From Govtech: California Wildfires, Power Outages Are Disrupting Health Care
Across California, wildfires and outages have forced health-care providers to close hospitals and medical clinics, or greatly limit services. Both Kaiser Permanente and Sutter Health evacuated their Santa Rosa hospitals.
Another concern is that of people with health and disabilities. See: Disabled seniors in Ca. complex left behind during outage. Thanks to Chris Jones for this citation.
Article about the report is here.
Full document is here: Keep Safe: A Guide for Resilient Housing Design in Island Communities. This is a significant document; it is 243 pages long and is available at no cost in English and Spanish.
Many thanks to Chris Jones for sending this URL.
Florida Workshops Focus on Business Continuity After Disasters. The likelihood of surviving a disaster is increased by good planning before the disaster, from securing property and having a clear crisis communication plan, to forming a post-disaster action plan and backing up files.
From the WashPost: California has difficult choices to make. Its politicians keep avoiding reality.
Dealing with the massive fires requires some tough decisions.
From the WashPost: As fires rage, California refines an important skill: Evacuating. An excerpt:
Cities are using emergency powers to send mobile alerts to all residents. Authorities are giving far more time to families and businesses to leave danger zones, which have expanded in size. And residents are quicker to trust the calls to evacuate. The new evacuation strategies are a sign of how California, strung between the dueling risks of fires and rolling power outages, is adapting to a new reality many officials attribute to climate change.
From the HSDL: Home Health Care in the Dark addresses the importance of resilient power (“continuous, reliable power even when the electric grid goes down for an extended period of time”) not only to hospitals, but to an increasing number of households utilizing in-home health care.
The authors propose clean, reliable alternatives to generator power, such as battery storage and solar energy, in order to protect energy-dependent communities that would be at risk in an emergency.
The direct link to the 34 page report is here.
From Vox: 3 key solutions to California’s wildfire safety blackout mess. Grid hardening, land-use reform, and restructuring PG&E, oh my.
Perspective on post-disaster reconstruction: Bans on Rebuilding in Disaster-Prone Areas Ignore Homeowners Preferences – Raising Costs Works Better
Another important new report from the GAO: Disaster Resilience Framework. Principles for Analyzing Federal Efforts to Facilitate and Promote Resilience to Natural Disasters.
Update: Some additional information on the framework from the GAO.
The Diva is interested in hearing from readers knowledgeable about resilience research about how this report meshes, or not, with other efforts, such as the publications of the National Academy of Sciences.
Disaster Recovery: Recent Disasters Highlight Progress and Challenges. GAO-20-183T: Published: Oct 22, 2019. Report is 37 pp.; highlights also available.
The federal government faces challenges in helping communities recover from disasters. Disaster costs are projected to rise as extreme weather becomes more frequent and intense. Federal disaster assistance since 2005 has topped $450 billion.
We testified that federal recovery programs are complicated and can be slow to provide help. For example, FEMA provided $2.4 billion to help communities recover from wildfires from 2015-2018. Yet, local officials cited challenges in providing housing, removing debris, and meeting FEMA’s paperwork requirements.
This is an important report; it covers a lot of recent history and many facets of recovery.
