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Catastrophe Recovery
Your community or regional
revitalization
can start with a primary focus on any of the
12 sectors of restorable assets. But if you're in a
post-catastrophe situation, the urgency and
comprehensiveness of your needs changes everything, and
it changes nothing. What this means is that the 3
renewal rules are more important than ever, as are the 3
renewal processes. You'll also need an effective
way of bringing people together and organizing your
efforts, and you can't beat a renewal engine for that.
So, the decision-making principles,
the solution-producing actions, and the organizational
model remains the same. But the emergency
situation changes how things work to a very large
degree, which is why catastrophe recovery is considered
a separate sector, even though it deals with restoring
the same assets covered by the other 11 sectors.
If you've recently been hit by
disaster, and you've already got a strong, trusted,
locally-based catastrophe
recovery organization, it can be an excellent foundation from
which to launch your Renewal Capacity Program.
Definition &
overview: Catastrophe restoration come in five basic forms:
Natural disasters
(hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, etc.);
Anthropogenic disasters
(industrial explosions, oil spills, nuclear power plant
accidents, etc.); Natural disasters exacerbated by
anthropogenic factors (natural floods made
catastrophic by development in flood plains, earthquakes
made more severe by groundwater or oil extraction,
hurricane-associate mudslides caused by deforestation,
etc.); Socioeconomic disasters
(military base closure in a community whose economy
depends on it, industrial flight to areas with cheaper
labor, incremental decline caused by a multitude of
social, environmental, economic, and image factors,
etc.), & Conflict
(invasion, terrorism, revolution, riots, etc.).
Integrated Catastrophe
Restoration includes use of revitalization programs to
prevent catastrophic community decline; use of natural
or manmade catastrophes to stimulate redevelopment (such
as technological leapfrogging of infrastructure,
community redesign, etc.), also known as the "silver
lining effect"; use of potential economic catastrophes
(such as military base closure) to stimulate
revitalization; recovery from armed conflict; etc.
Here's an examples of the "silver lining effect" in
action:
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Between 1950-1980, many major highways were built along
decrepit industrial waterfronts. With the waterfront
redevelopment trend that started in the 80's and
accelerated in the 90's, many communities found that
these highways were preventing effective revitalization
of their waterfront. The vast investment in these roads
made it difficult to propose removing them (as in
Toronto for the past two decades with the Gardiner
Freeway). This problem is sometimes "solved" by natural
disaster, as with the earthquakes in San Francisco
(Embarcadero & Central freeways), and in Seattle
(Alaskan Way Viaduct), where the communities took the
time to question whether they should be rebuilt, and
what could be done if they weren't.
It should be noted that some far-sighted communities,
such as Boston, "bit the bullet" and charged ahead with
the removal of revitalization-obstructing infrastructure
without waiting for a disaster to damage the highway for
them.
Integrated catastrophe restoration
is desperately needed these days, when natural disaster
damage is steadily increasing every year, and when wars
are becoming smaller-but-more-frequent, longer-lasting,
and more toxic. Recognition of the need for
more-integrated approaches is reflected in the rise of
concepts such as "smart aid". Too often,
disaster and war recovery efforts focus almost exclusively on
physical (usually urban) infrastructure. While this
is--in fact--usually the most critical need, catastrophe
revitalization efforts often miss their target by
forgetting (or under-funding) restoration efforts
related to rural needs in general, and social /
environmental aspects in particular.
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