As I watch the news accounts of the LA floods — with about 60,000 homes damaged to some extent and most owners with no flood insurance — I cannot help but think that our current federal response system and the National Flood Insurance Program are not adequate for the larger and more complex disasters the U.S. is experiencing. Whether or not these events are caused by climate change, the point is we need to think bigger and better about disasters. Also, I predict that FEMA is going to take a lot of abuse that it does not deserve, because of the limitations of its enabling legislation.

From the Wash. Post on August 19th: As People Flee Disasters Is This What Climate Change Looks Like? One quote from the article:

This is merely a foretaste of what will happen in the decades to come on a much more massive scale,” said Michael Gerrard, who directs the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. “Few places have undertaken serious planning that ultimately there’s going to have to be, and I’m talking about decades, large-scale movement inland in many coastal areas.”

When disaster-response apps fail

The scene in Nice the morning after the July 14 terror attack – during which an emergency-warning app failed to give timely notice. Michel Abada, CC BY-SA
When a terrorist struck Nice, France, on July 14, a new French government app designed to alert people failed. Three hours passed before SAIP, as the app is called, warned people in and around Nice to the danger on the city’s waterfront during Bastille Day festivities.

This aspect of the tragedy highlights an emerging element of disaster preparation and response: the potential for smartphone apps, social media sites and information technology more broadly to assist both emergency responders and the public at large in figuring out what is happening and what to do about it.

I have written about this pending change before, but here is a new take on the matter from the State OEM Director in FL: See: FEMA weighing change to disaster aid for states
Florida’s emergency director says states should back proposed federal program

Resilience – the Ultimate Sustainability, by Aris Papadopoulos, Resilience Action Fund ISBN #978-0-9861816-1-0, eBook – $10, hard copy $19.

Reviewed by Dr. John Plodinec, Associate Director, Community and Regional Resilience Institute

Aris Papadopoulos manages to pack a lots of facts, figures, and recommendations for the future in this small (177 pp of text) book.  Many are not going to like what he has to say – the American Wood Council, the NAHB, the ICC, FEMA, and most proponents of urbanization, to name a few.  But for those of us who believe that resilience should be the prime paradigm of our age, this book buttresses that belief.

The book focuses on the built environment and natural disasters in the US.  Papadopoulos opens by looking at the increasing cost and number of lives impacted by natural disasters.  He points out that the US is the only developed country that has the dubious distinction of being in the top 10 nations for both.  He then posits his Four Laws of Disaster Risk:

1.  Disaster risk grows exponentially with hazard risk.
2. Disaster risk grows exponentially with urban density, even when hazard risk remains constant. Proponents of urbanization too often forget that cities concentrate risk.
3. Disaster risk is inversely proportional to Resilience Capacity.
4. The Emergency Capacity required is inversely proportional to Resilience Capacity.

“Resilience Capacity” is the book’s key concept. Papadopoulos sees the Resilient Capacity of the built environment as a combination of the built environment’s resistance to the perils assailing it plus redundancy.  “Emergency Capacity” then is the difference between what may be lost to a disaster and what it will take to replace what is lost (I know that’s not what the Fourth Law says, but that’s how he applies it in the text).  Pushed to its logical extreme, Papadopoulos is saying that if buildings are completely resistant to a natural hazard then there is virtually no need for emergency capacity to replace them.  Conversely, if we keep concentrating risk without building in Resilience Capacity, then the butcher’s bill for major natural disasters will continue to grow exponentially.  And, of course, that’s what we seem to be seeing.

Papadopoulos provides nice capsules of the history of the LEED standards, the property insurance industry (esp. FMGlobal – an important story there), and the evolution of building codes.  For anyone interested in the resilience of the built environment, these are must-reads; Papadopoulos tells the tale of how we got here well.  Throughout the book, he emphasizes the importance of residential construction – the most important investment most of us will make in our lives – and how lax building codes put our investments at risk.  He shoots huge holes in the idea that disaster-resistant housing has to be unaffordable – most notably Moore, Oklahoma’s experience that increasing the required resistance of new construction so that a house could withstand 135 mph winds only increased construction costs by $1 per square foot (i.e., by about 1% – budget dust!).

At the end, Papadopoulos offers 30 practical recommendations that he breaks down as Strategy, Tactics and Applications.  His Strategy focuses on government action (esp. at the federal level) to make the built environment more disaster-resistant, spotlighting the residential sector.  Elsewhere in the book he has nice things to say about NIST’s resilience efforts; I hope they read this book.  He also hints at an economic development/social justice argument for built environment resilience – I wish this had been developed further.

Two of Papadopoulos’s Tactics especially resonated with me.  He recommends collecting and publicizing national statistics on building losses vs type of construction (Here he echoes a recent National Academies’ recommendation.).   He also strongly makes the point that “Green policies and programs are not a substitute for resilience” – building it twice is not sustainable.

Both his Tactics and Applications speak to the need for incentives.  In the Applications area, he points out that the insurance community can be the natural partner in improving resilience, but only if they are allowed to appropriately reflect risk in their rates.  My state of South Carolina is one of the few states that allow property insurers to do this; Louisiana is perhaps the worst offenders in preventing insurers from doing this.

This is a useful and very readable book (except I wish someone had done a better job of editing – but that’s to be expected of a self-published book).  Papadopoulos makes strong statements, but backs them up with facts (and doesn’t torture them to make them speak).  I don’t fully agree with everything Papadopoulos recommends, but his aim point – a more resilient built environment – is bang on.  If you care about the built environment – either its resilience or its sustainability – you should read this book.

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NOTE: Please see the comments on this review.

We often hear of temporary housing after a disaster, but not usually temporary communities.  See this article titled Temporary communities can reduce risks