Slow is smooth and smooth is fast -- Sandy Recovery

Slow is Smooth and Smooth is Fast. In theory this beautifully crafted statement would be the tagline for Long Term Recovery. Unfortunately, the reality that many renters, homeowners, and municipalities face during the Long Term Recovery process can be characterized as anything but ‘smooth’ or ‘fast’. You needn’t look further than any one of the stories that the news media has published in light of Superstorm Sandy’s 1-year anniversary for evidence of this fact. Recovery dollars are delayed; homeowner’s continue to wrangle with FEMA, their insurance companies, and contractors on money owed or how best to proceed in the face of the ever-changing landscape that is Long Term Recovery on a wide scale.

 

Staten Island, NY - Midland Beach Area (Credit: Natan Dvir/Polaris)

Given the lasting social, financial, and political impacts Sandy has had on the Mid-Atlantic region, one post devoted to understanding where things stand didn’t seem appropriate. With that said, I’m going to spend this week looking at Sandy through a number of different lens and explore:

The speed of Long Term Recovery

Within hours of Sandy’s passing communities were calling to be rebuilt, urging for the expeditious return to pre-Sandy conditions. At the same time though, another narrative surfaced, one with a focus on building back stronger and smarter to create more resilient communities. These opposing views are at odds with one another and have created environments strained by competing interests, which is affecting recovery speed and responsiveness.

The Mental Impacts of Disaster

While much of the impacts of disaster are quantified by the physical damage done to communities, there are mental impacts that disaster brings that don’t get attention because they’re usually silent. The passage of Sandy was a traumatic event, creating, uncovering, and exacerbating mental illness, adding to the strain of an already difficult situation. The mental toll Sandy exacted on families already struggling isn't a story often told, but one that has impacted everyone who went through the storm in some way.

Nonprofits in Long Term Recovery

In the aftermath of response, images of armies of volunteers doing cleanup work, distributing meals, and generally giving everyone a warm fuzzy feeling were everywhere. In the interceding 12 months the volunteer interest has waned, and many of the groups that descended on the mid-Atlantic region have long since packed up and moved on. So, what role do nonprofits play this far into recovery operations? What challenges are they facing? And how is a balance struck between contractors looking for work and Nonprofits providing similar services for free?

The Future of Long Term Recovery

What have we learned, and will we as a collective conscious care when it happens again in a smaller community? Will the pressure be as intense? If every community that experiences a disaster will go through the trials and tribulations of long-term recovery, how can we make them better prepared so that the speed of recovery is no longer a problem?

The Recovery of any community is a complex and drawn out process where competing interests lobby for how recovery dollars should be spent and opposing viewpoints clash over who should be leading the efforts. While the statement: 'slow is smooth and smooth is fast' would be a great way to characterize long term recovery, until communities are stronger and better prepared for dealing with the realities of what recovery entails, they will have to remain an aspirational ideal. 

Coordinating Cleanup 1.0

Crisis Cleanup has a great logo

Nonprofits setting up operations in Colorado are abuzz with talk of Crisis Cleanup, the brain child of Aaron Titus, a guy who said "there's got to be a better way to organize some of the chaos of early recovery cleanup" (I made that quote up) and created a tool that's doing just that. He created a tool that works to advance how nonprofit organizations engage in cleanup activities following a disaster.

The cliff's notes version is that Crisis Cleanup is a google map populated with cleanup needs represented by pins dropped on the location of said need. Registered organizations can claim pins so that other responding groups don't accidentally send teams to a home that has already received help. There is a reporting aspect that accompanies this so that hours can be tracked and volunteer numbers logged, an innovative solution that helps manage the nonprofit aspect of early recovery cleanup following disasters.

I had an opportunity to be a user of the system after Hurricane Sandy as part of its beta testing during response and saw the potential. Since then the system has been implemented several times with what I hope are fixes and advances making it easier to use and more comprehensive from a data capture perspective.

Screen shot of the user interface -- Superstorm Sandy

With the system being used in Colorado to coordinate nonprofit cleanup activities, I'm interested in hearing from anyone who uses it to manage their infield work flow to get your thoughts on the system within the context of cleanup coordination.

And while I'm optimistic about how Crisis Cleanup can work to provide the autonomy nonprofits seek while working within a defined system, I feel that it's important to remember the need to be inclusive.

Spontaneous response in disaster and the substantial impact it has during early recovery activities is no longer an ignorable trend. Social media is being used to organize armies of volunteers to aid in response and recovery, and it's happening as I write this in Colorado. As a community of practice we must strive to include as many of these emergent groups as possible in response coordination. Not only is it key in working towards enacting the "all of nation" or "whole of community" approach to preparedness and response as outlined by Presidential Policy Directive 8, but its important for unity of effort to provide better coordinated service delivery to those affected.

As it stands the crisis cleanup tool is largely for vetted organizations, those with a response history or those who are "known" entities. And while I understand why the system is setup this way, to help ensure consistency in the work done on behalf of homeowners, I feel that there is a solution that can set an expectation as to the level of work needing to be done, while encouraging broader inclusion of locally responding groups.

All Disasters Are Local, a tired expression but one that holds truth; and while Crisis Cleanup has taken a monumental step in unifying early recovery cleanup from a nonprofit perspective, I believe that there is work to be done to ensure access to this tool makes its way down to the emergent groups on a local level. For it's those groups that have the biggest stake in ensuring that their communities make a full recovery and as such rightfully deserve to be included within the broader coordinated effort.

A tip of my cap to you Mr. Titus, I look forward to seeing how we can evolve the model moving forward.

Consensus on Clean up

One of the greatest assets individuals and communities can have before, during, and after a disaster is the knowledge of what happens next, and the confidence to act on that knowledge. Unfortunately, the current state of preparedness in many communities is far from that ideal and as a result, leaves room for ambiguity around key issues that mark turning points in an individual and community's recovery.

A great opportunity to clear up some of this ambiguity while working to set and manage homeowner expectations is to, as a response community, agree and adhere to standards around the work done on behalf of impacted homeowners i.e. mucking/gutting/debris removal/sanitizing/mold treatment/etc. By gaining consensus on this issue, standards can be proactively communicated as a part of preparedness initiatives to help bring both homeowner and responding groups (established or spontaneous) onto the same page when engaging in cleanup activities. Not only that, but by actively pushing cleanup standards, homeowners don't have to wait around for someone to help them, they can quickly and aggressively begin the process with friends, family, or spontaneous volunteers from the community and work to a standard that is applied across the country...in essence, working to create more resilient communities.

Is it done?

Is it Done?
I would bet that if you were to show the above photo to different people with different levels of experience in response, homeowners included, and asked what needed to happen next, you would get a variety of answers. Not to say that they would be wrong, but finding a definitive answer would not be an easy task because until recently no checklist existed, there was no "how to" guide endorsed by a coalition of organizations or FEMA to help define the process. Given that more than a handful of organizations have been doing this type of work for years spanning hundreds of disasters, one would think that an authoritative guidebook would've been written before now, if for no other reason than to give homeowners a chance at a full recovery without such reliance on response organizations. I say this because responding non-profits can't serve everyone, and after a certain point, they begin to pack up taking with them their know how and experience, leaving the remaining work to fewer and oftentimes less experienced resources. What remains is often a mash up of homes taken to various stages of "completeness," and a lot of grey area around how best to move many of them forward.

In recognition that the resources and surge of Volunteer power are not inexhaustible, the National VOAD Housing Committee has created guidelines to formalize an understanding of what completing the steps involved in clean up means. This was done to bring some uniformity to how we talk and act in the field on behalf of impacted homeowners and renters.

Go here for the download

While the creation of the above guidance documentation is a good start, I believe packaging these guidelines with documentation and other relevant resources should be used as a part of community preparedness programming; preparedness is about more than having food and water, it's about having the knowledge and understanding of what happens next. 

The goal is to ensure that all homeowners and responding groups have a clear understanding of expectations around what the different phases of cleanup are to mitigate the guesswork so that consistency can be created in the work done on behalf of impacted homeowners.

In the post, 'Disaster Response in the Digital Age' I talk about the need for the creation of a standardized data set so that information can flow freely between the proprietary software platforms being utilized during response. I believe the creation of this guidance document is an important first step, because without consensus around the definitions of cleanup activities, getting consistency in data collection and tracking, the first step in data set standardization, isn't feasible.

Picking up after a disaster

Disasters create a lot of debris. Invariably there will be questions about what to do with all of it, where it's going to go, who's going to pay for its hauling, and what happens if homeowners miss the deadline in getting it to the curb?

To give you an idea, Superstorm Sandy created 8.5 Million cubic yards of debris, including 2.5 million cubic yards of sand and silt that was deposited onto roads limiting or halting transport. Debris and its management are central not only to individual homeowners cleaning up, but to the community as a whole and its return to a new normal.

While most of us will never know the joy of being saddled with the responsibility of having to deal with a mountain of household waste (literally), being able to help the process along in anyway possible will save you time and your community money.

The above graphic is what FEMA has put out for sorting debris at the curb, this is a the rule of thumb for sorting and is not always followed because when a basement looks like this after a flood:


It usually ends up on the street like this:



And taken to a pile where it all looks like this:



The resources required to coordinate the pickup, hauling, interim storage, sorting, and disposal of the aftermath of a disaster is a costly and time-intensive undertaking. As an impacted homeowner or Volunteer helping to clean up, please seek out guidance on where, how, and how long debris pickup will be taking place, and encourage everyone to abide by that request.

If you're unsure of where to find this information, call the 211/311 information referral service in your county (if available), search for your county's Debris Management Plan online, ask via your municipalities website, look at your county or state emergency management website, etc...Debris management