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From Iowa State University Extension, a useful list of resources for helping children cope with the aftermath of disasters. July 1, 2011.
Decisions to return and rebuild, or not, in Japan are similar to those experienced in the U.S after major disasters. The article ‘Too Late’ for Some Tsunami Victims to Rebuild in Japan presents some of the conflicts inherent in that decision; NY Times, March 19. A week after the tsunami obliterated most of this northern Japanese city’s seafront and not a little of its inland, some of the shopkeepers and their employees were outdoors shoveling mud and hauling wreckage from their businesses, the first signs of restoration. Will they stay and rebuild or not? Among the factors to consider:
“These are declining areas. With an exogenous shock like this, I think it’s possible that a lot of these communities will just fold up and disappear.” Some have been hollowing out, albeit slowly, for a long time. Japan’s population as a whole is shrinking and graying, but the Japanese prefectures hardest hit by the tsunami — Miyagi, Fukushima and Iwate — often outpace the national trends, and their workers’ average incomes are shrinking as well.
“There’s really no economic engine in these communities,” said Mr. Aldrich, whose 2010 book “Site Fights: Divisive Facilities and Civil Society in Japan and the West” details the government’s strategy for locating reactors in struggling areas. “These facilities bring $20 million or more to depopulating, dying towns. Many people saw these power plants as economic lifelines at a time when their towns are dying.” And they were, until an earthquake and tsunami changed the economic equation last week.
Now at least one of the Fukushima complexes appears destined never to reopen. Part of the prefecture could remain off limits for years because of radiation. The future of similar plants could be thrown into doubt, along with the jobs and supporting businesses that sprung up around the nuclear industry.
… the tsunami wiped out thousands of businesses and tens of thousands of homes, many of them owned by retirees who lack the spirit or money to rebuild. And Mr. Aldrich — also the author of a long-term study of the societal impact of major disasters like Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans — says the dislocation caused by the tsunami threatens to permanently rend the social fabric that keeps many coastal villages afloat in hard times.
“We faced exactly the same question after Katrina,” said John Campbell, an expert on aging at the University of Michigan and visiting scholar at the University of Tokyo. “There was a big discussion about whether we should rebuild the Ninth Ward, since it was below sea level, and so on. In terms of economic rationality, it didn’t make any sense, really. But on the other hand, it’s where these people lived, and there were emotional reasons to do it. “These villages may not have the same sentimental attachment. Nonetheless, there’s an emotional argument that’s going to be made, and I think it will be a potent one.”
Thanks to Bill Cumming for pointing out this article.
See also another NYT article, same date, titled Reeling from Crises.
Image via Wikipedia
A new, free manual on disaster recovery, titled How to Help Your Community Recover from Disaster: A Manual for Planning and Action, is available for download. (104 pp.) Some information about its development follow:
According to the authors, development of the manual began after Hurricane Katrina. It was part of a large-scale, multi-year, and 25-member collaboration by the Task Force for Disaster, Community Readiness, and recovery within the Society for Community Research and Action of the American Psychological Association. A distinctive feature of the manual is its grounding in psychological knowledge and in psychological principles closely linked to successful disaster recovery.
… the Manual is designed to guide both lay and professional readers through the steps required to understand the potential effects of disaster, organize the community, assess its needs, make an action plan, choose a strategy or strategies for intervention, reach out to various constituencies, track results, and share lessons learned.
We believe this Manual provides practical guidance to natural and potential community leaders about how to help their communities recover from disaster. We think it will be a useful resource in efforts to strengthen the capacity of communities to make informed choices, marshal resources, and facilitate post-disaster recovery.
The Diva has not yet had a chance to read the full text. She welcomes comments and reviews by readers.
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For those of you with an abiding interest in the oil spill and its ramifications, the Oct. issue of National Geographic has an excellent series of articles and a fascinating map insert as part of its Special Report on “The Spill.” The map offers a unique graphic of The Gulf of Mexico: A Geography of Offshore Oil.
This special report provides great retrospective documentation of the largest oil spill in history.
The advantage of writing a blog is that I have great literary license. Here goes a review of three different pieces on recovery in LA from Hurricane Katrina: two items are recently- issued research articles and one is a movie review.
(1) Recovery or Resilience Along the Gulf Coast. Public Manager magazine, Sept. 2010. See pages 24-49 for a set of articles about H. Katrina Recovery, mostly written by well-known public administration academics. The most unusual article — very bold and direct – is the article (p.38) titled The Ethinomics of Leaking Louisiana. It describes aspects of the local culture and the endemic corruption that have interfered with an efficient and effective recovery.
(2) In the current issue of Public Administration Review ( Sept./Oct 2010) is an article titled Retrospectives and Prospectives on Hurricane Katrina: Five Years and Counting, and the authors are Louise Comfort, Thomas Birkland, Beverly Cigler, and Earthea Nance. I am in agreement with some and disagreement with other parts of this article, but it is worth reading. It is only available to subscribers, so I cannot provide a copy here without violating the copyright. (Contact me offline if you have trouble obtaining it.)
(3) A recent New Yorker magazine, August 30, has a review of Spike Lee’s new movie about New Orleans five years after Katrine: the article is “Unnatural Disasters” and the title of the movie is “If God is Willing and da Creek Don’t Rise.” The reviewer concludes:
Over all, you’re left thinking that New Orleans is a city that goes in circles, with its own rules and mysteries and unyielding contradictions, none of them plumbable by outsiders. You finish watching “If God Is Willing” not knowing where New Orleans, for better or worse, will never be the same or will be the same as it always was.
My take from all of this is we must learn to do a better job on recovery in this country and soon – we need to do it smarter, faster, and cheaper than we did in NOLA. Otherwise, the future looks bleak.
Rarely is adequate consideration given to the health and safety of workers engaged in cleaning up after a disaster, and the BP Oil Spill Disaster is no exception. From Ship to Shore: Reforming the National Contingency Plan to Improve Protections for Oil Spill Cleanup Workers
BP’s foul up is not the first significant oil spill in the nation’s history, nor even the first in the Gulf. The oil companies and government agencies with a stake in guarding against and cleaning up the spills that inevitably accompany oil drilling have had ample opportunity and motivation to devise and hone plans for protecting workers. And yet, thousands of cleanup workers began their work in the Gulf without the training and guidance necessary to ensure their safety in the face of hazardous conditions.
…OSHA and NIOSH eventually settled on policies for training workers and requiring appropriate safety gear. Their response undoubtedly helped limit the risks the workers faced. But the time it took to settle these policies put into sharp focus a significant problem in our nation’s emergency response policies: OSHA and NIOSH had only limited roles in the planning process and in the development of implementing regulations, a failing that badly slowed the government’s response on the worker-safety front. From this “original sin” flowed a number of negative consequences, some of which compromised the health and safety of cleanup workers.
The report also said that the National and Regional Contingency Plans shortchanged the role of worker protection agencies in planning for an oil spill response, leaving no mechanism for enforcing workplace safety.
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As noted two days ago in this blog, the contrast between the outcomes of the same-size earthquakes in NZ and Haiti is stark. Here is a discussion of one of the reasons for the difference. Building code saves NZ from serious destruction; Radio Australia, Sept. 6.
As we’ve heard in earlier reports, many New Zealanders are assessing the damage from the weekend’s earthquake. Jeff Crosier, is a structural and earthquake engineer from consulting firm Miyamoto International. While the New Zealand earthquake was larger than the one which devastated Haiti earlier this year, killing 200 thousand people, Mr Crosier says it is surprising how little damage has been caused in Christchurch.
On the downside, more than 100 aftershocks have occurred, some of which are sizable. It appears that the structure damage and the no. of badly damaged homes is growing. To call New Zealand seismically active is an understatement. According to a NY Times article on Sept. 6,
New Zealand sits above an area where two tectonic plates collide. The country records more than 14,000 earthquakes a year — but only about 150 are felt by residents. Fewer than 10 a year do any damage. New Zealand’s last major earthquake registered magnitude 7.8 and hit South Island’s Fiordland region on July 16, 2009, moving the southern tip of the country 12 inches (30 centimeters) closer to Australia.
Regarding the financial aspects of the recovery, the existence of insurance funds for residential reconstruction is an unusual feature. Nevertheless, the national government will have to assist public entities as is true in the U.S. system. See UPDATE: New Zealand Building Shares Rally After Quake; Bonds Weaken; Wall St. Journal, Sept. 7.
For those interested in the health effects of the BP Oil spill, the full text of report can be downloaded free download from the National Academy of Sciences; August 2010. This is a large report (207 pp.). Assessing the Effects of the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill on Human Health: A Summary of the June 2010 Workshop.
Worries about recovery come to the foreground, now that the well has been capped. See As oil spill cleanup shifts gears, gulf residents fear they’ll be forgotten.
The [LA] state government said this week that erosion eats away 29 square miles — more than Arlington County — every year.
What about the gulf’s “dead zone”? This year, it covered 7,722 square miles of the gulf, an area nearly the size of Massachusetts that lacked the oxygen that some fish, crabs and oysters need to breathe. But fixing it would require making changes all the way up the Mississippi River, which brings down the pollutants that feed the algae blooms that suck out the oxygen — making changes at feedlots in Iowa and sewage plants in Illinois. “I can’t see how they could just restore everything that needs restoration. There’s just too many problems,” said Nancy Rabalais, who heads the LA Universities Marine Consortium….
She worries, in essence, that the gulf will simply be returned to its regularly scheduled disaster. “It doesn’t have the political attention” that the spill commanded, she said.
In an interview over the past weekend, Adm. Allen was asked to assess the job that BP did. His partial reply is as follows: Allen gives BP a mixed grade.
“The technology that was needed to be brought in for other parts of the world, was [brought in]. It took a long time to engineer it. It took a long time to install it. But, ultimately, it helped us put the cap on and control the well. So I give them fairly good marks there.” But Allen added that where the energy giant’s performance has been lacking is in having a human touch. *** “… they’re a large global oil production company. They don’t do retail sales or deal with individuals on a transactional basis. Anything that’s involved, that has been a real struggle for them….”
For Oil Spill Victims, Fair Compensation Requires a Crystal Ball; Gulf Residents Will Need to Predict Future Damages, in The Washington Independent. July 22.
According to a colleague who is doing field work in coastal LA, the incidents of stress and mental health problems are at a very high level. The needs of the local people are huge. I hope Mr. Feinberg can work out something equitable for those hardest hit.
Recovery Diva 