A city that prepares for the worse is disrupted the least. We explore what disaster preparedness looks like and how municipalities should be planning.
The 6.9-magnitude Loma Prieta earthquake struck the San Francisco Bay area of California, USA, on 17 October 1989 damaging more than 23,000 homes, killing 63 people, and caused up to $10 billions of damage.
At the time, high-level American Red Cross staff happened to be in the street of downtown Oakland. They immediately organised people to direct confused and terrified citizens away from buildings, where falling masonry presented a danger. Coordinating the recovery operations began then and there.
“First of all, we had to assess what the damage was, we had to assess what resources were available, and we really had to get in touch with key agencies in the community that we would be needing to help us respond,” one of the key figures in the response, Marian Wilson-Sylvestre, is on record as saying.
Organisations like the Red Cross are specialists in this, but most cities won’t have that to hand. They need to be ready to handle hazards themselves, warns Alicia Johnson, an expert in disaster preparedness and response.
One Disaster After Another
Alicia set up her consultancy agency, Two Lynchpin Road, in 2019 to help municipalities put plans together.
Since then, our CityChanger has helped governments, organisations, and communities across the United States to prepare for, respond to, and rebuild after crises, drawing on experience working with the Chemical Stockpile Emergency Preparedness Program (CSEPP), as the former Director of Emergency Management at UC Berkeley, and even having advised NATO.
After working in disaster management for two decades, Alicia has supported people against just about any hazard imaginable: forest fires, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, heatwaves, chemical spills, terror and cyberattacks, and of course pandemics.
She explains that, while every city needs an individualised plan, and every disaster behaves differently, there are some consistencies that apply. So, let’s take a look.
Need for Disaster Preparedness
The first of many hard-hitting truths is that, whether natural or human-caused, the decisions humanity has taken is making extreme events worse.
When I first entered into emergency management, the correlation with climate change was a very thin thread, and now that thread is much stronger and more pronounced.
With conflict raging in Ukraine and the memory of COVID-19 still fresh in our minds, the likelihood – and severity – of a disaster striking home turf seems eerily possible. With it, the need for disaster preparedness is all the more urgent.
Ignoring the threat carries a significant price tag. The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) reports that “direct disaster costs have grown to approximately $202 billion annually, but that the true costs of disasters is over $2.3 trillion when cascading and ecosystem costs are taken into account”.
However, economic impacts should not be the main concern.
The concentration of rising and densifying urban populations mean that impacts of disasters will affect more and more of us.
Municipal Planning
Prevention is better than cure. There are measures we can put in place to prevent or limit the damage caused by disasters. Flood defences, for example, can mitigate the swell of higher rainfall or tsunamis, and initiatives like the UK government’s aptly named Prevent programme are thought to curb the rise in terrorism.
It isn’t possibly to manage-out all the impacts, but homes, businesses, and lives can be saved if cities are poised for the eventuality.
The big jump is not making the policy, it’s acting on it.
Alicia points out that there are three distinctive steps to disaster preparedness and municipalities that consider the full timeline will be the most resilient:
- Plan ahead
- Response
- Recovery
Stage 1: Plan Ahead
Some disasters are predictable, in likelihood if not behaviour. Science gives us an inkling of when a volcanic eruption is imminent, for example. But we can also plan to deal with the unforeseen, as parts of our response will apply to many hazards similarly: road closures, curfews, cleanups, and memorials, for example.
Civic leaders need to understand that this can be a very long-term perspective, superseding political cycles and even entire careers: after sustaining damage in the Loma Prieta earthquake, it took 25 years until the final screw was in place on San Francisco’s Bay Bridge. “The people who were working on recovery initially were not the people who were working on recovery when it ended.”
How we act in the immediate, mid-, and long-term aftermath of a disaster needs to be adapted to local conditions and resources. “The leading way to do that is to be aware of what is possibly a risk for where you live,” Alicia explains.
That’s why locals – the people who know the geographies and actors – should propose their own plan, not depend on a generic national response.
The Role of Local Authorities
Municipalities cannot do this alone, but they are best placed to facilitate the input of multidisciplinary experts: geographers, hydrologists, emergency services, transport providers, virologists, representatives from water and electricity companies, architects and engineers, behavioural scientists, etc.
We’re not just speaking to the council leaders or the elected officials, we’re also talking to the community as a whole: those people who live in a place, who loves that place, who want to protect it.
Local authorities also have handy knowledge among their own ranks: city planners, building surveyors, educators, communicators, and waste management.
Alicia suggests hosting “a discussion, a workshop, a tabletop exercise, a full scale or functional exercise, something that actually helps people walk through” each step of the plan.
Bringing this collective knowledge together does three things:
- Informs a robust, comprehensive plan
- Deconflicts response processes where agencies have conflicting priorities
- Galvanises cooperation in advance, so that stakeholders are ready to cooperate
Citizen Consultation
Citizens should be included in conversations about long-term recovery; a step Alicia regularly sees avoided because civic leaders worry that those initial conversations could create an atmosphere of fear and panic rather than project reassurance.
Their worries may be exaggerated. People are quick to adapt, as Alicia’s nine-year-old son’s very casual attitude towards his school’s monthly lockdown drills show.
“In the US, children in all schools do active shooter drills,” she tells us. “They hide in a room with no windows. They have to practice being quiet.”
A generation is growing up doing this, and so are as unphased by running through the hyperathletic of an armed invasion as the rest of us are about a routine fire drill. “They are more prepared, which means they’re more resilient, they’re more likely to act correctly, quickly.”
Repetition normalises and trivialises the danger; it makes us familiar with what we need to do, so practice runs should feature in any good plan.
Covering Costs
Any way you look at it, disasters are costly, but a planned response may be cheaper than doing nothing and footing the bill for the ravages of extreme events. Sensible cities will start factoring disaster preparedness into budgeting cycles.
The more money that is made available, Alicia says frankly, the quicker recovery can be. This will get the local economic base back on track and so counteracting brain drain – a known reaction to a slow recovery.
Stage 2: Response
Evacuation plans are a major part of emergency response plans. Civic leaders must be ready to move: “If evacuations are necessary, they need to call for them early.”
When they do, the plan kicks in, having answered the questions:
- Where can all the people safely go for shelter?
- What routes will be available? When will they become congested and what’s the alternative?
- How can we ensure injured parties get access to medical care?
Travel Options
Getting around in a disaster may be problematic.
Decision-makers should be aware of what conditions are needed for public transport to continue operating, or when to close it down. Ferries and elevated monorails are likely to be docked in wild winds, for example.
In America, it’s normal to enlist spare public and school busses to ship people around but this depends on there being procedures in place to call in drivers at the last minute.
If we have buses, but we have no drivers, well there’s a problem!
This apparently was the case during Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, where 200 buses were witnessed “sitting in a [parking] lot underwater”.
Civic Responsibility
Research by Rowena Hill from the UK’s Nottingham Trent University shows that effective disaster preparedness is not solely a top-down directive; in a catastrophe, the public should step in to support the efforts of emergency responders.
Continuing with the idea of evacuation: public transport, when it does run, will not serve every street, and will quickly fill up. “Being able to manage that expectation is a big part of the plan”.
To ease pressure on limited resources, people should know that they are allowed to act on their own decisions. If people have means to leave by private vehicle or carpooling, Alicia advises, they should go as soon as possible. “Get your family out. Get as many people out as you can.”
So households too should be encouraged to make a straightforward emergency plan, which they can do by answering a handful of basic questions:
- What would we do?
- How would we do it/get out?
- Where’s our meeting place?
- Who would we involve (e.g. check on the neighbours)?
We are all responsible for our own safety. We’re also responsible for our community; the people and the places that we love. We take responsibility for those because we live there.
Alicia’s parents surprised her by having a quick getaway planned. Her father has a wheelchair ready in the bedroom, and her mother’s shoes are right next to it. The rear garden gate remins unlocked, and their neighbours know to expect them. Most importantly, they’ve practiced the route day and night.
It isn’t a foolproof plan, Alicia admits, but it’s “solid”.
Stage 3: Recovery & Cleanup
When the flames burn out, the floodwaters recede, and the aftershocks cease, cities can start to clean up and rebuild. It begins with getting the essential services like sewers, clean running water, and electricity running, then it’s on to transport, buildings, and civic infrastructure.
The main problem with repairing damaged constructions is that there’s “lots of regulations and so it’s really hard to pivot fast”. Residents forced to wait for building permission may feel abandoned and frustrated when they just want to restart their lives.
Los Angeles recognised this and reviewed its red tape, Alicia informs us. “They sped up the approval processes for permits.”
Slashing bureaucracy, Alicia warns, “may have some unforeseen environmental impacts down the road” but adds that it’s a trade-off city leaders need to accept in a state of emergency.
Psychological Recovery
Physical infrastructure may not be the toughest repairs to coordinate. Disasters have significant but much less talked about repercussions for mental and emotional health.
Alicia stops short of recommending cities set aside funding for additional healthcare but does acknowledge that we can prepare to rebuild in a way that supports wellbeing.
Unprecedented wildfires are now frequent in Hawai’i, USA. Two years after one of the most devastating, on Maui in 2023, the strain on mental health still impedes survivors’ recovery.[i]
Even so, they have resisted the temptation to fast-track construction, which would revive the tourist industry. By choosing a slower, measured recovery, they have managed to incorporate a traditional ethos and culture, rebuilding with Indigenous knowledge.
The consultation stage handed people advance opportunities to shape what recovery – and the city that emerges out of the wreckage – would look like. “As emergency managers, as civic leaders, as members of community, we need to be aware of that,” Alicia says. “It’s about honouring the values that really make this place, this place.”
Crucial Conversations: The Art of Communication
Making a plan is one thing, executing it is quite another, but it all falls flat unless people are aware that the plan exists and what it entails.
One of the most important elements of the plan is exposing people to frequent, consistent, and multi-channel messaging so they are familiar with what’s expected of them when they need to react.
Cities should recruit public figures have significant reach to relay approved messages to “provide the most accurate information possible to as many stakeholders as possible”. Choose trusted figureheads, so that people will listen to them more than the elected officials they view with scepticism.
We’re talking about community leaders, university professors, religious organisations, social clubs, neighbourhood associations, and even figures of industry. It can be institutions as well as individuals.
They’ll get that information spread out, and I think that’s a real key to making sure that people act and act appropriately.
Alicia has been in disaster management for 20 years, but it was a talk by the local fire department about senior safety that prompted her parents to make a plan.
This has a cascading effect, with disaster preparedness finally becoming a topic of conversation round the dinner table – a move Alicia encourages us all to do, as it disarms the fear. “We don’t need to be afraid; we need to take action. It gets a lot easier when you actually talk about it.”
Disaster Preparedness: Key Takeaways
Benefits:
- Being ready for a calamity to play out has capacity to constrain damage to the built environment, social infrastructure, civic operations, health, and the local economy
- Having a well communicated plan ensures the public and stakeholders involved in the response know what to do when the time comes
- Making disaster preparedness part of the everyday routine and conversation prevents panic and empowers the right action when disasters strike
Challenges:
- There’s no escaping the fact that disaster preparations, responses, and rebuilding is pricy, but as an unavoidable part of city governance, budgets should be ringfenced
- Authorities cannot put together an effective plan alone – they need to persuade a full range of stakeholders to buy in
- However well we plan, there will never be enough resources for the city to cover every eventuality. In the heat of the moment, we need the public to make certain decisions for themselves and do what they can to relieve this pressure
How to get started:
- Rebuilding after a disaster starts with writing a plan committed to long-term recovery – even if it takes a quarter of a century
- Consult with communities to get a localised picture of the environmental and social behaviours that should be addressed
- Plans should evolve over time as cities change but what stays consistent is the need to make sure the public is familiar with what’s expected of them
[i] Holliday R, Krishnamurti LS, Jordan SE, Sia MA, Brenner LA, Monteith LL. The Health and Social Impacts of the Maui Wildfires: Post-Disaster Care from a Sociocultural Lens. Hawaii J Health Soc Welf. 2024 Mar;83(3):85-87. PMID: 38456158; PMCID: PMC10915863.