; the clock is ticking on many earthquake faults throughout the world, and a comprehensive new book points to places around the world that could face the fate of Port au Prince

“We are not yet to the point where we can predict earthquakes,” said Yeats, a professor emeritus in Oregon State’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences. “What we can do is tell you where some of the most dangerous faults lie – and where those coincide with crowded cities, few building codes, and a lack of social services, you have a time bomb.

“The lesson there is that you never know which one is going to nail you,” Yeats said, “but it pays to be prepared.”

Infrastructure and Recovery- Sandia Labs Research

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A recent posting on HSWire was titled: Disaster recovery- Finding the best ways to protect infrastructure, recover from disasters; 25 June 2012. I have to admit, I am not clear about what the Lab has to offer, but here is a short account and you can go directly to their website for more information.

Researchers at Sandia National Lab bring the quantitative methods they have developed to the analysis of disasters and how best to recover from them; the researchers look at interdependencies among systems and supply chains, the resilience of various systems, how infrastructure systems fail, cascading effects, and how results might differ if a series of disasters hits instead of just one; the Sandia researchers say they can better quantify the results of such resiliency studies by taking a mathematically rigorous approach to objective assessments