Category: Emergency Preparedness (Page 1 of 2)

Finding Pan

September 26, 2023 / odrozd

By Ian Concannon

This spring, I traveled to southwest Florida where my namesake hurricane had made its explosive landfall the previous October. In June, I navigated life along with millions of others under the heavy haze of forest fire smoke blown over New England from Canada. Most recently, violent floods washed through several towns in southern Vermont, where I’ve lived for several months cumulatively since graduating from college in 2018. I am now training as a climate planner in graduate school, where my work seeks to develop resilience at a public transit agency. Yet even treading repeatedly within the direct footprint of climate change, I cannot shake a nagging sense of incompleteness—that I have somehow come no closer to comprehending the full forces at play.

Extreme weather may serve as evidence of climate change, but it is only a snapshot of a larger process. Climate change is as much an undermining of the way we make sense of the world as it is a self-contained object as such—more epoch than event. Climate change is a sunburn, an acid ocean, an expanse of algae, a burn scar, a mutated pathogen. It is the afterlife of acts committed generations ago and it never seems to arrive. Its essence can never be grasped directly. Strange weather is only the shadow cast by this phantom.

Attempting to squeeze a treatment of climate change into the bounds of ordinary discussion only obscures its true nature. Instead, I suggest we dim the lights and dream…

Pan has always been an old god, even when the ancient Greeks learned of him from the Arcadian mountain tribes. Secluded from view, he preferred to roam the woodland hills, tending livestock and hunting game. Unlike his more refined relatives Artemis or Hermes, Pan presented a distinctly bestial figure, pursuing his favored nymphs and sowing panic in foes. Offensive and alluring, powerful and marginalized, he brought together associations of fertility, replenishment, music, vengeance, chaos, violation, and mortality. Pan continues to embody these painful contradictions of the natural world.

Much as Pan could multiply into a swarm, his image has taken many forms in different settings since antiquity. A quick survey includes the Wiccan horned god as well as the faun from Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, leering at the borderlands of the underworld. In Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke, a deer god with a human face silently patrols the forest depths, taking and restoring life in equal measure with each stride. Pan’s offspring remain a penetrating reminder of a tangled rift lurking beyond the scope of civilized life.

One feature separating Pan from the rest of the Greek Pantheon is his mortality, documented first under the reign of the Roman emperor Tiberius following the birth of Christ. More recent authors associate Pan’s death with the triumph of modernity:

Then keep the tomb of Helice,
Thine olive-woods, thy vine-clad wold,
And what remains to us of thee?

Though many an unsung elegy
Sleeps in the reeds our rivers hold,
O goat-foot God of Arcady!
Ah, what remains to us of thee?

–Oscar Wilde [1]

My contribution here is to suggest that the terror and humility we know as a result of the turmoil of climate change reveal the continued presence of larger-than-life demigods. When we spot wayward migrations, upend our routines, abandon our homes, or savor an unseasonably warm winter evening: this is Pan’s work. To know this is to restore the generative agency of natural forces that were thought to be extinguished long ago. This time, though, Pan is back in ghost form—an existence denied by most, unimpressed by our attempts to appease. The question becomes: what would it mean to organize ourselves in space holding closely to this understanding?

One answer comes to us from ecological systems theory. As introduced by ecologists C.S. Holling and Lance Gunderson, Panarchy is a concept that invokes both an antidote to hierarchy and a nod to Pan’s power, in which the cycles of a system are tied together across spatial and temporal scales to describe the system’s response to stimuli. This approach honors the changes that naturally occur across such assemblages while suggesting interventions that uphold beneficial forms of resilience.

It may be worth grounding this theory in the case of a lake. Over the course of a year, this lake’s surface area, depth, temperature, nutrient composition and biomass content will all vary. However, these relatively rapid cycles, such as freeze dates in the winter, higher flow rates in the spring, or phytoplankton blooms in the summer, occur in such a way as to maintain the water body’s capacity for certain essential functions. This lake also depends on larger resource flows, such as tributary inflow volumes and the spread of species from other sources. These are in turn governed by even larger economic and climatic processes, like mass fertilizer application, anthropogenic demand for water, and planetary temperature trends. While periods of expansion, stability, collapse, and renewal are to be expected, Panarchy theory suggests that a resilient system will trend back towards its “domain of attraction” until conditions dictate otherwise; a lake will remain a lake, rather than an anoxic puddle or golf course.[2]

Given these constant exchanges, resilience is not equivalent to stability. Instead, resilience implies that local adaptive cycles are able to integrate information from the slower cycles surrounding them. When conditions change abruptly, ecosystem functions will initially degrade before adapting in such a way that the external changes become internalized. A lake may dry up entirely if enough feedback pushes it in that direction, but it may still retain its status as a productive system, albeit in a new state. What matters is that larger grounding conditions do not shift so fast as to undermine the ability of smaller, more local systems to maintain their adaptive capacity.

With Ghost Pan running loose, this is exactly what we see. Supercharged with two hundred years of fossil fuel energy and the global connectivity of capitalism, changes that might otherwise have taken thousands or millions of years can now proliferate in a matter of decades, if not faster. Circulating at such speed and altitude, these shifts fail to impart a coherent message on the systems they contain. Our lake, industry, or city of cannot meet these new demands by surrounding their existing structure in new fortifications. Their internal logic must move from preservation to pliability.

Multiple transportation modes overlay a shored-up seawall atop the tidal Mystic River in Somerville, MA. These projects bring together many forms of resilience, from the health of the river to public waterfront access and the integrity of engineered infrastructure.

In my efforts to embed climate resilience across a large urban transportation system, this clash of priorities is readily apparent. After decades of divestment, public transit remains an economic lifeline for tens of millions in North America and is understood as increasingly crucial to weaning cities of their dependence on fossil fuels. Simultaneously, its operations tend to be welded in place by predetermined land use and governance regimes. More specific challenges to the climate resilience of transit include:

Limited oversight of land, often along narrow Rights-of-Way. In the Northeastern United States, these Rights-of-Way are commonly laid in former streambeds or reclaimed wetlands.
Dependence on volatile supply chains for specialized equipment.
Few formal coordination avenues to plan with surrounding landowners and policymakers, like municipalities or residents.
Specialized labor practices that delay responses to emergent needs, such as maintaining drainage infrastructure vs. clearing roads or repairing transit vehicles.
- Unionized labor may be paired with short-term private contracts in which institutional knowledge is lost from year to year.
Project management processes that prioritize condition or political expedience over climate vulnerability.
Nested networks of aging communications, electrical, and mechanical infrastructure in which small disruptions set off cascading effects across the rest of the system.
Lagging federal and state requirements that promote but do not require climate resilience standards.

Transit authorities have few examples to guide how to successfully climate-proof tens of billions of dollars of assets. Adaptation strategies mostly involve selective elevation, installing flood walls, substituting rapid transit for buses, and reducing service during high-risk weather events. Even pursued to their fullest extent, these resilience measures correspond to a vision of the future in which people continue to use transit infrastructure much as they do now, albeit with critical elements elevated or clad in corrosion-resistant materials.

A “panarchic” approach to this issue recognizes the inseparability of transportation from its larger setting. Even as transit moves to meet the inevitability of direct climate change exposures such as extreme heat or stormwater flooding, the surrounding city will also be transforming. Economic changes may induce new demand away from traditional commuting destinations, while new residential patterns may bolster or undercut the existing labor force. Newly widespread forms of data will likely make climate modeling more accurate, even as the weather itself becomes more erratic. Longstanding political assumptions baked into the American planning context may begin to unravel, opening or foreclosing instruments by which local government rises to meet the challenges of environmental change.

Far from spaces of disembodied circulation, transit exerts a visceral influence on its physical surroundings. The pressures of climate change reconfigure the ways in which these spaces are demarcated, contested, and made ready for new uses. As planners, we occupy a unique position that both bears witness to the continued influence of historical actors and formulates new models by which future generations may carry out their own lives. Pan’s presence signals a warning to that tradition of planners who understand themselves as technicians erecting monumental cities in defiance of the surrounding environment. Let’s hope we are able to listen.

[1] Oscar Wilde, “Pan,” in Poems by Oscar Wilde, edited by Robert Ross. Retrieved at Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1057/1057-h/1057-h.htm.

[2] Holling, Crawford Stanley, and Lance H. Gunderson. Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2002.

About the Author:  Ian Concannon is an aspiring climate planner and master’s student at Tufts University’s Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning, with a B.A. in History from Williams College. His recent projects have involved performing outreach in support of disaster preparedness, evaluating road network resilience for an environmental engineering firm, and assessing public transit performance when exposed to coastal storms. He is especially interested in finding ways to coordinate across local policymaking bodies in support of resilient systems change. When he’s not tinkering with maps, Ian can be found on trail runs or backpacking loops throughout New England.

Featured image courtesy of Ian Concannon

History Repeats Itself: How to Help Southern Louisiana

September 3, 2021 / odrozd

By Pierce Holloway, CPJ Editor-In-Chief & Emma Vinella-Brusher, Angles Managing Editor

On August 29th, Category 4 Hurricane Ida struck the state of Louisiana. Described by Governor John Bel Edwards as “the strongest storm to hit anywhere in the state since the 1850s,” the storm’s center passed within 18 miles of downtown New Orleans causing tremendous damage to the area.^[i] Within hours over 560,000 households were without power, and this has worsened to over 826,000 across the state as of the writing of this article.^[ii] These outages come during the late summer heat, when the inability to use air conditioning, dry clothes, and keep food fresh can rapidly lead to unhealthy living conditions and increased safety concerns.

The Same Story, 16 Years Later

Eerily, Hurricane Ida passed through New Orleans 16 years to the day of Hurricane Katrina. This timing conjures visceral memories of the most costly hurricane in U.S. history, in an area still recovering from the storm’s damage. While it is easy to draw comparisons between these two storms, there are important differences to note:

Storm Intensity: Hurricane Ida struck Louisiana as a Category 4 hurricane with a storm diameter of 414 miles. Though Katrina was only classified as Category 3, it reached a diameter of nearly 680 miles, with 28 foot storm surges and wind speeds of 125 mph. Current Ida data finds 150 mph sustained winds and 8-10 foot storm surges, though these may increase as more information is collected.
Damage: While it is still too early to estimate the total damage and costs associated with Ida, current predictions are upwards of $15-20 Billion in insured losses.^[iii] This is compared to the $176.5 Billion in damages estimated from Hurricane Katrina.^[iv] Much of the 2005 damage was caused by levees breaking within the city of New Orleans; fortunately it appears that the levees have been hardened and expanded enough since that they held during Ida.
Deaths: Thus far at least 60 deaths have been attributed to Hurricane Ida’s wake across six states, though sadly this number is expected to rise as state officials gather additional information.^[v] This compares to the over 1,800 deaths associated with Katrina.^[vi] However it is important to note that there is always uncertainty surrounding accurately counting storm-related deaths, as the effects are not always immediate.
Health Impacts: Thousands if not millions are being displaced due to flooding and wind damages, which makes accessing needed medication and services a challenge. Moreover, experiencing the impacts of hurricanes has been shown to lead to mental disorders among previously healthy individuals while also compounding the detrimental effects of pre-existing mental health disorders.^[vii]

A person crosses the street during Hurricane Ida on August 29, 2021 in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Photo by: Brandon Bell, Getty Images

What Does “Recovery” Look Like?

When comparing these two severe storms, one important question comes to mind: Have New Orleans and other surrounding communities recovered since Katrina? While there are many useful metrics for assessing recovering, employment levels can provide a quick snapshot. In July 2005, just before Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans area had around 625,000 jobs. In the months following nearly 185,000 jobs were lost as residents fled the area, and many of these jobs never returned. Since Katrina, the state has also struggled with the impacts of the 2007-2009 recession and COVID-19 among other more local obstacles. The combination of each of these has hamstrung a heavily tourist dependent economy, impacting the resilience and ability of communities to recover. As of July 2021 New Orleans had recovered to around 530,000 jobs, still less than 15% of pre-Katrina levels, while employment nation-wide has risen 9% since this time. Hurricane Ida is yet another significant setback in the region’s recovery process.

The effects of Hurricane Ida have been felt well beyond Louisiana as well, with severe damages stretching from the Gulf Coast up into the Northeast. Unfortunately, Ida’s vast destruction may be close to the new normal we can expect for tropical cyclones.While climate models differ in the specifics, there is a growing consensus that storms are projected to significantly intensify as climate change continues.^[viii]^{,^[ix]} Massive infrastructure adaptation is needed across the U.S. to mitigate future storm damages, coupled with the public health resources to ensure vulnerable populations can be protected and well-served.^[x]

Organizations to Support During this Time:

^[i] Staff, W. (2021, August 28). Hurricane Ida will be ‘strongest storm’ to hit Louisiana since 1850s, governor warns. WAFB.

^[ii] PowerOutage.US. Power Outages: Louisiana.

^[iii] Otani, A. (2021, August 31). Firms Estimate Hurricane Ida Could Cause Over $15 Billion in Insured Losses. Wall Street Journal.

^[iv] Blake, E. S., Landsea, C. W., & Gibney, E. J. (2011). NOAA Technical Memorandum NWS NHC-6. 49.

^[v] Paúl, M.L. et al. (2021, September 2). Deaths climb to at least 44 from Northeast floods caused by Hurricane Ida’s remnants. (2021, September 2). Washington Post.

^[vi] Bialik, C. (2015, August 26). We Still Don’t Know How Many People Died Because Of Katrina. FiveThirtyEight.

^[vii] Espinel, Z. et al. (2019). Forecast: Increasing Mental Health Consequences From Atlantic Hurricanes Throughout the 21st Century. Psychiatric Services, 70(12), 1165–1167.

^[viii] Biasutti, M. et al. (2012). Projected changes in the physical climate of the Gulf Coast and Caribbean. Climatic Change 112, 819–845.

^[ix] Ting, M. et al. (2019). Past and Future Hurricane Intensity Change along the U.S. East Coast. Scientific Reports 9, 7795.

^[x] Petkova, E. P. et al. (2015). Climate Change and Health on the U.S. Gulf Coast: Public Health Adaptation is Needed to Address Future Risks. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 12(8), 9342–9356.

Pierce Holloway is a second-year master’s student at the Department of City and Regional Planning with a focus on Climate Change Adaptation. Before coming to Chapel Hill he worked as a geospatial analyst for Urban3, working on visualizing economic productivity of communities and states. Through his coursework he hopes to explore the nexus between adaptation for climate change and community equitability. In his free time, he enjoys long bike rides, trail running, and any excuse to play outside.

Emma Vinella-Brusher is a second-year dual degree Master’s student in City and Regional Planning and Public Health interested in equity, mobility, and food security. Born and raised in Oakland, CA, she received her undergraduate degree in Environmental Studies from Carleton College before spending four years at the U.S. Department of Transportation in Cambridge, MA. In her free time, Emma enjoys running, bike rides, live music, and laughing at her own jokes.

Featured image courtesy of Scott Olson, Getty Images

Lessons from the Fuel Shortage

June 18, 2021 / odrozd

By Pierce Holloway, Editor-in-Chief

Introduction

If you are a driver living in the Southeast, you likely felt the very real impacts of last month’s fuel shortage. The crisis began at 5:30 am on May 7th, when a ransom note from hackers was found on a Colonial Pipeline control room computer. This event halted 2.5 million barrels per day of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel shipments, making it the most disruptive cyberattack ever on U.S. energy infrastructure.^[1] Pressing pause on a pipeline which supplies roughly 45% of the East Coast’s fuel resulted in a ripple effect across the southeast, with rampant reports of price gouging and empty gas stations. According to the fuel tracking company GasBuddy, 65% of North Carolina’s gas stations were left without fuel in the wake of the attack. While the hack itself did disrupt the supply of fuel to stations across the region, drivers’ panic-buying caused stations to run empty much faster than expected.

May’s fuel shortage was not without precedent. In the 1970’s the nation experienced two intense periods of fuel shortages. The gas crises of 1973 & 1979 were spurred not by a cyber attack, but by geopolitics, the Iranian Revolution, and OPEC, all issues exacerbated by industry-wide fuel inefficient vehicles.^[2] What lessons can we take from this crisis and what implications does it have for our current transportation network?

Lessons Learned

One: The reliance on fossil fuels is not a resilient future for the United States.

Fossil fuels have allowed our country to develop and grow at an unprecedented rate, allowing for significant advances in science and technology. However, the U.S. has reached a point where we must diversify our energy sources for the future of our economy, transportation, and health.

Economy – Despite our robust gross domestic product (GDP) output, a continually fossil fuel-dependent United States is likely to reach a tipping point and be left behind as other countries lead the way economically.
Transportation – Our country’s transportation system is dependent upon single occupancy vehicles. What happens the next time 30% of a region’s workforce cannot acquire gas to get to work? The U.S. needs systems in place to prevent the disparate impacts fuel shortages have on those who cannot afford to live within walking distance to work.
Health – The negative health impacts of burning fossil fuels for combustion engines are well-known, with a harmful cocktail of particulate matter, ozone, sulfur dioxide, mercury, and more. Exposure to fossil fuels results in detrimental impacts such as lower life expectancy and reduced lung function, and these impacts are not equitably distributed. A 2014 study found that living in majority Hispanic neighborhoods were associated with higher air pollutant exposures, and newer research has revealed that historically redlined areas have significantly higher rates of asthma-related emergency room visits.^[3]

Two: Continued reliance on fossil fuels stands to make the United States defense network fragile.

Our government has acknowledged for some time that energy policies are inextricably linked to our national security. The first sentence of the 1981 Energy Policies for Resilience and National Security report summarizes the problem exceedingly well: “The U.S. energy system is highly vulnerable to large-scale failures with catastrophic consequences, and is becoming more so.” Fast forwarding 40 years later, we find ourselves living in a country still extremely susceptible to large-scale failures, perhaps increasingly so due the rise of cyberattacks. Prior to the May Colonial Pipeline cyberattack, the 2020 discovery of the Solarwinds attack impacted the U.S. Department of Energy and revealed the previous worst attack on energy infrastructure in history.^[4]

Three: The recent fuel shortage underlines the need for increased prevalence of effective and accessible public transit options.

Public transit can lead not only to more equitable outcomes, but more economic resilience in the face of fuel shortages. As of 2019, 76.3% workers over 16 reported driving alone to work, while only 5.2% utilized public transportation.^[5] By decreasing our reliance on single occupancy vehicles, we correspondingly decrease our reliance on fossil fuels. However it is important to note that electric and other alternative fuel vehicles are a not a silver bullet. While an electric car produces fewer carbon emissions than a traditional vehicle, its true carbon emissions depend on the electricity source. As of February 2021, over 60% of the U.S.’s electricity is still sourced from fossil fuels.^[6] While renewable electricity generation is rising, vehicles charged at home are not a perfectly green choice. And a single occupancy vehicle, electric or not, is still not as important as focusing on improving public transportation.

Four: Sprawling development patterns have played a crucial role in the rise of single occupancy vehicles.

The fuel shortage demonstrates that sprawling development cannot feasibly ensure long-term resilience for the U.S. A recent report from the Census Bureau reported that the average one-way commute for Americans reached an all-time high of 27.6 minutes in 2019.^[7] This, combined with the previously mentioned majority of workers driving alone to work, demonstrates the extremely arduous daily commute American workers engage in. Many American suburbs are also intentionally designed for isolation from a larger societal fabric, stemming from our racist and classist roots. How can suburbanites be expected to efficiently utilize public transit if their own neighborhoods are designed for isolation rather than interwovenness?

Urban sprawl also substantially increases congestion, resulting in commuters spending more and more time in a sea of brake lights.^[8] All this time stopping and starting compounds particulate emissions, decreases worker productivity, and results in less time for workers to spend with friends and family.^[9]

In recent years there has been a resurgence in younger Americans wanting to live in and moving to the urban core, leading to higher education and income metrics.^[10] A shift to living in denser, more interconnected communities seems to be growing across the U.S., but without political support and continued movement away from emissions-producing vehicles, will this trend continue?

Conclusion

U.S. residents need and deserve efficient transit wherever they live, and we cannot become truly sustainable nor equitable while sprawling development continues. Understanding the detrimental impacts of our current structures is the first step to creating and implementing improvements. The Colonial Pipeline disruption highlighted significant issues with our ongoing car-dependence, those which are not only important but also completely possible to address. Examples of effective transit systems and development patterns exist across the world, and the U.S. should learn from others who have successfully found a way to move away from pollutant-emitting fuels. Politics will always be a hurdle, but residents across the country deserve leaders willing to undertake efforts to explain and address the negative health and well-being outcomes our current transportation and development patterns impose.

^[1] Joseph Menn and Stephanie Kelly. 2021. “Colonial Pipeline slowly restarts as Southeast U.S. scrambles for fuel.” Reuters. Retrieved from https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/top-us-fuel-pipeline-edges-toward-reopening-gasoline-shortages-worsen-2021-05-12/.

^[2] The Washington Post. 2021. “Gas shortages and lines in the 1970s wreaked national havoc.” Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/05/13/gas-shortages-1970s/.

^[3] Casey A. Nardone et al. 2020. “Associations between historical residential redlining and current age-adjusted rates of emergency department visits due to asthma across eight cities in California: An ecological study.” The Lancet. Planetary Health, 4(1). https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(19)30241-4.

^[4] Dina Temple-Raston. 2021. “A ‘Worst Nightmare’ Cyberattack: The Untold Story Of The SolarWinds Hack.” NPR. Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/2021/04/16/985439655/a-worst-nightmare-cyberattack-the-untold-story-of-the-solarwinds-hack.

^[5] U.S. Census Bureau. 2019. “Five-Year Estimate.”

^[6] U.S. Energy Information Administration. 2021. “What is U.S. energy generation by energy source?” Retrieved from https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3.

^[7] U.S. Census. 2021. “Census Bureau Estimates Show Average One-Way Travel Time to Work Rises to All-Time High.” Retrieved from https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/one-way-travel-time-to-work-rises.html.

^[8] Bruce Schaller. 2019. “What Urban Sprawl Is Really Doing to Your Commute..” Retrieved from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-03/when-bad-commutes-make-bad-transportation-policy

^[9] Van Ommeren, J. N., & Gutiérrez-i-Puigarnau, E. (2011). Are workers with a long commute less productive? An empirical analysis of absenteeism. Regional Science and Urban Economics, 41(1), 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.regsciurbeco.2010.07.005

^[10] Richard Fry. 2020. “Prior to COVID-19, Urban Core Counties in the U.S. Were Gaining Vitality on Key Measures.” Retrieved from https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/07/29/prior-to-covid-19-urban-core-counties-in-the-u-s-were-gaining-vitality-on-key-measures/

Edited by Emma Vinella-Brusher, Managing Editor

Featured image courtesy of the Tallahassee Democrat

How to Help Texans

February 18, 2021 / odrozd

Winter Storm Uri brought freezing temperatures to the state of Texas and power outages to millions. Now, several days later, nearly a half-million residents remain without electricity and struggle to stay warm and survive the harsh conditions. Many have pointed to how the blackouts have disproportionately affected already vulnerable populations, and night photos seem to highlight the physicality of the divide.

*The Houston Skyline. Photo Credit: ABC13 Houston*

Organizations across Texas are working to provide the necessary services to support residents in need. In these challenging times, even those of us who are far away can still help. Here are some organizations and resources:

Feed the People Dallas Mutual Aid

CrowdSource Rescue

Austin Mutual Aid

Sunrise Homeless Navigation Center

Para Mi Gente Mutual Aid

Here for a more comprehensive list

Cover image courtesy of Ron Jenkins via Forbes.com

Post by Siobhan Nelson, Angles Managing Editor

Rebuilding their trust in what we say: Public information’s new frontier

May 28, 2020 / odrozd

This piece was originally published by Patience Wall on the Coastal Resilience Blog on May 18, 2020

Public information is at the core of our public safety and natural disaster resilience work. It’s a reliable source we can turn to when outcomes are uncertain and emergency responses are ambiguous. But in a world where we’re constantly bombarded with growing misinformation, contentious mistrust of government and the scripted drama of endlessly breaking news, all of the efforts that go into providing reliable public information often go unseen and perhaps even undervalued.

I was reminded of those many unseen efforts during Keith Acree’s guest lecture in the Coastal Resilience Center’s Natural Hazards and Resilience Speaker Series in April. Acree serves as a Public Information Officer with North Carolina’s Department of Public Safety. As a part of the Emergency Management team, he works with other public information officers to manage external affairs communications to the public. In natural disaster emergencies, he helps coordinate messaging through the state’s Joint Information System by collaborating with the other public information officers to ensure there’s consistent emergency communications across state agencies and departments. This external communication work extends to composing messaging for press briefings with the Governor and other administrators.

*North Carolina Emergency Management “Safety messaging.” Photo Credit: Keith Acree’s Natural Hazard Resilience Series guest lecture*

Outside of natural disaster work, Acree’s day-to-day work includes safety messaging campaigns and preparation. This messaging covers a wide array of hazards and risks from grill safety to power line warnings to mold precautions. These preparedness campaigns are supported through a host of in-person and virtual campaigns including but not limited to: ReadyNC.org, NC 211, the emergency management podcast and several Preparedness Weeks for hurricanes and other recurring severe weather events.

The sheer span of these campaigns speaks to the unseen efforts I noted earlier. While I have heard of several of the programs Acree mentioned, I often feel as if they’re taken for granted in a modern world with a short attention span and a variety of methods to receive news. In particular, creating effective messaging in this context is a challenging undertaking.

When asked how his office gauges the effectiveness of their preparedness campaigns, Acree cited social media sharing and engagement as an important indicator of the effectiveness of their outreach strategies. This makes sense considering social media’s impact and its reputation as a ubiquitous platform for constant communication and contact. Still, social media’s effectiveness can often become clouded by its low barriers to entry, which undermines the reliability of information found on its platforms. Anyone can make a social media profile and disseminate information under the guise of public welfare, and public information officers have to navigate how to ensure their verified campaigns can effectively counter misinformation campaigns in this murky context.

*NC Gov. Roy Cooper gives an update on the state’s preparations for Hurricane Florence in Sept. 2018. Photo Credit: Sam DeGrave/Asheville Citizen-Times.*

Concerns over misinformation campaigns and how public officials should counter them have resurfaced as of late in the midst of COVID-19 responses, and these concerns impact Acree’s work as public information does not end with natural hazards, but extends to biological threats as well. Acree says his office tries to battle misinformation by directing the public to reliable sources and noted that their news conferences and briefings as good ways to do that. But what happens when the reliability of public information is in question? The same contentious mistrust of government that I spoke to earlier has eroded the perceived reliability of public information, and regardless of where we place the blame for this mistrust, it is fueling the public’s consumption of misinformation.

Herein lies the core challenge for public information officials working in today’s world: How do we get the public to trust us? Yes, we want to know how you adequately publicize what the public needs to know in a world of crowded sources of information (both true and purposefully misleading). But we also need to know if people are getting what they need and believing it. Answering this question is key to ensuring we can reach our resilience goals. Without public trust, our public information would not only be undervalued, it may not even be used.

About the Author: Patience Wall is pursuing a MBA/ MCRP dual-degree with concentrations in Economic Development and Real Estate. While at Carolina, she’s focusing on how to attain equity in regional economic development and housing opportunities through public-private partnerships. Her past work experience includes a dash of elementary education, a brief stint as a pollster and time leading research and policy engagement initiatives at Duke. She obtained her undergraduate degree in Public Policy Studies from Duke University in 2015.

Featured Image: NC Emergency Management Logo. Photo Credit: defensealliancenc.org

From the CPJ Archives: Steps Towards Recovery – An Integrated Platform for Disaster Recovery Planning, Management, and Tracking

April 27, 2020 / odrozd

This week we’re sharing an article that originally appeared in Volume 42 of the Carolina Planning Journal back in 2017. The theme of that edition was Re:(Anything) from Revitalization to Resilience. This volume sought to understand the convergent and contradictory meanings behind the prefix ‘re-‘. Articles covered diverse topics like revitalization, resiliency, and reinvestment. In this piece, Jennifer Horney and Katie Kirsch, both of Texas A&M at the time, presented the Disaster Recovery Tracking Tool, a guide for local officials to use to facilitate a careful and deliberative recovery process. With everything going on in the world today, we can’t forget that hurricane and wildfire season will be upon us soon and that these kind of tools remain critically important to ensure effective and equitable recovery, particularly in an era of COVID-19.

Volume 42 and other back issues of the Journal can be found on our website at http://carolinaplanning.unc.edu/.

By Katie Kirsch (MS) and Jennifer Horney (PhD, MPH)

The persistent movement of people and economic development to highly vulnerable regions, such as the U.S. Southeastern Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, has dominated growth in disaster losses for the past 50 years (Pielke et al. 2008). The escalation of economic losses resulting from natural disasters in the U.S. — rising faster than either overall population or gross national product —- highlights the critical need for more effective, and resilience building, strategies for disaster recovery (Gall, Borden, Emrich and Cutter 2011). While the inherent geographic vulnerabilities of a coastal community cannot be modified, pre-disaster recovery planning has been shown to significantly improve post-event recovery outcomes (Zukowski 2014). After a disaster and during a time of high stress and uncertainty, pressure to make decisions and allocate funds to quicken recovery results in decisions that may be made with little time for deliberation or data gathering (Olshansky and Johnson 2010). In the absence of pre-disaster planning for recovery, insufficient recovery management can result in a failure to restore or improve upon pre-disaster conditions (Smith and Wenger 2006).

At the federal level, the Disaster Mitigation Act requires state and local governments to adopt hazard mitigation plans as a condition of receiving certain forms of federal disaster assistance (Disaster Mitigation Act 2000). Despite the recognized benefits of pre-disaster recovery planning, no such federal requirement exists for recovery plans. For this and other reasons, the development of high quality disaster recovery plans has lagged at both the state and local levels with some notable exceptions (U.S. Government Accountability Office 2016; Berke et al. 2014). The City of Los Angeles, California, created a Recovery and Reconstruction plan in 1987, several years before the 1994 Northridge Earthquake (City of Los Angeles Emergency Operations Organization 1994). Florida enacted legislation in 2008 requiring all local governments to adopt pre-disaster recovery plans either as a component of the local comprehensive plan or as a stand-alone document. The North Carolina Coastal Area Management Act has required the adoption of recovery elements in land use plans in coastal counties since the late 1990s, and community-engaged post-disaster recovery planning processes in Louisiana following Hurricane Katrina led to the adoption of a regional recovery plan (Norton 2005; Louisiana Speaks 2007). However, mandates for recovery planning that are put in place without funding support, clear standards, and strong oversight have generally resulted in either low levels of compliance or low quality plans.

A core set of plan quality principles provide a measurable, adaptable, and sufficient way to form a holistic evaluation of a community (Berke et al. 2014). Since established plan quality principles may not be fully suited for the development and evaluation of recovery plans, researchers have sought to define indicators or metrics to measure and better understand recovery trajectory in disaster affected communities (Chang 2010; Cutter, Burton, and Emrich 2010; Dwyer and Horney 2014; Horney et al. 2016; Jordan and Javernick-Will 2014; Norris et al. 2008).

Federal guidance has been offered as well. The National Disaster Recovery Framework (NDRF) was developed to guide local, state, and federal planning activities, core capabilities, and operational structures in preparation for and in the aftermath of disaster events (U.S. Department of Homeland Security 2016). The core capabilities described in the NDRF include planning, public information and warning, operational coordination, economic recovery, health and social services, housing, infrastructure systems, and natural and cultural resources (U.S. Department of Homeland Security 2016). Continuous monitoring and evaluation is required to determine the progress of a community in becoming proficient in these capabilities. However, capacity of local governments to monitor the multiple domains of a community may be impeded given that disaster recovery is subject to the compression of multiple types of redevelopment and recovery activities into a shortened post-disaster time period (Olshansky, Hopkins, and Johnson 2012). Therefore, resources that streamline the process of data collection and analysis are needed to eliminate this burden and allow decision-makers to more efficiently allocate their time to the benefit of the whole community.

The Disaster Recovery Tracking Tool

Recovery from disasters is a core responsibility for federal, state, and local governments. Systematic means of measuring the disaster recovery process across events and over time are needed to plan for and recover from disasters. Developed as part of the former Coastal Hazards Center of Excellence (now known as the Coastal Resilience Center of Excellence at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), the Disaster Recovery Tracking Tool (www.trackyourrecovery.org) was created to provide a free, secure, web-based disaster recovery management platform for local governments and decision-makers.

Metric Development and Application

The monitoring function of the Disaster Recovery Tracking Tool consists of eighty-four metrics, organized within four4 themes (financial, process, public sector, and social) and ten focus areas derived from Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Recovery Support Functions (RSFs) and core capabilities (U.S. Department of Homeland Security 2016). These metrics include both user-entered data (n=49) and data that are automatically populated from publically available sources (e.g., the American Community Survey, County Business Patterns, Disaster Declarations Summaries) across multiple years (n=35). These metrics were developed through a process that included: 1) a systematic review of the literature; 2) a content review of eighty-seven pre-disaster recovery plans developed by U.S. Gulf Coast and U.S. Atlantic counties and municipalities; 3) case studies of disaster affected communities including Hoboken, New Jersey and New Hanover County, North Carolina; 4) twenty-one key informant interviews; 5) two focus groups with ten experts; and 6) a case study of six disaster-affected communities located in Texas (Dwyer and Honey 2014; Horney and Smith 2015; Horney et al. 2016).

These activities provided validation of the proposed metrics identified in the systematic review. For example, during the content review of disaster recovery plans, a total of 204 potential metrics were identified in plans and categorized by RSF or core capability. All plan-based metrics were categorized into one of the Disaster Recovery Tracking Tool’s metrics, indicating that plan-based metrics validated the literature review-based metrics (Horney et al. 2016). Key informant interview and focus groups participants also supported the validity of the proposed metrics, pointing out that they “capture the complexities of community disaster recovery and provide potential opportunities for linkages to the development of disaster recovery plans and other activities that could increase community resilience in the future,” and also suggested changes mostly with the organization of the metrics (Dwyer and Horney 2014). A retrospective review of two case study communities undergoing recovery provided additional validation. The case studies were an attempt to use a community’s actual recovery experiences to collect data on the metrics and demonstrate how local recovery activities could be documented and shown to fulfill national recovery priorities.

One case study of the Disaster Recovery Tracking Tool’s functionality focused on New Hanover County’s recovery from Hurricane Irene in 2011. Hurricane Irene made landfall several times along the east coast of the United States in late August 2011, causing over $16 billion in damages. The storm’s first landfall in the United States was on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, just north of New Hanover County. New Hanover County, located in southeastern North Carolina and bordering the Atlantic Ocean, has approximately 200,000 residents (U.S. Census, 2010). Findings from the case study indicated that nearly half (forty-six percent) of the proposed metrics were represented in the Hurricane Irene recovery, both within community planning documents such as the County’s Multi-Jurisdictional Hazard Mitigation Plan Update in 2010 and in media reports and other documentation such as the New Hanover County Emergency Management Center’s Facebook page, Tweets, and YouTube videos that were created to inform residents about recovery issues (Covi 2012). Both baseline and current status data were most widely available for metrics related to economy, housing, and infrastructure. Fewer data were available for metrics in natural and cultural resources.

The metrics included in the current Disaster Recovery Tracking Tool were developed to capture a concise snapshot of community recovery functions at the local level and are applicable throughout the recovery continuum, defined by FEMA as a “sequence of interdependent and often concurrent activities that progressively advance a community towards a successful recovery” (U.S. Department of Homeland Security 2016). When leveraged in advance of a disruptive event, the metrics provided can guide preparedness and mitigation efforts by enabling users (e.g., planners, emergency managers, and long-term recovery committees) to readily identify and better understand existing vulnerabilities within the community, such as households without access to a vehicle (Figure 1). For example, practitioners populating the tool with baseline data from existing planning documents can compare pre- and post-disaster status using baseline data and updated current status data to identify disparate patterns of recovery in different focus areas such as housing or economic development. Quantitative data collected about ongoing recovery needs can serve as a means of promoting transparency and fostering public confidence in the actions of the local governing body. Reports generated by the tool can provide users a way to prioritize recovery goals and activities, potentially making recovery more effective and efficient and communities more resilient.

**Figure 1. Example of Disaster Recovery Tool Metric Chart**

Management Functions

The management functions of the Disaster Recovery Tracking Tool enable local users to maintain records of public outreach activities and meetings; store and access essential information for community organizations and other stakeholders; log, prioritize, and track the progress of recovery-oriented tasks; and capture resource inventories and expenditures for grant eligibility and reporting.

Tracking and Reporting

Effective management of recovery operations necessitates rapid and reliable record keeping. In the aftermath of a disaster, decision-makers are challenged by resource limitations and time constraints. Therefore, the Disaster Recovery Tracking Tool also functions as a disaster recovery management platform, enabling users to maintain accessible records of public outreach activities and local contacts, log and monitor the status of recovery-oriented tasks, and capture resource expenditure data required for grant eligibility and reporting. To streamline the process of required reporting, FEMA summary record forms may be automatically populated following data entry. The ability to generate forms from existing records saves critically needed time following a disaster.

Future Work

Ultimately, all communities should have a high-quality, community-wide disaster recovery plan that reflects their own jurisdiction’s culture and practice of recovery planning and focuses on the inclusion of a network of stakeholders who share responsibility in rebuilding efforts. A holistic perspective on the progress of disaster recovery is essential for the development of well-informed disaster recovery plans that are actionable, feasible, and effective. For example, one of the primary indicators of a high-quality plan is a strong community fact base that accurately characterizes local conditions, such as identified hazards and existing resources available to reduce risk. It is often difficult for smaller communities with limited capacity for recovery planning to develop a robust fact base focused on high-priority issues. In this case, data collected to populate the metrics in the Disaster Recovery Tracking Tool can guide the development of specific recovery plan elements, such as the fact base, as part of a larger plan, or the development of a stand-alone recovery plan. In the near future, the Disaster Recovery Tracking Tool will provide a plan building template to give users an opportunity to leverage their time, effort, and resources by using the data entered into the Tool to develop a pre-disaster recovery plan for their jurisdiction.

References

Berke, P., J. Cooper, M. Aminto, S. Grabich, and J. Horney. 2014. “Adaptive Planning for Disaster Recovery and Resiliency: An Evaluation of 87 Local Recovery Plans in Eight States.” Journal of the American Planning Association 80:310-23. doi:10.1080/01944363.2014.976585.

Chang, Stephanie E. 2010. “Urban Disaster Recovery: A Measurement Framework and Its Application to the 1995 Kobe Earthquake.” Disasters 34:303-27.

City of Los Angeles. 1994. City of Los Angeles Recovery and Reconstruction Plan. Los Angeles: Emergency Operations Board. http://eird.org/cd/recovery-planning/docs/2-planning-process-scenario/Los-angles-recovery-and-reconstruction-plan.pdf.

Covi, Michelle. 2012. “Storm Practices: Lessons Learned from Hurricane Irene.” Coastwatch: A North Carolina Sea Grant Magazine, Autumn 2012. Accessed October 20, 2014. http://ncseagrant.ncsu.edu/coastwatch/previous-issues/2012-2/autumn-2012/storm-practices-lessons-learned-from-hurricane-irene/.

Cutter, Susan L., Christopher G. Burton, and Christopher T. Emrich. 2010. “Disaster Resilience Indicators for Benchmarking Baseline Conditions.” Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management 7:51. doi:10.2202/1547-7355.1732.

Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000, Public Law 106-390, U.S. Statutes at Large 114 (2000): 1552-1576.

Dwyer, Caroline, and Jennifer Horney. 2014. “Validating Indicators of Disaster Recovery with Qualitative Research.” PLOS Current Disasters 6:ecurrents.dis.ec60859ff436919e096d51ef7d50736f. doi:10.1371/currents.dis.ec60859ff436919e096d51ef7d50736f.

Gall, M., K. A. Borden, C. T. Emrich, and S. L. Cutter. 2011. “The Unsustainable Trend of Natural Hazard Losses in the United States.” Sustainability 3:2157-81.

Horney, J., M. Aminto, P. Berke, and G. Smith. 2016. “Developing Indicators to Measure Post-Disaster Community Recovery in the United States.” Disasters 41:124-49. doi:10.1111/disa.12190.

Horney, Jennifer, and Gavin Smith. 2015. Measuring Successful Disaster Recovery. A Case Study of Six Communities in Texas, United States. Tysons, VA: LMI Research Institute.

Jordan, Elizabeth, and Amy Javernick-Will. 2014. “Determining the Causal Factors of Community Recovery.” International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters 32:405-27.

Louisiana Speaks. 2007. Louisiana Speaks Regional Plan. Vision and Strategies for Recovery and Growth in South Louisiana. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana Recovery Authority. http://www.cpex.org/louisiana-speaks/.

New Hanover County, North Carolina. 2010. “2010 Multi-Jurisdictional Hazard Mitigation Plan Update.” http://mitigationguide.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/NC_NewHanoverCo.pdf.

Norris, F. H., S. P. Stevens, B. Pfefferbaum, K. F. Wyche, and R. L. Pfefferbaum. 2008. “Community Resilience as a Metaphor, Theory, Set of Capacities, and Strategy for Disaster Readiness.” American Journal of Community Psychology 41:127-50.

Norton, Richard K. 2005. “More and Better Local Planning. State-Mandated Local Planning in Coastal North Carolina.” Journal of the American Planning Association 71:55-71.

Olshansky, Robert B., Lewis D. Hopkins, and Laurie A. Johnson. 2012. “Disaster and Recovery: Processes Compressed in Time.” Natural Hazards Review 13:173-8. doi:10.1061/(ASCE)NH.1527-6996.0000077.

Olshansky, Robert B., and Laurie A. Johnson. 2010. Clear as Mud: Planning for the Rebuilding of New Orleans. Washington, DC: Island Press.

Pielke Jr., R. A., J. Gratz, C. W. Landsea, D. Collins, M. A. Saunders, and R. Musulin. 2008. “Normalized Hurricane Damages in the United States: 1900–2005.” Natural Hazards Review 9:29–42. doi:10.1061/(ASCE)1527-6988(2008)9:1(29).

Smith, Gavin P., and Dennis Wenger. 2006. “Sustainable Disaster Recovery: Operationalizing an Existing Agenda.” In Handbook of Disaster Research, edited by Havidán Rodríguez, Enrico L. Quarantelli, Russell R. Dynes, 234-57. New York, NY: Springer Verlag.

U.S. Census Bureau. 2010. “American Fact Finder: New Hanover County, North Carolina.” http://factfinder.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/community_facts.xhtml?src=bkmk.

U.S. Department of Homeland Security. 2016. National Disaster Recovery Framework. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Second edition. https://www.fema.gov/media-library-data/1466014998123-4bec8550930f774269e0c5968b120ba2/National_Disaster_Recovery_Framework2nd.pdf.

U.S. Government Accountability Office. 2016. Disaster Recovery. FEMA Needs to Assess Its Effectiveness in Implementing the National Disaster Recovery Framework. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Accountability Office. http://www.gao.gov/assets/680/677511.pdf.

Zukowski, Rebecca S. 2014. “The Impact of Adaptive Capacity on Disaster Response and Recovery: Evidence Supporting Core Community Capabilities.” Prehospital and Disaster Medicine 29:380-7.

About the Author: Katie Kirsch is a Research Associate in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health and a PhD Candidate in Epidemiology and Public Health at Texas A&M University. She is the project manager of the Disaster Recovery Tracking Tool at trackyourrecovery.org. Jennifer Horney is a Professor in the Disaster Research Center and the Founding Director of the Epidemiology Program at the University of Delaware (previously Texas A&M). Her research focuses on the public health impacts of disasters and linkages between plan quality and post-disaster outcomes.

Featured Image: This image, by Sha’zire White as part of the ReFraming Food photo series, was the cover of the 42nd print edition of the Carolina Planning Journal.

Lessons in Disaster Response from the Tōhoku Earthquake and Tsunami

March 23, 2020 / odrozd

By Rachael Wolff

Tsunami comes from the Japanese characters meaning harbor (津tsu) and wave (波nami). While earthquakes and their resulting tsunamis have been a part of Japanese life since at least the 13th century, the 2011 duo that rocked Japan was the largest ever recorded in the country and fourth largest in the world. Interviews with first responders reveal their challenges with mental health and with “role conflict,” suggesting that communication could be improved during future man-made or natural disasters.

Japan is part of the “Ring of Fire,” home to the volatile Pacific Plate. Photo Credit: U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)

Three Disasters

Tōhoku is located in the northeastern region of Japan’s main Honshu island and is known for its hot springs, sake, cherry blossoms, and skiing. Though Tōhoku’s six prefectures are generally rural with a large elderly population, the city of Sendai was one of the most vulnerable areas hit.

Map of Tōhoku, Japan. Photo Credit: Tōhoku Tourism Promotion Organization

At 2:45 pm on March 11, 2011, a 9.0 magnitude earthquake rocked Japan. The epicenter was detected 64 miles off of the Sendai coast and was estimated to be only 18.6 miles below the surface. Days before, a 7.2 magnitude earthquake with 6.0 magnitude aftershocks had occurred nearby. The pressure from the colliding tectonic plates was enough to create 9 to 131-foot tsunami waves that rolled in at the speed of a jet plane. These waves caused millions of dollars in damage as far east as California.

March 11, 2011 Shakemap. Photo Credit: The New York Times

At the time of the disaster, Japan was home to 54 nuclear reactors. The shocks from the earthquake-tsunami led to fires in multiple nuclear plants on the island, and the meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant was at the center of the scrutiny and press coverage. The Fukushima incident displaced more than 160,000 local residents, caused 44 deaths, and led to the sale of radioactive beef. Meanwhile, Japan also worked to control the smaller fires that burned along its coast.

The immediate aftereffects of these disasters were devastating. Within 48 hours, 10 percent of the island—or 6 million homes—had lost power. Overall, between 15,000 and 30,000 people had perished, and there were some 100,000 missing children. The total damages in Japan may have reached $220 billion, destroying infrastructure, economies, and livelihoods—especially in farming and fishing villages such as Ishinomaki.

People take shelter as a ceiling collapses in a bookstore during the earthquake in Sendai, northeastern Japan, on March 11, 2011. Photo Credit: Kyodo/Reuters via The Atlantic

The Responders

In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, 100,000 members of the Self-Defense Force deployed, rescuing people trapped under buildings and stuck in flood waters. Elite squads of firefighters did the same, many of them rushing towards the Fukushima Daiichi disaster instead of away from it.

Dr. Michelle Dovil specializes in disaster risk, gender studies, and environmental inequality at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University. In September 2014 during her doctoral program, she accompanied her advisor and Howard University professor Dr. Terri Adams to interview first responders in Sendai.

Dovil said some of the most surprising results from the sample of firefighters they interviewed were the respondents’ hesitation towards emotional and psychological impacts.* While some admitted to not sleeping, depression, and triggers such as shaking or a tsunami movie on TV, none admitted to receiving any help. The government offered testing and subsequent counseling, but most firefighters were not receptive to it. Dovil observed that the trend may be similar in African American and Latinx communities, where mental health is still considered a “big taboo.” Indeed, both contemporary and academic sources suggest stigma and denial of mental health is common in Japan.

The firefighters also balanced emergency response and personal duties in a challenge of “role conflict.” Similar to what Adams and Dovil found post-Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, many first responders were conflicted between the need to help others and the desire to keep track of their own family, friends, and loved ones.

“With the challenges, especially with the role conflict, we saw a lot of similarities [to other disasters] as it relates to just being concerned: their anxiety, the frustration, and the worry,” Dovil said.

While focus groups did not directly address the topic of risk, many firefighters expressed that the earthquake-tsunami was unexpected. One respondent called on people to “take care of themselves.” Another added, “just evacuate and don’t think.” One respondent may have alluded to the Japanese concept of wa (和), or “social harmony,” in his final remarks:

“Japanese people support each other, so the conflict is very low. Japanese people are very polite and have good morals even in disasters. Japanese people will aim to support others.”

Firefighters search for victims on March 14, 2011, in Soma, Fukushima Prefecture, three days after the massive earthquake and tsunami struck. Photo Credit: AP via The Atlantic

Recommendations

Throughout the interview, both the firefighters and Dovil stressed the importance of information dissemination. While Japan is often seen as a leader in early warning systems and the emergency management community (also: TIME, World Bank, Washington Post), there were still breakdowns in communication. Specifically, phone systems were overwhelmed. At one fire station, there was a line for disaster victims but not another to communicate tasks to workers. Broadly, coastal and remote areas had difficulty evacuating.

Dovil stressed that risk should be tailored to specific communities because there is no “monolithic group.” Instead: “Risk communication is a component in how people receive this message and how they perceive the message, which inadvertently impacts how these communities will take protective actions and/or evacuate as a result of a disaster.”

After the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, 91 countries provided aid to Japan. It becomes crucial for governments at all levels to understand the populations they serve so that disaster response and recovery can be as effective and efficient as possible.

* Dovil, Michelle. Interview by Rachael Wolff. March 16, 2020.

Featured Image: Huge waves sweep ashore and flood Sendai Airport. Photo Credit: Kyodo/Reuters via International Business Times.

About the Author: Rachael Wolff is a first-year master’s candidate in the Department of City and Regional Planning. She is interested in learning how flood risk shapes land use, property values and behavior. Prior to UNC, Rachael worked at a federal agency in Washington, D.C., where she also earned her bachelor’s degree at American University.

From the CPJ Archives: (Re)Shaping the Development Discussion – Connecting Elected Officials and Resilience Experts in Coastal Louisiana

March 3, 2020 / odrozd

This week we’re sharing an article that originally appeared in Volume 43 of the Carolina Planning Journal back in 2018. The theme of that edition was Planning for Uncertainty, which seems fitting in the midst of Presidential Election primary season! In this Volume, articles covered diverse topics from gentrification to education to explore the myriad ways in which risk and uncertainty are ever present in planning. Traci Birch (PhD, AICP) and Jeff Carney (AIA, AICP) of the LSU Coastal Sustainability Studio focused on uncertainty in resilience planning specifically, presenting a range of creative planning methods for engaging communities in coastal restoration efforts.

Volume 43 and other back issues of the Journal can be found on our website at http://carolinaplanning.unc.edu/.

By Traci Birch (PhD, AICP) and Jeff Carney (AIA, AICP)