Watching communities rebuild after such devastation is often perplexing for educated observers who say mistakes are repeated and lead to more devastation, and that an approach that considers the likelihood of more severe storms and reduces risk should be taken.
The latter isn’t happening often enough, and even as parts of the Northeast pick up the pieces and promise more resilient communities, there is hand wringing among those who say opportunities are being missed. Again.
“I think there are many windows that have already been closed,” said Robert Young, director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University. “The vast majority of the rebuilding planning has been done, and for the most part, the writing is on the wall.”
That writing says adaptations like elevating structures and improving storm engineering building are the actions being taken. “There’s no doubt we can do a better job of storm engineering building,” Young said, “but that doesn’t stop the shorelines from eroding.”
Sand dunes are also being built and will help, but not forever, and that’s the point of some of the criticism. Rebuilding in the same areas is asking for more of the same, even with elevated, stronger structures.
“In other words,” said Young, “if the river is flooding, rather than step out of the river, roll up your pant legs.”
Ken Mitchell, professor of geography at Rutgers, is researching on rebuilding after Sandy for the National Science Foundation. He said elevating structures, which has been emphasized by the federal government, will only help so much. It may not help against the worst floods, and it doesn’t protect the infrastructure serving the buildings.
And he said, in focusing on this solution, communities are missing other more viable, long-term ones.
Sand dunes are effective too, but again only to a certain extent. The dune system can be established to withstand extreme storms with proper maintenance, said Stewart Farrell, director of the Richard Stockton College Coastal Research Center. But the effect won’t last forever, he said, “Since we run out of sand eventually, run out of cash or run out of the will to fight storms combined with sea level rise at some point.”
These have traditionally been the primary approaches, but other tactics should be considered more often, including relocating structures from the riskiest areas. One roadblock, though, sources say is an “incentive” by the federal government to rebuild as before.
A Moral Hazard
There are a number of federal subsidies that encourage rebuilding in the same spot, according to Young. “In Hurricane Sandy, we had a $60 billion emergency appropriations bill that goes back into these communities and puts the roads and the power grid back and infrastructure in place.”
Young said the appropriations money is helping rebuild boardwalks, beaches and investment properties right back where they were. “Why wouldn’t any of these people rebuild right where they are if they know the federal taxpayers have their backs and are assuming all the risks?” Young asked. “The federal government has created a moral hazard.”
Young said it’s well known where the problem spots are and that emergency managers are tasked with responding to those areas every time there is “even a little wind blowing and a little storm.” Young advocates rebuilding in areas that are known to be more protected.
Mitchell was less direct about the government’s role in perpetuating disasters, but agrees that much more can and should be done to reduce risk. “I don’t want to criticize the government because I think it’s moving in the right direction with reforming the flood insurance program, but there are a lot of things we don’t think about.”
He said he hopes that flood insurance adjustments will help and that there’s evidence the program can work, but more so in river flood situations than coastal ones. “In the past, they were undercharged,” Mitchell said. “It’s going to help, but on the downside it’s going to force some people, like elderly people who suffered damage to houses they inherited, out of the marketplace because they won’t be able to rebuild.”
Mitchell advocates a holistic approach to recovery and rebuilding; one that considers the local economy, physical environment and social networks that people inhabit. He said we’re a long way off from that and closer to the one-size-fits-all approach.
He pointed to New Zealand, which he said has recently taken the approach that recovery isn’t just about reconstructing buildings, but also about blending the aforementioned aspects of community. He said the recent development of the federal National Disaster Recovery Framework is a step in the right direction but a work in progress.
“A lot of that grew out of the experiences in New Orleans after Katrina,” Mitchell said. “The problem is, New York City is not New Orleans and New Jersey is not New Orleans. There are very different combinations of risks and vulnerabilities, and what you got from Katrina doesn’t always transfer to other places.”
But there can be lessons learned from what communities have done in the past, and those shouldn’t be forgotten. Too often communities look at the more recent past and don’t go back far enough. There are lessons decades old that can be of value today.
“If you go back into the 18th century in New Jersey, you find many cases of relocation of homes in flood-prone areas where they took the structure and literally jacked it up and moved it someplace else,” Mitchell said. Historical records reveal good examples of adjustments to future risks, he said, but you have to go back further than most do. Mitchell also said that the same is true of looking into the future — we generally don’t look far enough ahead.
“Municipalities generally look back to World War II, don’t really use the full historic record and then tend to focus on the bad things, not the positive things we’ve done in the past. When you turn the telescope around and look into the future, the tendency is to plan five, 10 years ahead.”
Another systematic mistake municipalities make during rebuilding is assuming the same development decisions and institutions, planning and zoning decisions will work just as well after a disaster as they did before.
In non-emergency settings, those decisions are made with a leisure that allows boards and agencies to stop the process, get feedback and make decisions without haste. “None of that stuff is really well adjusted to handling the kinds of decisions you need to make during disasters,” Mitchell said. A lot of improvisation must occur after a disaster, and municipalities have to entertain ideas that were not thought of before. It can’t be business as usual, when the tendency is to rebuild as things were.
Mitchell sees promise and limitations to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Rebuild by Design program. It’s a competition to promote scalable solutions that increase resilience in areas affected by Sandy and sets aside block grant funding for implementation of the winning projects.
Mitchell said the projects are “wonderful in theory,” but care should be taken to assure that local communities are involved. “Those projects often have local partners, but it seems to me they’re dominated by the international, engineering or landscape architect firms.”
Know Your Community
It’s crucial to involve the whole community in the rebuilding process. “One of the rules of resilience,” Mitchell said, “is to know your community.” He said it’s important for outsiders, the federal government included, to understand that.
An example of involving the whole community came from Greensburg, Kan., after a tornado wiped away 95 percent of the city in May 2007, killing 11. Although a very small city (a population of 777, according to the 2010 census), it literally came together and rebuilt, developing into a modern, wind-powered one.
After the tornado, there was no place to meet except under FEMA tents. There the community members gathered and discussed the future, said Stephen Hardy, chief community builder of MindMixer, a startup that helps communities garner ideas from citizens. “We were able to shift the way people thought of the community as not something they were building back for themselves, but something they were building for a future generation.”
He remembers several times when young people stood up in the tent and voiced a position that was counter to the way things had been done. Ultimately community leaders listened.
“At the end of the day, it’s a conservative community in a conservative state that is entirely wind powered. They have the greenest main street in the country and nine LEED Certified Platinum buildings, more per capita than anywhere in the world,” Hardy said. “It’s incredibly progressive.”
The key was not to let short-term thinking creep back into the conversation when things got tense but to continue to look far into the future. The way to do that is to involve multiple stakeholders and build a consensus.
“As soon as a storm hits, there’s this immediate tension between trying to put everything back exactly the way it was as fast as possible; on the other hand, is taking the time to maybe do something you didn’t have the opportunity to do before, to actually improve the trajectory of the community rather than putting it back on the old path,” said Hardy.
In Greensburg, community members looked at other communities that had rebuilt to find what might work. The community took a “deep breath” and looked at what assets it had and how to leverage those into a better future. But not before getting over the dread of what lay ahead.
“There’s a horrible fatigue that sets in,” Hardy said. “You get this initial burst of adrenaline, and everybody rolls up their sleeves and clears debris and that’s one-hundredth of the work. Then the real task kind of sets in and people get depressed and you have some real issues.”
The key to getting past that in Greensburg was to shift the thinking ahead to rebuilding for the next generation.
‘What We Need’
After Katrina in 2005, Bay Saint Louis, Miss., found itself in a similar situation as Greensburg. The city of about 17 square miles was devastated by the hurricane and faced rebuilding.
The community thought beyond just building back and drew a map of what it wanted the city to look and feel like. Bay St. Louis’ attraction was the waterfront, a people magnet, and the community thought to enhance that by building a harbor, something it lacked prior to Katrina.
“Waterfront, streetscape, restaurants and so forth, we facilitated that and funded a harbor project, and the whole area is revitalized,” said Jon Mabry, chief operations officer of the Mississippi Development Authority’s Disaster Recovery Division. “That’s an example of a project where local leaders came together outside of the public elected officials, formed a group and said, ‘This is what we think we need.’”
There was no road map for this type of rebuilding Mabry said, so they developed programs for housing assistance, including elderly housing, public housing, how to address homeownership and workforce housing, as well as homes for troubled youth.
One common and critical element to rebuilding in Bay St. Louis that every program was required to have, as per Gov. Haley Barbour, storm mitigation. The programs offered Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funds for rebuilding but incentivized responsibility, according to Mabry.
“In the homeowner assistance program, for example, if you’ve got a grant to provide you with funds for uncompensated losses, we put a covenant on your property. If you rebuild, it requires you to go back to the most stringent standards and maintain flood and property insurance.”
Mabry said using the CDBG funds allows municipalities to sidestep some of the “federalization” that occurs when only FEMA money is used. “FEMA funds allow you only to build back the way it was,” he said. “The supplemental funds, the CDBG grant money, allow you to take the money, combine it with FEMA money and build back stronger, bigger and better.”
Mabry said if he had to do it over, he’d make more loan money available for rebuilding. After Katrina, the Development Authority created a small fund of about $50 million with a local bank and made approximately 1,200 loans, ranging from $15,000 to $20,000 each, available for small businesses.
“That money is revolving now, being de-federalized, not subject to the expensive tasks that go along with federal dollars,” Mabry said. The key to all this is sitting down with locals, discussing the future look of the community and handing out planning loans to help develop the proper plans.
“You don’t want to come up with some [unrealistic] plan that’s just put on a shelf. And who knows better than the local communities about how they want their communities to be shaped?”
