Category Archives: Mitigation

Excellent New Article – in Environment Magazine

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Since Michelin ranks restaurants with stars, the Diva has decided to award stars to documents re recovery. Here is the first one I would give 4 stars to:

Making America More Resilience toward Natural Disasters: A Call For Action, by Howard Kunreuther, Erwann Michel-Kerjan and Mark Pauly. From Environment Magazine, July/August 2013.  The title does not really do justice to the wide array of useful content here, so I suggest you download the full article and decide for yourself how you would categorize it.

Some excerpts:

Hurricane Sandy caused an estimated $65 billion in economic losses to residences, business owners, and infrastructure owners. It is the second most costly natural disaster in recent years in the United States, after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, but it is not an outlier; economic and insured losses from devastating natural catastrophes in the United States and worldwide are climbing.

According to Munich Re,2 real-dollar economic losses from natural catastrophes alone have increased from $528 billion (1981–1990), to $1,197 billion (1991–2000), to $1,23 billion (2001–2010). During the past 10 years, the losses were principally due to hurricanes and resulting storm surge occurring in 2004, 2005, and 2008. Figure 1 depicts the evolution of the direct economic losses and the insured portion from great natural disasters over the period 1980–2012.2

There is a wealth of useful information in this article, which makes it hard to summarize. It is thoughtful and clearly writtten. I consider this an essential document, one that I think will be a classic in time.

Natural mitigation

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The Best Defense Against Catastrophic Storms: Mother Nature

Extreme weather, sea level rise and degraded coastal systems are placing people and property at greater risk along the coast.

Natural habitats such as dunes and reefs are critical to protecting millions of U.S. residents and billions of dollars in property from coastal storms, according to a new study by scientists with the Natural Capital Project at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

The study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, offers the first comprehensive map of the entire U.S. coastline that shows where and how much protection communities get from natural habitats such as sand dunes, coral reefs, sea grasses and mangroves.

Another Call for Safe Rooms and Mitigation

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Shortly after the tornadoes in Moore, media from all over the nation, as well as many professional associations, are adamant in their call for some mitigative measures so that the repetitive losses of life and property are reduced.  Since the means to do so are known, what is needed is the political will– something lacking so far in OK  None of us wants to watch while children are trapped in their schools and people buried in their homes, if it can be avoided.

From the Post Gazette (Pitsburgh), an editorial of interest: After the Storm; Safe Rooms Need to be mandated in Perilous Places. A few excepts follow; my favorites are highlighted in red:

As always in times of disaster, the humanitarian response of the American people was heart-warming. But the heart must now heed the head. There are obvious lessons that need to be taken if the wells of sympathy are not to be depleted.

Some 24 people were killed by the tornado, including seven 8- and 9-year-old students at Moore’s Plaza Elementary School — a school that had no safe room, just as most of the 1,200 homes damaged and destroyed did not. That is stupid to the point of scandalous. Oklahoma is situated in Tornado Alley and people are accustomed to the danger. According to the National Weather Service, Moore and its environs have seen at least 22 tornadoes killing more than 100 people since 1893.

The state is conservative and fear of overreaching government power is part of the culture. That’s fine as far as it goes, but it goes only as far as it affects other Americans whose tax dollars go to help places like Moore recover.

It rankles that Oklahoma’s U.S. senators, James Inhofe and Tom Coburn, have voted against federal funding for other disaster relief, including for victims of Hurricane Sandy. Yes, they had their reasons — concerns for wasteful federal spending and deficits — but a day of reckoning comes for ingrate behavior. In Moore, it came in a terrifying funnel cloud.

Political ideology should have been blown away in this storm. State and local governments in areas at risk should insist on safe rooms, at least in all new construction. The cost might be high, but so is the cost of repetitive tragedy. It is said that God helps those who help themselves; federal aid ought to be predicated on it.

Finding the Right Balance for Natural Hazard Mitigation.

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News article from HS Wire on May 6, 2013: Finding the Right Balance for Natural Hazard Mitigation.

Uncertainty issues are paramount in the assessment of risks posed by natural hazards and in developing strategies to alleviate their consequences.Researchers describe a model that estimates the balance between costs and benefits of mitigation — efforts to reduce losses by taking action now to reduce consequences later — following natural disasters, as well as rebuilding defenses in their aftermath.

The full journal article from the Society and Industrial Applied Mathematics is available for a fee.

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APA Policy Paper on Hazard Mitigation

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Although intended for internal policy use by the American Planning Association, this 5-page paper titled Policy Paper: Hazard Mitigation provides a useful update on current concerns and unfinished business with respect to hazard mitigation.

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Flood Mitigation Efforts in Other Countries

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QUEENSLAND AUSTRALIA

The U.S. is not the only country trying to think ahead and find ways to mitigate future flood damage.  Queensland has experienced many devastating floods in recent years and is working to anticipate and aboid future flood damamges. Here are two sources of more information about their present efforts:

News Clip :http://www.sunshinecoastdaily.com.au/news/councils-be-given-protection-stop-flood-developmen/1758559/

Government Report: http://www.premiers.qld.gov.au/publications/categories/reports/assets/gov-response-floods-commission-inquiry.pdf

One more article, citing additional reports that explain the Australian approach to flood management. Feb. 15.

UNITED KINGDOM

Article covers several decades of flood experience in the U.K.

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Thanks for Chris Jones for point out these resources to me.

Good Example of Floodproofing High Rise Office Buildings

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Bottom of Wall Street from FDR

Bottom of Wall Street from

From the NY Times on Feb. 20, Landlords in NYC . An Interesting account of how owners of high-priced commercial office buildings have taken mitigation measures in light of future flooding.  If you have money and are smart enough to think ahead about the costs and benefits of mitigation, the high rises can be protected.

Earlier this month (Feb. 14), the posting dealt with the concerns of the mayor of  Hoboken, N.J. about how to assure flood migitation for high rise residential structures, for moderate income residents.

 

 

Floodproofing High Rise Buildings

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When a densely populated urban area contains mostly high rise dwellings, selecting mitigation measures to reduce future floods is a major challenge.  Here is one mayor’s approach: Hoboken Mayor Seeks Storm Protection More Suitable for High-Rise Buildings. Excerpts from the NY Time article on Feb. 12 follow:

The mayor of this city of 50,000 across the Hudson River from New York, badly damaged by the storm, is pushing federal and state officials to make it a test case for a new model of hurricane resilience, one that could be translated to other cities in the Northeast that rising seas have increasingly turned into flood plains.

Most bluntly, Mayor Dawn Zimmer said, that means accepting and planning for the likelihood that most residents will not evacuate, even under an official order. And it requires adjusting federal flood-insurance guidelines to recognize that it is not possible to elevate an entire city. About two-thirds of Hoboken lies in the flood zone on new federal maps, but apart from the rare single-family homes, most buildings are apartment complexes or attached houses that cannot easily be mounted on pilings.

“The rules don’t work,” Mayor Zimmer said. “They’re looking at a fairly suburban approach. We need to carve out an urban approach. Because today it’s Hoboken, tomorrow, Boston.”

Thanks to Bill Cumming for this citation.

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Changing the Calculation for Utilities – pre and post disaster

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In order to achieve more resilience after future disasters, all aspects of the cost-benefit calculations that are made about taking pre-event mitigative steps vs. just paying for repair and restoration post-disaster will have to re reassessed. This example about utilities illustrations the fundamental issue.

Hurricane Sandy Alters Utilities’ Calculus on Upgrades; NYT. December 29. Some excerpts follow:

After Hurricane Sandy wreaked havoc with power systems in the Northeast, many consumers and public officials complained that the electric utilities had done far too little to protect their equipment from violent storms, which forecasters have warned could strike with increasing frequency.

But from a utility’s perspective, the cold hard math is this: it is typically far cheaper for the company, and its customers, to skip the prevention measures and just clean up the mess afterward.

Utilities and policy makers can see that ocean surge poses a previously unexpected threat to the power grid. And there is growing recognition that the true cost of disruptions, in terms of gasoline lines, lost workdays and business sales, and shivering homeowners, is far higher than the simple dollars and cents spent to protect the power system. A recent report from the National Academy of Sciences about the vast 2003 blackout in the Eastern United States determined that the economic cost of that disruption was about 50 times higher than the price of the actual electricity lost, and that didn’t take into account deaths or other human consequences.

“We need to think now of not just restoring the grid, but how to make it more survivable,” said Philip B. Jones, president of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, a trade association of state officials. “I think most commissioners are coming around to that.”

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Pressing FEMA to Consider Climate Change in Mitigation Plans – update

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About one month ago, I posted the article at the bottom of this posting. As you might expect, as a result of  Hurricane Sandy, the environmental groups are pumped up to have the federal government take some actions on climate change. In  CQ, November 5, their article is titled:  FEMA to Weigh Climate Change in Disaster Planning . The full article is copyrighted, so I cannot include it here. Some excerpts:

Environmentalists are stepping up pressure on the Obama administration to consider the effects of climate change in disaster planning, as the recovery from Hurricane Sandy continues one week after the storm hit the
East Coast.

Dozens of environmental groups are calling on the Federal Emergency
Management Agency (FEMA) to grant a petition filed last month seeking to
require states to consider climate change risks in hazard mitigation
plans they must submit in order to qualify for federal non-emergency
disaster funds.

“States that exclude climate change considerations from their plans will
be unprepared for the volatility of future hazard events,” wrote 42
groups from around the country in a Nov. 2 letter released Monday.
“FEMA’s failure to require states to consider all of their
vulnerabilities leads to insufficient planning and puts people and
property at risk.”

One more take on the topic: Andrew Revkin’s blog, November 6.

Why Climate Disasters Might Not Boost Public Engagement on Climate Change

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October 9: Some environmental groups are pressing FEMA to take into consideration climate change as a future threat when preparing mitigation plans. See “Disaster Planning: An Opportunity to Prepare for the Impacts of Climate Change.”

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