Check out the Facebook page of the Gender and Disaster Resilience Alliance, and note the 5 free posters available for download.

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• Inextricable and Inevitable: Gender, Climate Change, Health (girlsglobe.org)
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It is possible to build shelters without federal funding; and it is happening in Norman, Oklahoma. See: Schools think outside the FEMA-funded box when building tornado shelters

For the past 23 years, Edmond Public Schools has added tornado shelters to every new school building project. None of those shelters have been built with Federal Emergency Management Agency dollars.

 FEMA funding is great when it’s available, but some FEMA requirements for federally funded shelters add to the cost without contributing to structural safety, school officials and architects said.

 “The movement to build safe rooms in Edmond schools began in 1990,” said Dr. David Goin, Edmond Schools superintendent.

This article features a discussion of how Joplin, MO managed to include shelters in a large percentage of the buildings rebuilt after the devastating tornadoes in that community two years ago.

It has taken a week or so, but finally some in-depth analyses about the floods are showing up in the media accounts. Some examples are cited below. It may just be that the Calgary Floods are to Canada what Superstorm Sandy was to the U.S. – both disasters have a high ratio of impact and both are a wakeup call to pay attention to the scientific evidence that has been mounting but was ignored.

Alberta floods a wake up call to dangers of extreme weather;‘Water the new fire’ as a danger to property. Some excerpts:

The Alberta floods are Canada’s Hurricane Sandy moment, and should be a catalyst for badly needed changes to limit future damage from extreme weather, say experts on climate change adaptation.

“In many cases, the standards for where and how we build are completely out of date with a climatically changed future,” said Ian Mauro, Canada Research Chair in human dimension and environmental change at Mount Allison University. The Alberta floods, he said, should be a wake-up call that “we need to seriously rethink how we build structures, where we build structures and how we manage in emergency situations.”
Not only do cities and towns need to stop building in flood-prone areas, but infrastructure such as bridges need to be reassessed with extreme weather events in mind. The failing railway bridge over Calgary’s Bow River underlined the catastrophic potential of doing nothing, said Mauro.

“This is just the beginning,” he said. “this isn’t fearmongering, this is a call to action to inspire people to build resilient communities to be able to deal with impending superstorms of the future.”

Water, is considered the new fire — it now accounts for more property damage every year in Canada than from fire. But, while many building and zoning regulations were historically developed to lessen the risk of fire, the response to water damage has been inconsistent and weak. Many Canadian cities and towns, for example, don’t even have up-to-date floodplain maps, basic information they need to understand flood risks, says the chair of the Climate Change Adaptation Project Canada.

Calgary Floods Spotlight Cities’ Costly Failure To Plan For Climate Change

In a related article, Alberta province took over the management of one badly impacted town, since local officials could not deal with the extent and complexity of the recovery.

Alberta Needs to Do a Better Job on Flood Forecasting. June 29.

I  was about to write a posting on the March of Folly, but in the meantime, here is an example from Oklahoma  that is just gut-wrenching.  Sorry to say much of the  disaster news this week is full of examples of folly: the flood risk assessment that was ignored in Calgary, Alberta; the ignorance displayed by public officials re the risks in West, TX before the fertilizer plant exploded; and the state building codes in Oklahoma.  Once cannot be an optimist in this line of work!

NPR did a feature article on the building standards in Oklahoma, which are neither up to date or able deal  effectively with the known tornado risk.  Hey folks in OK, it’s time to stop lamenting the damage and do some prevention!!!!  See: Oklahoma’s Building Codes Don’t Factor for Tornadoes. Some quotes follow:

The “Oklahoma Standard” is a phrase that describes how this state responds in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, like the tornado that ripped through Moore on May 20.But that resiliency isn’t reflected in Oklahoma’s construction standards, which don’t factor for tornadoes. [Here is the folly part.]

It’s hard to make sense of the mess in Moore. When they’re in piles by the curb, all the houses — whether they’re single or two-story, brick or stone — look the same. But buried in the heaps of wood, brick and nails, Dallas-based Haag Engineering meteorologist and civil engineer Tim Marshall sees clues to how these homes disintegrated when the 200 mile-per-hour winds moved in.When disaster strikes, he moves in and starts to play detective.

“I go in and look at these buildings and see how they fail,” Marshall says. They fail spectacularly. And a  neighbor’s poorly constructed home can become a cloud of shrapnel that shreds your home. But Marshall says these homes can be built better. “Bolts and clips and straps in the proper place,” Marshall says. “$500-$1,000 on a house, that’s all.”

Marshall says local and state officials should update the building code to make sure that happens. He said the same thing in 1999, when an F5 tornado cut a similar path through Moore. He even authored a study on the failures and how Oklahoma homes could be made safer. No one listened.
Shane Speegle is the Development Services Manager for the City of Moore. He says the city’s building codes were updated a few times between the 1999 and 2013 tornados. But those updates were nothing special. This city — like many — regularly adopts a set of generic, pre-written standards and enhances them with local tweaks and changes.

“”I doubt that pattern will repeat,” Speegle says. “I’ll bet after this one, we’re going to see some changes.”But none of Moore’s residential building code upgrades address tornados. And Marshall says generic construction standards don’t either. “Building codes do consider hurricanes, but they don’t consider tornados,” Marshall says. “Go figure.”

Billy Pope is the CEO of Oklahoma’s Uniform Building Code Commission, a state agency that sets the minimum building code standards for the state. “This is the third time Moore has been hit,” Pope says. “And it doesn’t make a difference. It can happen anywhere. We hope there is no next time, but we know — within reason — that that’s going to happen again.”  [This is the hope part.]

The commission was formed in 2009, a decade after that first Moore F5 tornado. It has no inspectors or enforcement authority. A new version of the minimum building code was released last year, but the commission didn’t adopt it. And there are no additions to Oklahoma’s building code to help guard against tornados. Pope says that’s likely to change.
“That’s why we bring those engineers and architects together,” Pope says. “To see if there’s something we can do. Put it in as a mandate to make those withstand a little more. Do a little better.”

Officials in Joplin, Missouri toughened building code standards after its EF-5 tornado in 2011. Alabama adopted a statewide building code after an EF-4 tornado devastated Tuscaloosa that same year, but it doesn’t require tornado-resistant construction. Officials in those states, like Oklahoma, worry new construction mandates will increase a home’s cost. Marshall says there are other pressures:“Everyone wants back in their house as soon as possible, so pushing that agenda of better building is a difficult thing to do,” Marshall says. But Marshall says there’s an opportunity to build safer homes in Moore. Because, unfortunately, many of these neighborhoods are clean slates.

Do I need to point out the irony of the person responsible for state building codes operating on hope?

Once again I turned up an older report that is worth highlighting.  The report titled Financing Recovery From Catastrophic Events, was issued by the Homeland Security Institute in 2007. Although it is slightly dated — Superstorm Sandy and the pending recovery strategies and plans would make a useful addition — it provides an interesting and unique history of some major/catastrophic disasters in the U.S. and elsewhere with particular attention to funding mechanisms for the recovery phase.  Of special interest are the 4 types of funding support noted in the report: (1) government (2) insurance, (3) charity, and (4) litigation. [See a similar CRS Report from 2008.]

Most of the historic examples, such as the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and the 1927 Great Mississippi Flood,  were also described and analyzed in the book Emergency Management; The American Experience, 1900-2010, although although that book deals primarily with the response phase.  I think that reading both books would provide a more comprehensive view of  the history of major disasters than has been possible to date.

Related articles

• Canada’s aging infrastructure vulnerable to natural disasters: experts (ctvnews.ca)