Despite more knowledge
and ability to manipulate nature, we have increased our exposure and
susceptibility to natural hazards. Why? Distinguished Carolina Professor Susan
L. Cutter explores our current hazardscape
[Historical natural disasters reveal that the severity of the human toll could be lessened—if society and technologists would take heed. But despite the fact that the Federal government handles flood insurance, there is no Federal
national database collating data from past disasters that could inform current
policies! So pointed out Distinguished Carolina Professor and geographer Dr.
Susan L. Cutter from the University of South Carolina in the 2014 Gilbert F.
White Lecture in the Geographical Sciences given at the National Academy of
Sciences on December 4. Using field research from Hurricanes Katrina (2005) and
Sandy (2012), Cutter examined societal factors making people and places
vulnerable to hazards, why hazards vary with location, and what must change
if people and property are to be genuinely protected.
Relevance to the unusually
powerful Great Easter 1913 winter storm system and flood? A century later, that natural disaster—which killed some 1,000 people and wreaked more property damage than Hurricane Katrina centered on the
industrial north—is still the flood of record in Indiana and Ohio as well as in parts of a dozen other states. Climate models predict more
intense rainfall in the Midwest in the coming decades, including the effects of
Gulf and Atlantic hurricanes penetrating further inland. Indeed, 70+mph winds from
Hurricane Sandy in 2012 caused so much damage in Ohio that Ohio itself was made eligible for Federal disaster relief. If climate models prove accurate,
intense concentrated rainfall of the scale of the mammoth 1913 storm system and
flood today—whether from hurricane or from winter storm system—would be
devastating to key national infrastructure. Below, with Cutter's permission, is a
summary of her talk “In Harm’s Way: Why More Knowledge is Not Reducing Losses" along with some of her slides.]
We are on a
“disaster loss up escalator” in the United States, declared Susan L. Cutter,
Distinguished Carolina Professor at University of South Carolina. Despite the
fact that we know more today about hazards than we did half a century ago, the statistics
are clear: annual U.S. losses to natural disasters have nearly tripled—from
under $25 per capita (2009 dollars) in the 1960s to more than $70 per capita in
the 2010s (2009 dollars), despite the fact that population itself has doubled.
Why is that?
Some explanations are clear: because of greater population density and greater
personal/business wealth, smaller-magnitude weather events can produce bigger
losses. But it is also clear that intense weather events are increasing in
frequency, and that people are building in more high-hazard areas (in part
because often they have desirable views, say, of coastline beaches). But the
real explanation goes deeper. “In many ways, we have a failure to act to help
reduce loss,” Cutter said.
Cutter suggests
three causes of the hazard loss paradox: lack
of loss accounting, lack of understanding science, and lack of the use of
science in public policy and practice.
No national database of disaster
losses
“We don’t
have a national database of hazard event and losses in the United States!”
Cutter pointed out, ticking off her first major point about causes for the
hazard loss paradox. “The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
(NOAA) has a database, but it is only weather. The U.S. Geological Survey
(USGS) has some data, but it’s inconsistent. Every Federal agency has some
data, but it’s not in one place, and [no single database covers] all hazards.”
The absence
of a comprehensive Federal national database of natural disaster losses is not
a new concern. In 1999, Cutter recounted, the National Academy of Sciences produced
two separate studies followed by a third in 2001, all calling for disaster loss
accounting and pointing up the need for such a national database. Fourteen
years later, the situation has not changed. That being said, she noted, no
other nation has a national database, either.
 |
These three National Academy of Sciences reports from 1999 and 2001
all called for a Federal national database on natural disaster losses. |
That begs a
key question: “How can you reduce losses when you don’t know where the hazards
are, or when, where, and how much?” Cutter asked. “How do you begin to tackle
the problem of reduction when you don’t know the baseline?”
A private
database does exist at the University of South Carolina. Called the Spatial
Hazard Events and Losses Database for the United States (SHELDUS), it has more
than 800,000 records from 1960 through 2013, geocoded to the county level
across the nation, drawing on information from NOAA, USGS, the Department of
Agriculture, and other sources of loss information. Until mid-2014, it was
searchable online free of charge. Because no Federal support exists to maintain
SHELDUS, however, “we had no option but to change to a fee basis,” Cutter said.
Second, she
pointed out, hazard science knows some things well. “We know that mitigation
works: for example, putting hurricane straps between the rafters and the roof
makes a difference in a high wind environment,” Cutter said. “We also know that
mitigation pays: every dollar in mitigation spent saves four dollars in
losses.” Much is known about monitoring, about the physical basis for extreme
events, and about how many people live in high-hazard areas. Forecasts are
getting ever better for the timing of hurricanes and impact areas.
 |
SHELDUS, the only database for U.S. hazard losses, is
not Federally supported. |
Other
aspects of hazard science are known less well. Key among them are how, when,
and where to anticipate complex events or cascading events. “What is the
surprise in the system that we don’t know and can’t imagine?” Cutter asked. “We
know that there are incredible interdependencies between infrastructure
systems, human systems, and natural systems, but we are not sure about the
connectivity among them in all places for all things.”
Also less
well known is the effectiveness of existing policies and practices in hazards
management, “in large part because we have not done a review or audit of these
policies and programs to see if they actually are reducing loss,” she said.
Vulnerability is an important component of disaster risk, “but we don’t know
how to measure it” nor how to quantify how historic or antecedent social
conditions that either increase or decrease vulnerabilities and exposure.
One thing is
clear, however, she emphasized: “Multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary
perspectives are key in hazard science.”
Social vulnerability index
A geographer’s
view of vulnerability and resilience differs from an engineer’s or a
hydrologist’s because the focus is on “how vulnerability and resilience varies
among social groups and varies geographically,” Cutter said. The goal of such
studies “is to make a difference: to take the science and to put it into
practice.” Over the past two decades, she and her colleagues have focused on
ways to objectively measure social vulnerability, resilience, and recovery.
For
measuring vulnerability, they devised a social vulnerability index (SoVI,
pronounced SOE-VEE): “the identification of quantifiable attributes of
populations that make them more or less susceptible to harm, and mapping them
to look at geographic distribution,” she explained.
Interpreting
the map, however, requires a deeper, detailed understanding of the social
geography across the country. For example, Cutter noted, in the Mississippi
Valley, “vulnerability is related to female head of households, poverty
populations, and African Americans. That’s very different from what you see in
Arizona, where vulnerability is related to Native American reservations. Both
are different from what you see in eastern Kentucky, where vulnerability is
related to white, less educated, poverty populations. One of my favorite
examples [of the need for detailed local knowledge] is Nebraska and parts of
North and South Dakota,” she continued. “Although social vulnerability in parts
of South Dakota is related to Native American lands, in other areas of the
Great Plains vulnerability is related to in situ aging of the female population
on the family farm, living on a fixed income with very little resource base or
flexibility should that disaster hit. In many instances, the husband has died;
the widow has stayed on the farm but the children have moved to the cities to
seek employment, so resources are highly constrained.”
“We’ve done
a lot of testing,” Cutter continued. The social vulnerability index “works in
counties, in census tracts, and across different nations.” It is now gaining
traction in policy circles as a way of planning how one might distribute or
position resources for aid, response, and recovery. “During Hurricane Sandy, we
got a call from the regional office of FEMA, asking us to do a run on SoVI for
the three-state area because they wanted to see where they might need to deploy
resources and target efforts,” she recounted. The index “gives governments a
way of prioritizing that they would not have had before.”
Quantifying resilience
Cutter
quoted the National Academy of Sciences definition of resilience as “the
ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from or more successfully
adapt to actual or potential adverse events.” The concept of resilience has
gained
keen interest not only in the U.S. Federal government but also in the United
Kingdom and the United Nations. Meantime,
the Rockefeller Foundation has embarked on a major effort to help cities develop disaster resilience and the National Academies has
developed a Resilient America Roundtable to help communities develop a culture of
resilience.
“Everyone is
talking about resilience as a way of moving from a focus on disaster risk
reduction to a broader framing in sustainability,” Cutter observed. “The
question is: how do we know if these efforts will be successful? We don’t have
metrics: We don’t know how to measure resilience, and we don’t have a baseline.
If we don’t have a baseline to know how resilient we are now in the absence of
these policy innovations, how are we going to know whether or not they are
effective?” Moreover, in the
literature, Cutter said, the issue becomes resilience of what? and resilience for
whom? Thus, attempts at developing metrics for resilience have been inconsistent
with one another. “You
can look at social resilience, or institutional resilience, or community
capital. But across the nation, each of these different types of resilience has
a very different geography.”
Measuring recovery
“Recovery is
a natural laboratory, where we can actually see how vulnerability and
resilience influence the capacity of communities to respond after an event,”
Cutter noted. And research questions abound: Does the social transformation of
the landscape follow its same trajectory after a disaster as beforehand? Is
recovery spatially or temporally uniform? Or are there persistent inequalities
in the recovery process? Answering such questions requires some objective way of
measuring recovery.
“Well, being
geographers and liking to go out into the field after disasters, we’ve
developed a number of ways to do this,” Cutter recounted. One “crude but
useful” technique was repeat photography: returning to the same locations every
six months to photograph the same homes and other structures to document their
stage of recovery. The photographs could be categorized using such objective evidence
as debris removal, demolition, or rebuilding, and a property coarsely scored as
showing no recovery, 25%, 50%, 75%, or full
recovery. Then, “because we
[geographers] are very good at all things spatial, you can then take those
points and create a surface [map] representing both the spatial and the
temporal change,” Cutter said. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, because so many people were rushing to New
Orleans, the team decided to focus on residences on the largely overlooked
coast of Mississippi. They have now photographically documented recovery at six
month intervals along the 130-mile Mississippi coast for nine years.
But recovery
in a region is influenced also by “the historical conditions that allow that place to
become what it is today,” Cutter said. “The environmental and social history of
coastal Mississippi has been shaped not only by hurricanes, but also the
historical legacy of social and economic development and segregation.”
For
example, during Hurricane Camille in 1969, there were two separate evacuations,
one for whites, the other for blacks. They went to different places. There were
inequalities in food aid: Families who had the same number of children who were
white got more money from the Federal government than families who were African
American. The same thing happened with Small Business Administration loans: 90
percent of them went to white small businesses, not black small businesses.
After Camille, Federal disaster money was used for a social good. “Camille
struck during the Nixon Administration, and Mississippi refused to integrate
its schools,” Cutter recounted. “The Federal government, at the urging of Leon
Panetta [then Director of the Office for Civil Rights, a sub-agency of the U.S.
Department of Education], said we are not giving Federal aid money to Mississippi until you
integrate the schools. The governor of Mississippi said no. Federal disaster
aid was withheld and Mississippi given until December 31, 1969, to integrate
the schools. And they did.”
That
segregation legacy still resonates in coastal Mississippi. “In many ways,
Hurricane Katrina was a replication of what happened in Camille 35 years
earlier,” Cutter observed. “It was not as segregated a society in 2005 as it was in 1969, but the
vestiges of residential segregation were still there in terms of housing
location and the quality of the construction for minority residents.”
The scale at
which recovery is viewed also matters, Cutter noted. At the county level along
the Mississippi coast, the general pattern of recovery looks fairly good, but
examination at the neighborhood level reveals a veritable patchwork quilt of recovery. As late
as 2010, there were still areas in demolition mode. “That is an indication that
the scale really matters: that there are some communities and neighborhoods
that are simply not recovering, despite the fact that the general pattern looks
fairly good,” she observed. Remote sensing imagery
also records geographical shifts in development. And changes in demographics
reveal that both young families and retirees were leaving the area.
In short,
different types of measurements document that “today’s coastal Mississippi has
a smaller spatial footprint, a smaller population, fewer retirees,” Cutter
summarized. “The majority is still white, but diversity is increasing, largely through
an influx of Hispanic populations. There is increasing social vulnerability. We
project that it will take about 19 years for the population of communities to return
to what they were before Hurricane Katrina.”
A tale of two regions
Cutter’s
second case study was Hurricane Sandy, which hit New York City and the coast of
New Jersey in 2012. “Just as we focused on Mississippi because everyone was
going to New Orleans, and we focused on New Jersey because everyone was going
to New York City,” Cutter said, showing a slide that depicted the social vulnerability
map underlying the storm track. As with the Mississippi coast, field teams began documenting the
rebuilding of structures immediately after Sandy and at six-month intervals
thereafter.
The contrast
couldn’t have been greater. “In Mississippi six months after Katrina, zero of those points had fully
recovered. But in New Jersey six months after Sandy, nearly 75% of those
structures that we visited had recovered,” Cutter said.
In comparing
the two case studies, Cutter pointed out factors that made the two recoveries
so different. In Mississippi, there was slowness in Federal investment in
infrastructure, and the governor made a decision to use the initial recovery
money for business development, specifically the Port of Gulfport—meaning that
low- to middle-income housing was not constructed, and former residents had to
go somewhere else to live. “One of the biggest issues retarding redevelopment
was the availability and affordability of flood insurance” from the National
Flood Insurance Program, Cutter continued. Because the base flood elevation [the
flood height having a 1% chance of being reached or exceeded in any given year]
along coastal Mississippi is so high, coverage would require the homes to be
elevated 8 to 9 feet above base elevation, plus 1 or 2 feet of freeboard [safety
margin] on top of that. “So you’re talking about massive structures,” Cutter
noted. In later years, recovery along the Mississippi Coast was further retarded
by multiple shocks having nothing to do with Hurricane Katrina. During the
mortgage crisis of 2007–2008, people could not get mortgage financing to
rebuild their homes. The Deepwater Horizon Gulf oil spill in 2010 fouled the
white beaches and hit both the tourism and fishing sectors of the local
economies. And in 2012, the area was struck by another hurricane, Hurricane
Isaac.
In contrast,
Cutter noted, a third of the housing stock along the Jersey shore is vacation
homes. After Hurricane Sandy, those homeowners “were not flooded from their
primary residences, so they already had a house they could live in while
rebuilding,” Cutter said. Despite FEMA efforts, there was very little
penetration of flood insurance: fewer than half of New Jersey communities carried
flood insurance policies. But New Jersey is a highly capitalized, wealthy area.
Also, “there was an emphasis on the part of Governor [Chris] Christie to get
[reconstruction] moving in a hurry” and rapidly recover the shore, because many
of the shore communities depend on summer tourism, deriving 80% of their annual
income between Memorial Day and Labor Day. As a result, “many had fully
recovered within the first six months,” Cutter said. “These two examples
illustrate how context and antecedent conditions in areas make a difference in
the timing and the geography of recovery.”
Getting off the hazard loss ‘up
escalator’
How do we
resolve this hazard loss paradox—that despite knowing more, we are losing more?
In her view, getting off the hazard loss ‘up escalator’ will depend on major
cultural shifts both within policy groups and within hazard science, her third
point.
“We know
that hazard science can make a difference—if it is used,” Cutter said. One
obstacle, she noted, is the aversion of some political leaders to anything
scientific. “They view science simply as a belief system: it’s different from
their belief system, and therefore it’s bad and meaningless.” That being said,
she noted, there are increased efforts by science agencies to engage policy
makers. One example is an international group called Integrated Research on Disaster Risk, which is trying to infuse disaster
science into public policy.”
Second, “emergency
management has to become management,
not response,” Cutter stated. “And it has to become pro-active management, not after-the-fact response. That’s going to
take a major cultural shift at the national, state, and local level. We need to
base public policy on evidence, not expedient politics and who’s in charge of
what committees. We need to think in the long term, not just the election cycle
of two years or four years. That’s no way to manage risk or develop disaster
policy. And the policy community needs to think of hazard researchers as their
friends: We can give you good information on which you can base policy.”
“In turn,
hazard researchers have to make their research available,” she continued. “Publishing
your research in a refereed journal is nice but it goes nowhere. You need to
develop ways to reach the policy community. They are not going to read a
10-page technical report; they may read a 1-pager with the technical details
stripped out and the key messages in there. You need to solve the problems of
the policy maker and practitioner. In fact, you need to go to them and ask what are their problems. Last—my favorite,
having worked on IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] reports—hazards
researchers have to get over this thing that they can’t say anything because
they are uncertain and don’t know the certainty bands. Instead, we have to
think about what is good enough information
for the policy maker to use to make a sound decision.”
“Both communities,” Cutter concluded, “need to keep in mind the broader long-term vision: the goals of equity, fairness, and the development of a more resilient future for the next generation. That's why we’re in this business in the first place.”
Susan L. Cutter is Distinguished Carolina Professor at the
University of South Carolina and Director of the university’s Hazards and
Vulnerability Research Institute. She has authored or edited thirteen books, more than 150 peer-reviewed
articles and book chapters. Her latest book Hurricane
Katrina and the Forgotten Coast of Mississippi examines the post-disaster
recovery along the Gulf coast and the role that historic, economic, and social
factors play in producing the differential recovery that is so apparent today.
© 2015 Trudy E. Bell
Next
time: Explosion at Equality
Selected references
An audio
file of Dr. Cutter’s Gilbert F. White Lecture in the Geographical Sciences
given at the National Academy of Sciences as well as a PDF of all her slides
are available here. (The audio recording begins on
slide 6.) Warm gratitude is expressed to Dr. Cutter for allowing me to
reproduce several of her slides.
More about the hazard loss escalator appears in the 2011 journal article
“The Unsustainable Trend of Natural Hazard Losses in the United States,” by Melanie Gall, Kevin A. Borden, Christopher T. Emrich, and Susan L. Cutter in Sustainability 3:2157-2181, based on data amassed in SHELDUS. .
Bell, Trudy E., The Great Dayton Flood of
1913, Arcadia Publishing, 2008. Picture book of nearly 200 images of the
flood in Dayton, rescue efforts, recovery, and the construction of the Miami
Conservancy District dry dams for flood control, including several pictures of
Cox. (Author’s shameless marketing plug: Copies are available directly from me for
the cover price of $21.99 plus $4.00 shipping, complete with inscription of
your choice; for details, e-mail me), or order from the publisher.
