“Neighbors can hear the alarm so they call us, but when we get up to the home, it's vacant, locked up and we're unable to access them,”

Such calls are distracting firefighters from other more important calls in inhabited homes and putting a strain on the public emergency system.

via ABC15 News.

Model cities aren’t just for show; they can have real utility. In 1957 the US Army Corps of Engineers created the Bay Model, a replica of the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta meant to simulate the impact of public works projects and disasters—natural and man-made—on currents and tides.

Terence Russell at Wired Magazine tells us how scale models of cities are increasingly used for urban planning and design applications.

As John McQuaid at Huffington Post points out, the basic problem of New Orleans is “its siting, mostly below sea level, on an eroding, hurricane-prone river delta.” This context demands state and federal intervention if at all New Orleans should be considered suited for habitation. Man’s desire for controlling nature to suit his habitation needs does not necessarily triumph’s nature eventual dominance. I’ve no strong opinions whether New Orleans should or should not be developed but if it is meant to be built through a bottom up approach, it should continue on that path even in eventuality of a natural disaster.

Update: Nicole writes in to mention that she believes in good government that maintains flood control infrastructure and protect citizens from crime. I agree but like any rational entity, government will not giveth unless it can taketh even it means control over planning processes. Extremes in governance systems be it totally state-controlled or completely individualistic may not work and efforts should be made to find an amicable middle-ground.

Couple of colleagues in a Sustainable Urbanism class had proposed floating homes as a potential solution for homes in New Orleans. This floating villa designed by Swedish architect, Staffan Strindberg, currently situated in the town of Kalmar on the east coast of Sweden may be a tad fancy for residents of New Orleans especially for those whose houses got washed away. But definitely a technology worth exploring, right?

Americans increasingly insist on living in dense, vertical cities near water. About 91 percent of Americans now live in places at a moderate-to-high risk of earthquakes, volcanoes, tornadoes, wildfires, hurricanes, flooding, high-wind damage, or terrorism.

We concentrate ourselves, and the mere fact of concentration makes for greater calamity when the hazard, whatever it is, strikes. That we concentrate ourselves in places that are naturally dangerous makes it worse. Ultimately, our disrespect and disregard for the environment (we assume we can tame nature) is something that, if unabated, will lead to more suffering.

Something that I have always believed and quoted.

Mitigation couple with insurance coverage should be considered as an appropriate measure of risk prevention instead of depending solely on insurance. FEMA defines mitigation as “sustained action taken to reduce or eliminate long-term risk to people and property from hazards and their effects.” However due to low frequency of natural hazards or skewed risk perceptions, homeowners are unlikely to indulge in mitigation efforts apart from buying property insurance. The spillover effects of personal losses during a large-scale natural disaster often transforms an otherwise personal and private loss into a social risk in form of homelessness, displacement, unemployment, and rise in cost of public services.

Such a transformation almost mandates government action in an otherwise private insurance market and government aims to incorporate mitigation measures instead of merely diverting public funds towards disaster relief. The private insurance industry has also realized the importance of better building codes and mitigation processes to avoid hazard risks. Thus, it is important not only for the government but also for the private insurers to develop models that link mitigation with insurance so as to provide greater reliability and reduced uncertainty to assess costs and losses for a natural disaster.

The government has attempted to pass several legislative acts in order to increase insurance coverage and promote mitigation. The HR 4480 initiated in 1990 attempted to protect private insurers by transferring the risk to the federal government. Senate Bill 1350 considered increasing the availability of disaster insurance and encourage hazard mitigation to reduce reliance on federal assistance.

But after deliberations in the House of Representatives and the Senate, it was clear that in order to have any federal control over disaster relief and insurance it would incorporate imposing sufficient hazard mitigation techniques and have federal oversight and control. It would also entail sharing risk with the private sector and make insurance purchase mandatory for federally related mortgages. But due to limited success in mandatory implementations of the national flood insurance requirements, these legislative actions met with limited success.

Hazard mitigation has to be implemented either through voluntary action or through enforcement of government regulations, ordinances, and codes at the local level. But such enforcement depends on the institutional capacity of the local government. It has to be clear in statues and regulations as to what actions governments are required to take and should specify relationships between different subdivisions of the government. The success of such a plan is dependant on the land management goals incorporated in the comprehensive plans and the previous experience with similar disasters.

Implementation of mitigation measures through insurance has lead to identification of 8 broad themes and 15 specific objectives. The building codes should be made broader in order to go beyond protecting just life of the occupants and should be implemented statewide instead of varying across different jurisdictions. More public education and research on retrofitting structures with disaster preventive measures should be emphasized.

Kunreuther’s six objectives that include more stringent building codes, seals of approval on structures meeting codes, insurance that encourages mitigation, all-hazard insurance provision, government reinsurance, and subsidies for low-income families seems to address the crucial aspects of the relationship between mitigation and insurance. Provision of financial incentives through reduced premiums and limited availability of insurance also might encourage wider acceptance.
References:

Kunreuther, Howard. “A Program for Reducing Disaster Losses Through Insurance” in Paying the Price, Howard Kunreuther and Richard Roth eds., 1998 National Academy of Sciences Press.

Alex Staffen at WorldChanging gives a thumbs up to Worldwatch’s new report on the State of the World in which they cite that by the end of 2010, we would have nearly 3.5 billion urbanites. Alex particularly likes the chapters that address the crossover between the urban and the natural regions of the world that underline the role of sustainable development. The three aspects – providing clean water and sanitation, farming the cities (‘urban agriculture’), and reducing natural disaster risk in cities – would be key if we are to survive the growing wilderness that our cities are turning into.

Technorati Tags: urban, future, worldchanging, cities, sustainable development

The authors advocate a combined strategy of sustainable development and hazard mitigation to draft land use plans. Use of high risk areas such as flood plains, steep slopes, earthquake fault zones, coastal areas should be discouraged for human habitation. Sustainable practices advocate relocating land use away from hazard areas and relying on resilient building practices to withstand natural hazards.

The mitigation plan in addition to the comprehensive land use planning document allows the community to reassess its primary issues in a systematic manner. It also allows the community to understand the various connections and nexus between private land ownership and interests and public safety through proposed policies and programs. This contemplation not only informs the public of the risks but also makes them more aware of the mitigation strategies that the local government plans to implement either by coercion or cooperation. A comprehensive plan encapsulates the multiple goals, plans, issues, and policies of the community as a whole and transmits it to the interested stakeholders. The plan also forms a means to implement policy and enforce regulations, if need be, to counter risk vulnerabilities.

The primary values that should be considered before drafting a comprehensive plan are social values, market or economic values, and ecological values. These values examine the basic assumptions that a community holds central to its existence and proper balancing of these values are central to the model that links land use planning, mitigation, and sustainability. As FEMA puts it appropriately, all mitigation is local, the local government can use various powers – planning, regulatory, spending, taxing, and acquisition – that vary in its intensity with respect to coercion to formulate its own version of comprehensive plans.

The authors advocate the incorporation of hazard mitigation into land use planning to effectively channelize the implementation of such mitigating strategies. Usually communities wait for a “window of opportunity” to break down resistance to mitigation and introduce sustainable and innovative policy changes in the comprehensive plans. Mitigation strategies can be studied and emphasized at every stage of the planning process; be it generating planning intelligence or monitoring, evaluating, and revising plans in accordance with the changed objectives.

However, there is no single approach to design a hazard mitigation planning comprehensive plan and it is dependant on the planners and the relevant authorities to choose an appropriate method that would suit the region. The local government must be specific about studying the method necessary to involve the community in the planning process including deciding which component of a plan to include and emphasize given the motivations and political leanings of the people. This would let the planners understand what kind of plan and more importantly, what mitigation strategies to employ. The resulting plan need not be in accordance to a single strategy but instead be a hybrid, combining policies, land use plans & maps, and management programs geared toward realizing the consensual goals and objectives of the community. Creating a separate chapter on hazard mitigation in a comprehensive plan might also be considered as a middle ground between fully integrating hazard plans into the comprehensive plan and creating a separate hazards plan.

Reference: Chapter 4: Cooperating With Nature: Confronting Natural Hazards With Land-Use Planning for Sustainable Communities (Natural Hazards and Disasters).

Technorati Tags: mitigation, disaster relief, land use, planning, sustainability, comprehensive plan, values, FEMA

However two factors can directly affect the use of local government’s use of land use planning and development management programs – commitment of local officials and capacity of local governments. These factors can be directly affected by the extent of community resources that public officials are willing to dedicate for mitigation and the influence of the political climate that pushes these issues up in the public consciousness.

The federal government addresses mitigation issues through a range of programs aimed at land use and development in vulnerable areas. Although the federal government prefers the local government to intervene to regulate land use planning, it also uses an overarching controlling role in preserving wetlands and high-risk areas. The federal government primarily uses investment policies to offer incentives in order to put in place remedial measures; for e.g. The National Flood Insurance Act.

The Stafford Act is intended to offer a comprehensive look at mitigation strategies and provide integrated approaches but differing goals in different states and bureaucratic tangles have not made much difference. The federal government however acts in patchwork of programs that target specific areas instead of providing a broad-based approach and strategy. The federal programs have instead shown a stronger preference for protective methods rather than mitigation and preventive approaches that effectively increase the potential for damage. Stronger land use provisions are avoiding in federal mandate and instead rely on the local governments to enforce them, who in turn differ widely in their application of such regulations.

The states on the other hand have developed a variety of programs for vulnerable regions. Although special attention has been paid to environmentally sensitive areas, protection of regions vulnerable to natural hazards such as flooding, earthquake, or hurricanes has been given low priority. The variation in state programs is attributable to various factors that stem from either the economic or political climate of the regions. The state comprehensive planning mandates have provided a sense of direction to the local governments but due to lack of regional cooperation, such mandates lead to limited and sporadic changes. The goal divergence and mistrust among different levels of the governments are also partly to blame for the inconsistencies of different state policies.

Reference: Summary – Chapter 3: Cooperating With Nature: Confronting Natural Hazards With Land-Use Planning for Sustainable Communities (Natural Hazards and Disasters)

[tags]disaster mitigation, natural hazards, federal regulations, land use, comprehensive plan, The National Flood Insurance Act, planning, local government[/tags]