Monday, September 28, 2009
Community Resilience: A Successful National Preparedness Month
As we come to the end of National Preparedness Month, DHS has announced that Secretary Napolitano will deliver a major speech on national preparedness tomorrow, Tuesday, September 29 at 2pm eastern time. We at CARRI will be listening intently to hear what the Secretary says about resilience, particularly at the local level. The speech will be carried live at http://www.dhs.gov/. For those not able to watch the speech live, it will be posted at http://www.ready.gov/ and http://www.citizencorps.gov/. We heartily recommend that our followers listen to the Secretary. It may give all us a clue on where the Department is headed in the area of resilience.
Friday, September 18, 2009
Community Resilience: Informing Policy
As I may have stated earlier in this blog, one of the tensions in the Community and Regional Resilience Institute work from the very beginning has been between what I call “getting it right” and “getting it now.” By that I mean that it is critical for the nation that the solutions we adopt to increase our resilience work in practice because they are grounded in knowledge gained from research and from practical experience. That’s getting it right. But we also have to realize that the nation needs solutions now. The next hurricane or tornado or terrorist won’t wait until we get it exactly right.
I’m not sure that this tension is recognized at the national level. I don’t claim to have great insight into or knowledge of all that is going on nationally on the resilience front but from my limited view of current processes and deliberations two things seem apparent. First, there is limited interaction between those scholars and researchers who have studied the various aspects of resilience for years and the policy community that is seeking to frame policies and processes for a more resilient nation. Second, virtually every federal agency is embracing a fairly parochial view of resilience with very little understanding of what other agencies (often in the same department) are doing.
I have been told that the first observation is not surprising. It has taken 25 years for the scientific community to begin to influence and have an actual impact on policy surrounding climate change. It seems to me that we should be trying to accelerate this interaction in the current resilience discussion.
Separate acceptance of resilience as an agency goal without understanding other efforts is likely to produce multiple, overlapping, and conflicting programs that will confuse and frustrate our communities and citizens. Coordination at the federal level is absolutely required now.
I’m not sure that this tension is recognized at the national level. I don’t claim to have great insight into or knowledge of all that is going on nationally on the resilience front but from my limited view of current processes and deliberations two things seem apparent. First, there is limited interaction between those scholars and researchers who have studied the various aspects of resilience for years and the policy community that is seeking to frame policies and processes for a more resilient nation. Second, virtually every federal agency is embracing a fairly parochial view of resilience with very little understanding of what other agencies (often in the same department) are doing.
I have been told that the first observation is not surprising. It has taken 25 years for the scientific community to begin to influence and have an actual impact on policy surrounding climate change. It seems to me that we should be trying to accelerate this interaction in the current resilience discussion.
Separate acceptance of resilience as an agency goal without understanding other efforts is likely to produce multiple, overlapping, and conflicting programs that will confuse and frustrate our communities and citizens. Coordination at the federal level is absolutely required now.
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Community Resilience and Personal Responsibility
In its recently released report, Personal Preparedness in America: Findings from the 2009 Citizen Corps National Survey, FEMA discovered that we as individuals are not as prepared for disaster as we should be. The report (www.citizencorps.gov/ready/2009findings.shtm) provides a detailed look into individual perceptions of disaster readiness and responsibilities as well as interesting evaluations of demographic and contextual insights. I don’t think that anyone should be very surprised by this report.
Since Hurricane Andrew (maybe Hugo), American expectations of outside assistance particularly federal assistance have grown steadily, rapidly and unrealistically. Perhaps most evident in Katrina, our citizens and our communities seem increasingly to believe that FEMA will be on site at almost any level of disaster within 48 hours and will fix the problem. This report reveals, for instance, that more than 60 percent of the respondents plan to rely on emergency responders in the first 72 hours following a disaster despite repeated warnings from governments at all levels to the contrary. As interestingly, even among those who deem themselves prepared for disaster, the survey finds that most do not have adequate family plans and lack even a basic understanding of their community’s plans.
This problem is only a failure of the federal government in that we continue to believe that we can craft national solutions to local problems. At its heart, this is an indication of community failure. Very few communities have coherent, highly coordinated, individual preparedness efforts with a common message across jurisdictions and well thought ways to transmit the message to the full fabric of their societies. I am sure that there are some. In fact I highlighted one in my posting of March 24, 2009, the “I’m Ready Campaign” in Shelby County, Tennessee. The FEMA report, however, says that our communities are not doing enough or are not doing it right.
I am a big advocate of FEMA’s Citizen Corps. The thousands of Citizen Corps councils across the nation are in exactly the right place to solve this challenge. Citizen Corps hasn’t had greater success because communities continue to rely on federal funding of the councils, an expectation which belies the very name of their mission “citizen” corps. No matter how hard we try, the nation will never provide the resources to fully support all the nation’s communities in this way -- nor should we. This is a local community problem. Federal funding of what should be local initiatives only continues to foster the belief that preparing communities to recover from disaster is a federal responsibility. Communities have an inherent responsibility to protect their citizens. They need to put the skin in the game to get individual preparedness right.
Since Hurricane Andrew (maybe Hugo), American expectations of outside assistance particularly federal assistance have grown steadily, rapidly and unrealistically. Perhaps most evident in Katrina, our citizens and our communities seem increasingly to believe that FEMA will be on site at almost any level of disaster within 48 hours and will fix the problem. This report reveals, for instance, that more than 60 percent of the respondents plan to rely on emergency responders in the first 72 hours following a disaster despite repeated warnings from governments at all levels to the contrary. As interestingly, even among those who deem themselves prepared for disaster, the survey finds that most do not have adequate family plans and lack even a basic understanding of their community’s plans.
This problem is only a failure of the federal government in that we continue to believe that we can craft national solutions to local problems. At its heart, this is an indication of community failure. Very few communities have coherent, highly coordinated, individual preparedness efforts with a common message across jurisdictions and well thought ways to transmit the message to the full fabric of their societies. I am sure that there are some. In fact I highlighted one in my posting of March 24, 2009, the “I’m Ready Campaign” in Shelby County, Tennessee. The FEMA report, however, says that our communities are not doing enough or are not doing it right.
I am a big advocate of FEMA’s Citizen Corps. The thousands of Citizen Corps councils across the nation are in exactly the right place to solve this challenge. Citizen Corps hasn’t had greater success because communities continue to rely on federal funding of the councils, an expectation which belies the very name of their mission “citizen” corps. No matter how hard we try, the nation will never provide the resources to fully support all the nation’s communities in this way -- nor should we. This is a local community problem. Federal funding of what should be local initiatives only continues to foster the belief that preparing communities to recover from disaster is a federal responsibility. Communities have an inherent responsibility to protect their citizens. They need to put the skin in the game to get individual preparedness right.
Friday, September 4, 2009
Where Does Mitigation Fit?
One of our CARRI blog followers in a comment to the August 18 blog expresses the thought that “mitigation” should be in his words, “included as a component of any Sustainable and Resilient Nation.” (See the comment to “Simultaneous or Sequential,” August 18, 2009) He goes on to give several examples of how actions to mitigate would beneficially contribute to limiting the effects of disasters.
The comments have caused me to think about how CARRI is handling the important area of mitigation to disaster. Clear actions to mitigate are important and must be part of any community's plan to reach a state approaching resilience. Much of the writing about mitigation in disaster management seems to group mitigation actions into two categories – structural (engineered interventions) and non-structural (planning, codes, restrictions, material usage). Mitigation seems, therefore, to deal primarily with the physical environment. While this is clearly critical, it is not sufficient by itself.
CARRI treats mitigation as part of the total resilience mindset – culture – ethos. As we look at our proposed emergency management continuum – prevent, protect, respond and recover – undergirded by preparation, mitigation falls in the “protect” area of the continuum. Mitigation is one of the ways we protect ourselves and our stuff from the effects of natural or man-made disasters.
Resilience, however, also recognizes two things that affect our thinking about mitigation. First, we will never be able to mitigate all effects. Something will be damaged and some things will be damaged severely despite our best efforts. We still need to bounce back from this damage. Second, resilience includes more actions than just those which address physical effects. Resilience in a community has social and economic aspects that are not typically considered when one is looking at mitigation actions. Perhaps using resilience as our basis of thought can help us to enlarge our perspective of mitigation to include more than how disasters affect the physical environment.
The comments have caused me to think about how CARRI is handling the important area of mitigation to disaster. Clear actions to mitigate are important and must be part of any community's plan to reach a state approaching resilience. Much of the writing about mitigation in disaster management seems to group mitigation actions into two categories – structural (engineered interventions) and non-structural (planning, codes, restrictions, material usage). Mitigation seems, therefore, to deal primarily with the physical environment. While this is clearly critical, it is not sufficient by itself.
CARRI treats mitigation as part of the total resilience mindset – culture – ethos. As we look at our proposed emergency management continuum – prevent, protect, respond and recover – undergirded by preparation, mitigation falls in the “protect” area of the continuum. Mitigation is one of the ways we protect ourselves and our stuff from the effects of natural or man-made disasters.
Resilience, however, also recognizes two things that affect our thinking about mitigation. First, we will never be able to mitigate all effects. Something will be damaged and some things will be damaged severely despite our best efforts. We still need to bounce back from this damage. Second, resilience includes more actions than just those which address physical effects. Resilience in a community has social and economic aspects that are not typically considered when one is looking at mitigation actions. Perhaps using resilience as our basis of thought can help us to enlarge our perspective of mitigation to include more than how disasters affect the physical environment.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Resilience at the Top
The President’s weekly radio address on Saturday was dedicated to remembering the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. It is worth noting that he used the word resilience in his address and called for the nation to be more resilient. He stated, “As we rebuild and recover, we must also learn the lessons of Katrina so that our nation is more protected and resilient in the face of disaster.” The President went on to support a multi-hazards approach to national preparedness giving examples in the natural, medical and man-made disaster areas. As I have noted earlier, the concept of resilience as a national goal seems to be gaining traction at the national level. Clearly, a significant number of senior federal officials are beginning to incorporate resilience to many hazards into their strategic thinking. Getting the President firmly ensconced into a culture of national resilience has to be a top priority.
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