Project Impact Initiative to Create Disaster-Resistant Communities Demonstrates Worth in Kansas Years Later

Project Impact, a short-lived federal initiative that worked to create disaster-resistant communities, showed that teamwork by different government levels and the private and nonprofit sectors can do amazing things when they're working in close partnership with one another. The program suggests how past experiences can provide a guide for future adaptation.

When a killer tornado plowed toward Manhattan, Kan., in spring 2008, people scurried to shelter - just as they had planned for years.

The little-known Project Impact, which began in 1997, encouraged residents to build tornado shelters. It paid off.

The half-mile-wide, F3- to F4-scale tornado left millions of dollars of damage, but everybody found safe shelter, and there were no deaths in Manhattan, said Dori Milldyke, the former Project Impact director. Her home was among those wrecked in the June 11, 2008, storm.

"Riley County and Manhattan Project Impact had given grants toward safe rooms in Miller Ranch, one of the major areas of damage in Manhattan," Milldyke said. "I'm sure it saved lives. One couple lived by hiding in their shelter under their concrete steps. Others found safe refuge in group safe rooms built in mobile home parks. And others knew where to grab the safest improvised shelter, following our Project Impact preparedness tips. As I go around helping people clean up, I am proudly wearing my old Project Impact shirt because I know it made all the difference here."

Curbing Losses

Although Project Impact was discontinued as a national program in 2001, the initiative continues to make a difference. Project Impact is alive and well in Miami-Dade, Fla., according to Frank Reddish, the county's blunt-spoken mitigation manager.

"We routinely have up to 100 organizations attending our meetings, including all our municipalities, major county departments, nine colleges and universities, 10 hospitals, nonprofits such as Red Cross and the Humane Society; and good old for-profits including IBM, Wal-Mart, Macy's, Visa, UPS, American Airlines, etc. We have completed more than $250 million in projects so far," Reddish said.

"Following the hurricanes of 2004 and 2005, not one facility - not one - that we mitigated had any more damage than scuffed paint," Reddish said. "And where we had done flood mitigation, there was no flooding, none. Project Impact worked in Miami-Dade County and still does."

Project Impact towns, from Manhattan to Miami, got in the habit of collaborating in public-private partnerships to make long-term changes in their disaster profiles. Collaboration is a habit encouraged by Project Impact, which made a dramatic difference in some of the test locations.

When James Lee Witt was director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), he quickly saw that federal help could actually perpetuate endless disaster cycles of build, disaster, rebuild, disaster.

FEMA established the idealistic Project Impact initiative in 1997 to help communities reduce their disaster tolls by building partnerships among businesses, agencies, churches, neighborhoods and others who worked together on locally based hazard-mitigation activities.

These hazard mitigations included long-term actions, such as earthquake retrofits, floodplain buyouts and tornado safe rooms that can lower death and destruction dramatically.

"Working together, we can reduce disaster losses," Witt said at the time.

Project Impact started small, with pilots in a few dozen communities that built partnerships among first responders, businesses and nonprofits, so they could seize opportunities to build safer, stronger towns.

Witt had a big goal: to change the culture. He urged Project Impact partners to make hazard mitigation an integral part of how the community and its people live and conduct business every day.

"There is something about the Project Impact process," Witt said, "that will reach down into the heart of your community and bring out the best in your best people."

It didn't work everywhere. But when the project