Title:ارزیابی تأثیرات طوفان سندی: مصاحبه با ادوارد ای. توماس

جیم شواب، مدیر مرکز تحقیقات برنامه ریزی خطر APA، با ادوارد توماس، رئیس انجمن کاهش خطرات طبیعی، در مورد تأثیر طوفان سندی در سواحل شرقی ایالات متحده مصاحبه می کند که در ۶ نوامبر ۲۰۱۲ ثبت شده است.

قسمتي از متن فيلم: Although this is Jim Schwab manager of the American Planning Association hazards planning research center and the project manager for planning for post disaster recovery next generation a project funded by FEMA under which we’re presenting the recovery news blog and with me today is ed thomas it is the president of the natural hazard

Mitigation Association is an elected member of the Council of the state and local government section of the American Bar Association and share the hazard subcommittee of the land use planning and zoning committee of the American Bar Association and also serves on the advisory committee of natural hazard center at the university of colorado

Which runs an excellent conference every year in july bringing about four or five hundred experts from various disciplines and disasters together to have discussions about the future of hazards policy in this country and it’s also an active member of APA we’re proud to say and also the american geophysical union

So that’s got a long list of other credits but we’re here to talk about sandy and the impact of Sandy on the Northeast and what its implications are for a long-term community recovery planning and hazard mitigation in the in their states that are affected so let me

Start at by bringing up the the great bugaboo about climate change in weather uncertainty since we seem to be entering a period of greater weather uncertainty ushered in by climate change and global warming how does this affect our ability to anticipate events like hurricane sandy and what does it do to our

Modeling of floods and storms that we’ve traditionally based on historical patterns well I the second Federal Insurance administrator once described what we do with Community Development is driving an 18-wheel huge rig truck 80 miles an hour down the highway steering by looking in the rearview mirrors only we need to look

Not just in the rearview mirrors we need to look out in the front and the windshield and think about the future and I think that’s the essence of planning where are we going and how can we get there and stay you know between the white lines on the road as we drive

Along and really do a little bit of visioning and generally we’re not doing that uh the reality is most local government state governments and the federal government have not done a very good job planning and preparing for historic floods and natural events just that are totally foreseeable by history

Now the future is even more uncertain than it was before and you need to take that into account and there are steps that can be taken where we can still have development I am certainly not suggesting no to develop we’re in a demographic precious wind will inevitably drive development we’re going

To have more development the question is whether we’ll continue to have development that harms people the environment and the taxpayer or whether we’re going to have good sound well planned development could you elaborate on what some of those steps might be to just refer to well the natural hazard

Mitigation Association has on its website of paper that lays out steps that can be considered for future planning and and basically what we’re suggesting is look at the reality of the situation and deal with it and we can do this in a very orderly well-planned process or we can do it simply reacting

To what is in the short-term economic best interest of an individual homeowner or developer so we need to look first at what are the existing rules and then think about from a planning perspective from a player’s perspective are these rules really good enough for example many many communities in New York New

Jersey Delaware Maryland have new flood insurance rate maps in the process of being developed those maps have a lot of good information in them and yet they’re absolute minimum standards so we should start by saying look hey maybe my existing rules allow me to build at a level below the

Experienced height of the sandy storm or maybe they would just have me build at that height let’s look at the new documents from FEMA and let’s think about doing things maybe a little bit more safely with free board let’s think about those buildings down in lower Manhattan a dozens and dozens of

Buildings according to the New York Times yesterday where there was water went into the basement and those buildings will be knocked out of action for months and months millions of dollars in economic losses and yet those buildings could have been structurally flood proved with wet or dry flood

Proofing techniques so that they would be open for business today or tomorrow and and so we have a variety of steps that we can take on an individual homeowner individual community basis and also regionally to look forward to doing things better elevation flood proofing seriously considering is a loca de vela

Pant in a particular location is it really in the right best location from the point of view of that homeowner or should it possibly be moved inland government coming up with techniques to say look if you don’t want to come back into this same area we can come up with

Techniques such as transferable development rights or other low-cost techniques or the entire vast cornucopia of programs that are made available after a disaster to give people and communities the ability to really think about the future okay Libby I have enough couple other questions here but let me follow up just a little further

On that one of the other things that was clearly a big issue in the Northeast particularly New York City in lower Manhattan had to do with the the ability to protect infrastructure to mitigate against damage to infrastructure including obviously the power system which is a pretty drastically effective in this case what

Would you suggest on that front well I think let’s can we deal first with the subways we talked about infrastructure sure uh subways by their very nature can be flood proved you can you can for lower cost you can keep your vents with with some elevation there are techniques

On this when you consider the tiny cost of this type of retrofitting versus the best expense that is now being incurred it just really makes sense to do this differently and better and as we are fixing those subway stations and those tunnels to seriously think about okay

Well we know what the sandy flood height was and we know for a fact an absolute fact based on history based on a repetition of historic storms that sandy isn’t the worst possible swarm to get new york city just based on history and then think well how about the future we

Know sea level rise is an accepted fact now there are people that get very thinking about words climate changed use together and they they say that it’s not proven or that it’s a left-wing conspiracy but there are certainly tremendous uncertainties as the flood elevations so let’s add some extra flood

Proofing on to the existing minimum requirements and flood proof those subway stations for power lines let’s think about okay I own a building that’s an inn in Manhattan and it absolutely has to have power in order to run the elevators in order to run the lights and

The computers for me to be open for business how can I accept the fact that possibly the power system will fail and have backup power for minimum operations from a community perspective so many of the the power lines came down because we had objects slamming into them or more likely we had

Trees coming down on them we need to have more trees to reduce our our global warming but it’s got to be the right tree properly trimmed on the utility rights-of-way there’s a lot that we can do prior to run years in years prior to restore in order to accept the idea that

Inevitably we will have storms windstorms snowstorms hurricanes and how can we deal with the reality to prevent the damage if possible and then how to be resilient and operational for the future when when when evitable II we have these damages okay well um I have to point out that you you loaded Boston

And it puts you up in the general target area but somewhat at the outer edge of the impacts of Sandy not necessarily at the heart of the event like Manhattan or New Jersey but it does Lisa mean that you’re living every day with what’s up

There in New England what it what do you think are some of the unique vulnerabilities of this very dense cluster of urban centers that we’ve got in the Northeast really worthy the bullseye for this particular storm well let me let me start off by saying I’m a

Native New Yorker i was born in new york city i grew up in new york city spent the first 21 years of my life there went to school in New York City a cardinal hayes high school and fordham university so I very much still consider myself a

New Yorker and my heart goes out to those folks the biggest problem we have I believe in New York New Jersey Shore and so many other places is we’ve had this tremendous blessing of life without major storms for years and years it has been many years since a really major

Hurricane slammed into New York City slammed into Long Island slammed into New England we’ve had minor hurricanes we’ve had hurricane gloria 1986 in New England week hurricane Bob in 1991 but they were very small hurricanes compared to actual historic hurricanes such as the hurricane to hit New York City in 1821

Or the what’s called a long island express or in New England the wind that shook the world of 1938 so we’ve had generations of developers generations of homeowners who somehow got it into their heads that they just weren’t very flood-prone are very prone to storms so that lack of awareness is perhaps our

Biggest obstacle of all getting people to recognize that inevitably there would be flooding it was well known in the emergency management community that lower Manhattan was seriously prone to flooding in a repetition of a major historic hurt just in historic ok never mind the future with climate change

Never mind the the significant rise in sea level since the last time I hurricane hit me of major hurricane hit New York Harbor in 1821 keeping that all together we have generations of people who are totally stunned and totally taken aback by the reality of them having to deal with natural hazards well

As a former New Yorker you will appreciate they probably should have also talked to my father who grew up in Queens and remember distinctly the long island express of 1938 and I remember being told some interesting stories about them I bet yeah we’ll have to talk about that sometime yeah might my family

Of Chris over were there in 1938 and they talked about that and my granddad talked about the blizzard of 1888 and the tremendous impact that had on the city so we need to remember our elders telling us about the reality of these storms it’s very difficult to get people

To pay attention to an event that is rare david rowe peak has an excellent book on that journalist and an instructor at Harvard’s extension university or lpg ik talking but why people have a real hard time thinking about rarely repetitious hazards and and certainly New York New England gosh we haven’t been really

Slammed in years and years and yet we have in the past there’s no question that we will in the future and getting people to do those preparations for a rare event is is a is a tremendous challenge and one that I’m hoping Jim that we talked about quite a bit at the

International Hazard Mitigation practitioners a symposium that’s going to be in July just following the natural hazards confidence that we mentioned earlier yeah before I get to my next question let me just comment on that and because I on friday i’m going to be talking about this experience as a

Matter of fact at a conference on global health and disasters out at the University of Iowa School of Public Health I was in Sri Lanka as part of the post-tsunami assessment back in 2005 and people there we’re telling our team that they had no historical record of a

Previous tsunami in Sri Lanka trying to say basically well we had no way to expect something like this it did not take me very long checking the historical records to find it in fact they had a tsunami from Krakatoa in eighteen eighty four or whatever year that was but nobody remembered it great

Sure so that’s your way about to having people’s memory gets short memory is very short and people according to psychologists have a tendency remember the good things they have a hard time remembering really really bad things so it’s what we’re trying to do I believe you and I are to introduce the planning

Community and the community development folks to the reality of getting ready for a balanced approach to a rare but definitely foreseeable event there’s no question we’re going to have these events and a very small amount of preparation a very small out of elevation flood proofing or thought can save millions and millions

Of dollars save lives reduce economic suffering and reduce environmental desperation and getting the attention of people to do that is very difficult and that’s to some extent why we have zoning and building codes to think about that ahead of time fold those considerations right into your comprehensive plan and

Then stick with it for possibly fifty or sixty years a hundred years until we really get slammed again and that’s that’s going to be difficult to do one of the neat things that’s coming out of this storm is all of a sudden the discussion of climate change has become

Respectable III do lecturing all over the country as you know Jim and I go up into Iowa and Colorado and Montana and the local sponsors will often tell me ed you can use the word climate and you can use the word change but please don’t use

Them in the same however its people many people out there have gotten the idea that the climate change is a left-wing conspiracy it has to do with funding Obamacare seriously that’s their belief and that’s fine what we have to do is get across to people is even if you

Don’t believe in climate change understand that prognostications about the future are uncertain and when we say that something is a one percent annual chance flood that doesn’t mean that it is going to be absolutely correct there’s a variability there and for a very small amount of money you can get a

Lot of protection particularly when you build design and rebuild a building I mean I’m hoping our planners are planning community in New York City says look this is absolutely insane that we have buildings multi-million dollar buildings important businesses put out of business because of very small relative amount of money that could have

Been spent flood proofing wet or dry those buildings wit flood proofing the driveway and that we as planning us as part of the planning community take the lead and saying we’ve got to do this differently you’ve got to do this better we’ve got to turn around and do community

Development very differently than we have before by looking down the road and keeping the trucks between the white lines thinking about things ahead of time right well let me ask you this question as a current president of the natural hazard mitigation Association which by the way if you would like to

Tell us a little bit about that you may but you’re also an active land US Attorney longtime consultant in this whole field other particular resources that you would like to recommend to planners in these communities affected by Sandy that you think would make their job easier absolutely to go to the gym

Schwab website at APA for the hazards planning research center for starters if you’re a planner there’s a lot of material on there that needs to be looked at as a planner to understand all the resources that are available post-sandy the only document that I know that describes that is the the nhm a

Publication which is available online at the nhm a website called patchwork quilt planning building stuff differently and better we need to talk about change as planners and fundamentally particularly in post disaster situations people resist change gyms described what I am and what I do I was also a federal

Coordinating officer for FEMA that was the president’s representative on scene I have literally dealt and worked of something like 200 disasters i stopped counting something around 200 i have worked one-on-one with hundreds and hundreds of disaster victims and survivors and i’ve seen their misery I’ve seen their suffering it is an

Important part of my life and what we as planners need to think of is that this is not dry dusty plans this is about people’s lives this is a out like safety this is about core environmental and economic business values that if we do a good job on

Planning mother nature will do what she does what she’s going to do anyway and then there will either be devastation the community or we will have a well-engineered well architectural II designed will plant community that takes the hit or just keeps on working and right now we’re seeing very few

Communities that have done that there are some there are some wonderful bright lights around the country Tulsa Oklahoma the the Metropolitan Denver area due to the efforts of the urban drainage and flood control district and we need to have a lot more bright shining lights and I hope that the planning community

Will will produce those bright shining lights and examples all over the eastern seaboard following sandy make any final comments you want to throw in here well I think the natural hazard mitigation website also has excellent resources we’re setting in the process of setting up a sandy resource area that’s going to

Have things like our steps to recovery for a safe future and we’ll have many other items in there and so I’m hoping to work very closely with you Jim and and to encourage planners to talk together to work with their neighbors possibly through the resilient neighbor’s network program that FEMA has

Funded working with the APA we can we can do a very different future we can vision a very different future and execute that vision or we can go back to business as usual and be talking about some other hurricane someday that has done devastation possibly quite possibly not in Jim’s robbery Thomas’s lifetime

But down the road possibly this week right we’re talking about a nor’easter slamming into the new york new jersey area a lot of a lot of flap on that or possibly got ribbit in boston harbor as well which is a real concern to me because i live in the special flood

Hazard area lost it doesn’t in northeastern oh that that’s called piling on in the NFL uh Mother Nature doesn’t doesn’t read the NFL blew a real book on my fridge an okay thank you very much hey thanks a lot of it heavy

ID: n1DyuZfBdfY
Time: 1352319295
Date: 2012-11-07 23:44:55
Duration: 00:22:49

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