The Routledge Handbook of Urban Disaster Resilience

Integrating Mitigation, Preparedness, and Recovery Planning

Michael Lindell, Michael K Lindell, Michael Lindell, Michael K Lindell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317501077
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

The Routledge Handbook of Urban Disaster Resilience emphasizes the intersection of urban planning and hazard mitigation as critical for community resilience, considering the interaction of social, environmental, and physical systems with disasters. The Handbook introduces and discusses the phases of disaster – mitigation, preparedness/response, and recovery – as well as each of the federal, state, and local players that address these phases from a planning and policy perspective.

Part I provides an overview of hazard vulnerability that begins with an explanation of what it means to be vulnerable to hazards, especially for socially vulnerable population segments. Part II discusses the politics of hazard mitigation; the failures of smart growth placed in hazardous areas; the wide range of land development policies and their associated risk; the connection between hazards and climate adaptation; and the role of structural and non-structural mitigation in planning for disasters. Part III covers emergency preparedness and response planning, the unmet needs people experience and community service planning; evacuation planning; and increasing community capacity and emergency response in developing countries. Part IV addresses recovery from and adaption to disasters, with topics such as the National Disaster Recovery Framework, long-term housing recovery; population displacement; business recovery; and designs in disasters. Finally, Part V demonstrates how disaster research is interpreted in practice – how to incorporate mitigation into the comprehensive planning process; how states respond to recovery; how cities undertake recovery planning; and how to effectively engage the whole community in disaster planning.

The Routledge Handbook of Urban Disaster Resilience offers the most authoritative and comprehensive coverage of cutting-edge research at the intersection of urban planning and disasters from a U.S. perspective. This book serves as an invaluable guide for undergraduate and postgraduate students, future professionals, and practitioners interested in urban planning, sustainability, development response planning, emergency planning, recovery planning, hazard mitigation planning, land use planning, housing and community development as well as urban sociology, sociology of the community, public administration, homeland security, climate change, and related fields.

PART I

Overview

1

AN OVERVIEW OF HAZARDS, VULNERABILITY, AND DISASTERS

Michael K. Lindell

Introduction

A disaster occurs when an extreme event exceeds a community’s ability to cope with that event. Understanding the process by which natural disasters produce community impacts is important for four reasons. First, information from this process is needed to identify the preimpact conditions that make communities vulnerable to disaster impacts. Second, information about the disaster impact process can be used to identify specific segments of each community that will be affected disproportionately (e.g., low-income households, ethnic minorities, or specific types of businesses). Third, information about the disaster impact process can be used to identify the event-specific conditions that determine the level of disaster impact. Fourth, an understanding of disaster impact process allows planners to identify suitable emergency management interventions.

The process by which disasters produce community impacts can be explained in terms of a model originally proposed by Lindell and Prater (2003) and later extended in Lindell et al. (2006) and Lindell (2013a). Specifically, Figure 1.1 indicates the effects of a disaster are determined by three preimpact conditions—hazard exposure, physical vulnerability, and social vulnerability. There also are three event-specific conditions, hazard event characteristics, improvised disaster responses, and improvised disaster recovery. Two of the event-specific conditions, hazard event characteristics and improvised disaster responses, combine with the preimpact conditions to produce a disaster’s physical impacts. The physical impacts, in turn, combine with improvised disaster recovery to produce the disaster’s social impacts. Communities can engage in three types of emergency management interventions to ameliorate disaster impacts. Physical impacts can be reduced if communities engage in hazard mitigation practices and emergency preparedness practices, whereas social impacts can be reduced by recovery preparedness practices.

The following sections describe the components of the model in greater detail. Specifically, the next section will describe the three preimpact conditions—hazard exposure, physical vulnerability, and social vulnerability. This section will be followed by sections discussing hazard event characteristics and improvised disaster responses. The fourth section will discuss disasters’ physical impacts, social impacts, and improvised disaster recovery. The last section will discuss three types of strategic interventions, hazard mitigation practices, emergency preparedness practices, and recovery preparedness practices.

Figure 1.1 Disaster Impact Model (Lindell, 2013a)

Preimpact Conditions

Hazard Exposure

Hazard exposure arises from people’s occupancy of geographical areas where they could be affected by specific types of events that threaten their lives and property. For natural hazards, this exposure is caused by living in geographical areas as specific as floodplains that sometimes extend only a few feet beyond the floodway or as broad as the Great Plains of the Midwest where tornadoes can strike anywhere over an area of hundreds of thousands of square miles. For technological hazards, exposure can arise if people move into areas where they could be exposed to events such as explosions or hazardous materials releases. In principle, hazard exposure can be measured by the probability of occurrence of a given event magnitude, but these exceedance probabilities can be difficult to obtain for hazards about which the historical data are insufficient to reliably estimate the probability of very unusual events. For example, many areas of the US have meteorological and hydrological data that are limited to the past century, so the estimation of extreme floods requires extrapolation from a limited data series. Moreover, watershed urbanization causes the boundaries of the 100-year floodplains to change in ways that may be difficult for local emergency managers to anticipate. Even more difficult to estimate are the probabilities of events, such as chemical and nuclear reactor accidents, for which data are limited because each facility is essentially unique. In such cases, techniques of probabilistic safety analysis are used to model these systems, attach probabilities to the failure of system components, and synthesize probabilities of overall system failure by mathematically combining the probabilities of individual component failure.

The greatest difficulties are encountered in attempting to estimate the probabilities of social hazards such as terrorist attacks because the occurrence of these events is defined by social system dynamics that cannot presently be modeled in the same way as physical systems. That is, the elements of social systems are difficult to define and measure. Moreover, the interactions of the system elements have multiple determinants and involve complex lag and feedback effects that are not well understood, let alone precisely measured. Indeed, there are significant social and political constraints that limit the collection of data on individuals and groups. These constraints further inhibit the ability of scientists to make specific predictions of social system behavior.

Physical Vulnerability

Human Vulnerability

Humans are vulnerable to environmental extremes of temperature, pressure, and chemical exposures that can cause death, injury, and illness. For any hazard agent—water, wind, ionizing radiation, toxic chemicals, infectious agents—there often is variability in the physiological response of the affected population. That is, given the same level of exposure, some people will die, others will be severely injured, still others slightly injured, and the rest will survive unscathed. Typically, the most susceptible to any environmental stressor will be the very young, the very old, and those with weakened immune systems.

Agricultural Vulnerability

Like humans, agricultural plants and animals are also vulnerable to environmental extremes of temperature, pressure, chemicals, radiation, and infectious agents. Like humans, there are differences among individuals within each plant and animal population. However, agricultural vulnerability is more complex than human vulnerability because there is a greater number of species to be assessed, each of which has its own characteristic range of responses to each environmental stressor.

Structural Vulnerability

Structural vulnerability arises when buildings are constructed using designs and materials that are incapable of resisting extreme stresses (e.g., high wind, hydraulic pressures of water, seismic shaking) or that allow hazardous materials to infiltrate into the building. The construction of most buildings is governed by building codes that are intended to protect the life safety of building occupants from structural collapse—primarily from the dead load of the building material themselves and the live load of the occupants and furnishings—but do not necessarily provide protection from extreme wind, seismic, or hydraulic loads. Nor do they provide an impermeable barrier to the infiltration of toxic air pollutants. Just as people vary in their physical vulnerability to environmental extremes, so too do buildings. Variation in the designs and construction materials of residential, commercial, and industrial structures—as well as electric power, fuel (e.g., natural gas), water, wastewater, telecommunications, and transportation systems—means that facilities of the same type, subjected to identical environmental stresses, might range from fully functional to completely destroyed.

Social Vulnerability

Social vulnerability has been defined as “the characteristics of a person or group and their situation that influence their capacity to anticipate, cope with, resist, and recover from the impact of a natural hazard” (Wisner et al. 2004: 11). We can define specify people’s capacity to “anticipate” in terms of their awareness that their home, work, and other frequent locations are exposed to environmental hazards, as well as their expectations that extreme environmental events could produce casualties, damage, and disruption (Lindell 2013b; Lindell and Perry 2000). We can further define an ability to “cope with, resist, and recover” in terms of their capacity to adopt and implement four types of hazard adjustments—hazard mitigation, emergency preparedness, emergency response, and disaster recovery actions. In addition, we can define their “personal characteristics” in terms of their physical/psychological, material, social/political, and economic resources (Lindell 2018). Demographic categories such as gender, age, ethnicity, education, and income can sometimes serve as predictors of social vulnerability because these population segments can vary systematically in their physical/psychological, material, social/political, and economic resources (Bolin and Kurtz 2018; Enarson et al. 2018).

The central point of the social vulnerability perspective is that, just as people’s occupancy of hazard-prone areas and the physical vulnerability of the structures in which they live and work are not randomly distributed, neither is social vulnerability randomly distributed—either geographically or demographically. Thus, just as variations in structural vulnerability can increase or decrease the effect of hazard exposure on physical impacts (property damage and casualties), so too can variations in social vulnerability. Social vulnerability varies across communities and also across households within communities. Variability in vulnerability is a problem for local emergency managers because it requires that they identify the areas within their communities having population segments with the highest levels of social vulnerability.

For example, lower-income households tend to be headed disproportionately by females and racial/ethnic minorities. Such households are more likely to experience destruction of their homes because of preimpact hazard exposure. This is especially true in developing countries such as Guatemala (Peacock et al. 1987), but also has been reported in the US (Peacock and Girard 1997). The homes of these households also are more likely to be destroyed because they were built according to older, less stringent building codes, used lower-quality construction materials and methods, and were less well maintained (Bolin and Bolton 1986). Because lower-income households have fewer resources on which to draw for recovery, they also take longer to transition to permanent housing, sometimes remaining for extended periods of time in severely damaged homes (Girard and Peacock 1997). In other cases, they are forced to accept as permanent what originally was intended as temporary housing (Peacock et al. 1987). Consequently, there may still be low-income households in temporary sheltering and temporary housing even after high-income households all have relocated to permanent housing (Berke et al. 1993; Rubin et al. 1985).

Event-Specific Conditions

Hazard Event Characteristics

Hazard impacts can be difficult to characterize because a given hazard agent can initiate a number of different threats. For example, tropical cyclones (also known as hurricanes or typhoons) can cause casualties and damage through wind, rain, storm surge, and inland flooding (Bryant 1997). Volcanoes can impact human settlements through ash fall, explosive eruptions, lava flows, mudflows and floods, and forest fires (Perry and Lindell 1990; Saarinen and Sell 1985; Warrick et al. 1981). However, once these distinct threats have been distinguished from each other, each can be characterized in terms of six significant characteristics. These are the speed of onset, availability of environmental cues (such as wind, rain, or ground movement), the intensity, scope, and duration of impact, and the probability of occurrence—CDRSS 2006). These characteristics determine people’s ability to detect hazard onset, the amount of time they have to respond, the number of affected social units, and thus the event’s casualties, damage, and socioeconomic disruption.

A hazard’s impact intensity can generally be defined in terms of the physical materials involved and the energy these materials impart. The physical materials involved in disasters differ in terms of their physical state—gas (or vapor), liquid, or solid (or particulate). In most cases, the hazard from a gas arises from its temperature or pressure. Examples include hurricane or tornado wind (note that the atmosphere is a mixture of gases), which is hazardous because of overpressures that can inflict traumatic injuries directly on people. High wind also is hazardous because it can destroy structures and accelerate debris that can itself cause traumatic injuries. Alternatively, the hazard from a gas might arise from its toxicity, as is the case in some volcanic eruptions. Liquids also can be hazardous because of their toxicity, but the most common liquid hazard is water. It is hazardous to structures because of the pressure it can exert and is hazardous to living things when it fills the lungs and prevents respiration. Lava is solid rock that has been liquefied by extreme heat and therefore is hazardous to people and structures because of its thermal energy. Solids also can be hazardous if they take the form of particulates such as airborne volcanic ash or floodborne mud. These are particularly significant because they can leave deposits that have impacts of long duration.

The scope of impact defines the number of affected social units (e.g., individuals, households, and businesses). This is typically defined by the area in which death and destruction occur although, as noted below, this definition is problematic. Impact duration can be short for some hazards, as when hurricane-force wind arrives and departs within hours but indefinitely long for others, as when heavy metals such as lead contaminate an area. The probability of occurrence (per unit of time) is an important characteristic that affects disaster impacts indirectly because more probable hazards are likely to mobilize communities to engage in emergency management interventions to reduce their vulnerability (Prater and Lindell 2000).

Improvised Disaster Response

Disaster myths commonly portray disaster victims as dazed, panicked, or disorganized but people actually respond in a generally adaptive manner when disasters strike (Fischer 2008). Adaptive response is often delayed because normalcy bias inhibits people’s realization that an improb...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Part I Overview
• Part II Contributions of Hazard Mitigation Planning to Community Resilience
• Part III Contributions of Emergency Response Planning to Community Resilience
• Part IV Contributions of Disaster Recovery Planning to Community Resilience
• Part V Contributions of Research to Practice
• Index