Search Results

This epilogue discusses the death of civil defense proclaimed by President George H. W. Bush and then by President Bill Clinton, followed by its resurrection in 2001. The current Homeland Security provisions are compared to previous civil defense measures. The emergence of a large grassroots resistance movement against the Patriot Act is described.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Hurricane Agnes, which swept through New York and Pennsylvania in late June of 1972. National trends influenced the federal and local response to the disaster. Hurricane Agnes struck the United States less than five months before the 1972 presidential election, and Richard Nixon's response to Hurricane Agnes was one variable in that election, which charted the course of American politics for the next three decades. In order to win reelection in 1972, President Nixon enacted the most substantial disaster aid package in history to that time, termed the Agnes Recovery Act, which he was convinced was the key to winning New York and Pennsylvania. The chapter then explains that local leaders played a crucial role in responding to the crisis in their communities and in flood recovery operations and rebuilding. Often neglected in studies of natural disaster policy is the way in which local leadership from government and the private sector interacted with representatives of the federal government to restore order and implement change. The chapter also introduces the Federal Office of Emergency Management (FEMA).

This chapter studies how, after his landslide reelection in 1972, Richard Nixon began his campaign to change the trajectory of American disaster policy and create a new era in which preparation and mitigation at the local level of government was a requirement to receive any assistance from the federal government. In signing the Disaster Relief Act of 1974 on May 22 of that year, Nixon remarked that this bill “truly brings the new federalism to our disaster preparedness and assistance activities.” The significance of the Disaster Relief Act of 1974 is debatable; some analysts see it as a continuation of practices set into motion by the Disaster Relief Act of 1950, whereas others see it as a significant departure from prior disaster legislation. The Disaster Relief Act of 1974 marked the beginning of the regulatory phase of disaster assistance, an era in which the federal government limited federal costs and forced individuals and communities to assume some of the responsibility of living in disaster-prone areas. The legislation contained the provisions requiring states and localities to take steps to mitigate future disasters. Moreover, it required communities to have plans and contingencies for disaster, which laid the foundation of the professionalization of emergency management. The chapter then considers the creation of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

Chapter 2 builds a historical narrative on how New Orleans’s civic actors influenced policies and politics around emergency management at the federal, state, and local level. This chapter focuses on the ways in which citizen requests have influenced the federal, state, and local governments. This has been done in two ways. First, civic actors urged the federal government to pursue structural solutions by constructing levees and drainage systems around flood-prone areas. Through browsing these documents, we can get a glimpse of how the perception of natural disasters had been constructed prior to Katrina’s landfall. To government officials and residents alike, disasters were considered as infrequent disruptions from which the city of New Orleans had to be protected, and the protection was mainly provided by the federal government’s engineering and insurance programs. The expanding protection instilled residents with an elevated sense of security and justified rebuilding in vulnerable regions. Second, because of the federal protection, the Louisiana and New Orleans governments have developed policies that minimize investment in long-term hazard mitigation for the sake of economic development.

Looking beyond the animosities and vitriol of national, partisan politics, chapter 6 shines a light on new political formations. In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, residents of Staten Island’s southern and eastern shores petitioned for managed retreat programs that would relocate them inland. For years, these homeowners had joined forces with activists on Staten Island’s north shore to contest overdevelopment and to demand better flood protections, forming ongoing partnerships across geographic, political, racial, ethnic and economic divides. On a national level, flood survivors throughout the US similarly came together to create the national Stop FEMA Now (SFN) movement. In both cases, activists sidestepped their ethnic, racial, economic and political differences and worked together for better flood protections and environmental policy in the face of oncoming climate change. These issue-based coalitions demonstrate how a politics of disaffection can inspire new—and surprisingly nonpartisan—political formations.

This chapter describes a pioneering effort: an academic-practitioner partnership between the Office of Chief Counsel of the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and a multidisciplinary team of university-based experts to develop usable, trainable knowledge and skills designed to improve the ability and performance of government lawyers under highly challenging conditions. The methodology and results—training designs and good practice models—of the FEMA Legal Advice in Crisis project are summarized. Furthermore, the chapter addresses the question of whether challenges and good practices for crisis lawyering identified through empirical research focusing on US government leaders and lawyers are unique to the United States or whether they also apply to a significant extent to other highly developed countries as well such as Sweden. The results of an ongoing parallel initiative linking the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB), the Swedish Defense University, and a growing network of government lawyers serving both Swedish central government agencies and county boards demonstrate the potential relevance of “localized” versions of the Legal Advice in Crisis framework and instructional design in non-US settings as well.

Chapter Two summarizes the multiple attempts to create a city rebuilding plan and the federal rebuilding policies and programs that influenced how New Orleans and its neighborhoods would rebuild. It discusses key problems in both the design and delivery of federal recovery aid and the challenges faced by the Louisiana and New Orleans governments in developing the capacity to implement rebuilding projects and programs. It concludes that, although New Orleans secured significant federal recovery funding and increased its capacity to deploy these funds, major flaws existed in how federal funds could be used and accessed, and in the city’s ability to manage recovery projects and programs. Without an actionable recovery plan and long delays in deploying rebuilding assistance, residents, businesses and other property owners faced considerable uncertainty about the city’s future. Under these circumstances, grassroots neighborhood initiatives took on greater importance in rebuilding New Orleans.

The concluding chapter presents findings and learning from the rebuilding experience across the six New Orleans neighborhoods. It argues that grassroots organizations had a fourfold contribution to rebuilding New Orleans: repopulation, creating more complete neighborhoods, economic development and building civic capacity. It critically examines the strengths and gaps in recovery efforts for each of these four areas. A second discussion presents a framework for undertaking grassroots rebuilding in cities like New Orleans, in which capacity is largely based on volunteer organizations rather than on staff-based community organizations. A third section considers the connections between individual, neighborhood- and city-scale rebuilding, emphasizing the collective nature of rebuilding, the potential to leverage grassroots initiatives and using complete neighborhoods as a principle to guide rebuilding decisions. Finally, several proposals are made to address shortcomings in federal disaster recovery policies.

Chapter 3 focuses on the period immediately following 9/11 and Katrina: the phase of recovery led by the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA). It identifies the framing strategies used to typify the two disasters, define the victims, assign responsibility for the traumatic conditions (diagnostic framing), and identify remedies and solutions (prognostic framing). The chapter analyses the highly divergent framing of the disasters and their victims in New York and New Orleans—the former framed as heroes of a global tragedy and the latter as victims of a “natural” disaster—and explores the policy implications and consequences of these framing strategies. Major effects of this reorganization included the privatization and devolution of emergency management policy and the creation of new regulations that sharply restricted aid itself. Despite the “positive” versus “negative” valence of the framing of New York and New Orleans following these two tragedies, both localities suffered comparable difficulties in accessing federal aid.

This chapter describes the chaos in the aftermath of Katrina. On the Mississippi Gulf Coast, 238 lives were lost, businesses employing tens of thousands were obliterated, and more than 216,000 individuals and families lost their homes. Bureaucratic systems failed Mississippians in their hour of need. Katrina also revealed that the nation’s lead disaster agency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was underfunded, understaffed, and suffered from serious mismanagement.

This chapter discusses how the recovery and rebuilding effort in the aftermath of Katrina was mired in red tape. No one in Mississippi advocated for reduced or limited federal involvement in the Katrina recovery. The need was just too great, and state and private resources were just too limited. Federal dollars administered through FEMA eventually covered the lion’s share of more than $3 billion in costs associated with debris removal and rebuilding schools, public buildings, parks, and other infrastructure lost in the storm. However, delay and uncertainty dogged the federal programs, and were the main enemies confronted by local leaders who were responsible for getting these long-term recovery projects moving.

This chapter describes the evolution of the superpowers’ civil defense programs from the mid-1970s until the end of the Cold War. In the mid-1970s, the contrast between the USSR’s extensive civil defense effort and its moribund U.S. counterpart led to considerable anxiety that the Kremlin might see civil defense as a usable source of strategic advantage. Rebuffed in their efforts to convince the USSR to negotiate limits on its civil defense program, the Carter administration decided to revive U.S. civil defense on the basis of a strategic evacuation concept dubbed “Crisis Relocation Planning,” which the Reagan administration also pursued. Simultaneously, civil defense for nuclear war and peacetime emergency management were combined into a single agency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Ironically, not only did Soviet leaders not perceive their civil defense program as a useable source of advantage, they grew increasingly sceptical of its utility throughout this period. The 1986 Chernobyl disaster accelerated this process and led to the reinvention of Soviet civil defense as a peacetime emergency management organization.

Hurricane Katrina inundated southern Louisiana and Gulf Coast Mississippi with devastating storm surges and flooding, resulting in death, displacement, and untold destruction. Survivors felt let down by the federal government’s ineptitude at emergency management and by their insurance companies. The only counterpoint to the pervasive experience of abandonment was the unending efforts made by people of faith and other voluntary groups. As helpful as outside volunteers proved, the disaster also led to new imaginative efforts at community building and overcoming poverty, distrust, corruption, and racial injustice in which religious leaders from inside the community took leading roles.

Drought occurs somewhere in the United States almost every year and results in serious economic, social, and environmental costs and losses. Drought is more commonly associated with the western United States because much of this region is typically arid to semiarid. For example, this region experienced widespread drought conditions from the late 1980s through the early 1990s. The widespread and severe drought that affected large portions of the nation in 1988 resulted in an estimated $39 billion in impacts in sectors ranging from agriculture and forestry to transportation, energy production, water supply, tourism, recreation, and the environment (Riebsame et al., 1991). In the case of agriculture, production losses of more than $15 billion occurred and especially devastated corn and spring wheat belts in addition to reducing exports to other nations. In 1995, the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) estimated annual losses attributable to drought at $6–8 billion (FEMA, 1995). Since 1995, drought has occurred in nearly all parts of the country, and many regions have been affected on several occasions and in consecutive years. Most of the eastern United States experienced an extremely severe drought in 1998– 99, and in parts of the southeast, drought occurred each year from 1999 through 2002, especially in Florida and Georgia. Figure 9.1 depicts nonirrigated corn yields for Nebraska for the period from 1950 to 2002. Nebraska is one of the principal agricultural states in the United States, and corn is one of its primary crops. The drought effects on yields are most apparent during the severe droughts of the mid-1950s, mid-1970s, 1980, 1983, 1988–89, and 2000. Extremely wet years, such as 1993 in the eastern part of the state, also depressed corn yields. Monitoring drought presents some unique challenges because of its distinctive characteristics (Wilhite, 2000). The purpose of this chapter is to document the current status of drought monitoring and assessment in the United States, particularly with regard to the agricultural sector.

Communities tend to learn things the hard way, reacting in the wake of disasters rather than in anticipation of them. Virtually all existing infrastructure was designed to withstand the extremes that we have experienced in the past. Historically, scientists could not project the impacts of climate change with much precision, so our existing design choices and plans for infrastructure have largely ignored the risks posed by those impacts. This chapter identifies strategies that communities and individuals can adopt now to strengthen their building practices to endure new extremes driven by a changing climate. Among other things, it analyzes how improving building codes and standards and insisting on wiser land-use policies, especially in the absence of a “no more” moment, can serve as a bulwark against the destruction that climate-fueled disasters bring.

Even for the largest economy in the world, ever-larger climate bailouts are not a responsible solution to confronting present and future climate impacts. Governments everywhere, including in the United States, will have to raise unprecedented amounts of money to cope with the impacts of climate change. This chapter examines how communities can raise the money needed, and how can they do so while keeping the financial strain as low as possible. It highlights some traditional solutions, such as taxes, borrowing, and buying reinsurance, alongside newer ideas, such as setting up special reserve funds, using value capture, raising funds from carbon taxes and cap-and-trade mechanisms, and issuing green and catastrophe bonds.