Community Resilience: Lessons from New Orleans

Robert Cates, one of the authors of Community Resilience: Lessons from New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina, is working on a follow up article that makes explicit a number of general lessons about the creation of resilient communities.

The 8 lessons, listed below, are described in greater detail by Andrew Revkin.

1. The United States is vulnerable to enormous disasters despite being the richest and most powerful nation on earth.
2. Creating community resilience is a long-term process.
3. Surprises should be expected.
4. The best scientific and technological knowledge does not get used or widely disseminated.
5. Major response capability and resources were invisible, refused, or poorly used.
6. Disasters accelerate existing pre-disaster trends.
7. Overall vulnerability to hurricanes has grown from multiple causes.
8. Efforts to provide protection reduced vulnerability to frequent small events but increased vulnerability to rare catastrophic events.

While the work uses the term resilience, it is more in the ordinary language sense than in the technical sense developed by Holling and other resilience science researchers. Conceptually, the analysis is closer to Perrow's treatment of system accidents (see Normal Accidents) than to resilience theory.

Since I've got a chapter "Disasters as System Accidents" in the forthcoming Earthscan Press book Dynamics of Disaster: Lessons on Risk, Response and Recovery that covers some of the same territory, I thought I'd point out the major differences between this analysis and my own.

First, the concept of a system accident refers to an accident resulting from the unanticipated interaction of multiple failures in a complex system. While both Cates and I agree on the importance of multiple causes and the impossibility of perfect foresight (hence, the importance he places on surprises), I have a broader view of the types of causes that should be examined. Cates emphasizes two broad types of factor: natural factors (e.g., hurricane) and technological factors (e.g., levees). The central point of my chapter is the need to incorporate a third type of factor, socio-cultural, into the analysis. I don't think it is possible to fully understand what happened in New Orleans without taking account of both the specific culture of the city and the longstanding history of racism in the region.

Second, Cates argues that disasters accelerate pre-existing trends. Specifically, Katrina accelerated the economic and population decline that New Orleans was already experiencing. While Katrina does appear to have had this effect, I don't think it is safe to generalize from the single case. Naomi Kline, in her book The Shock Doctrine provides a number of examples where natural and human induced disasters alter the situation and provide the opportunity for a dramatic re-organization of the existing state of affairs. These cases illustrate not an acceleration of pre-existing trends but, rather, the replacement of the old trend by a new one. Thus, for example, the tsunami that hit Thailand and wiped out a number of small local villages that had been intractably opposed to tourist development became an opportunity for large corporations to move in and build resorts in those areas.

Third, as the following quote illustrates, Cates clearly understands that there is a potential relationship between adaptation and vulnerability.

A major concern in adapting to climate change is whether successful short-term adaptation may lead to larger long-term vulnerability. This seemed to be the case from the 40 year period between Hurricane Betsy and Katrina, when new and improved levees, drainage pumps, and canals — successfully protected New Orleans against three hurricanes in 1985, 1997, and 1998. But these same works permitted the massive development of previously unprotected areas and the flooding of these areas that resulted when the works themselves failed were the major cause of the Katrina catastrophe.

However, while noting the potential relationship, he doesn't provide any conceptual ideas to help us make sense of it. Individuals familiar with panarchy theory will recognize the similarities between the situation described above and the rigidities present in the conservation phase of the adaptive cycle.

Human Side of Disaster

The current issue of the Disaster and Social Crisis Research Network Electronic Newsletter has just been released. It is edited by Eduardo Runte, a former graduate student in Sociology at UNB whose MA thesis dealt with the experiences of electrical linemen during the ice storm of 1998. Eduardo is now in the PhD program at the Ecole des Mines in Paris. The contents of his thesis are summarized here and a description of his PhD work, dealing with the social processes involved in the creation of safety, can be found here.

The newsletter has a blurb for a new book by Thomas Drabek, The Human Side of Disaster, which it describes as follows:

When disaster strikes, people react, and usually, fear levels rise. Temporarily, however, one motivation supersedes all others: survival of self and those nearby, especially loved ones. Based on the author’s years of research and teaching experience, The Human Side of Disaster scientifically evaluates human responses in the face of disasters. This examination informs emergency managers and response teams and teaches them how to anticipate human behaviors in-crisis.

The book begins with four scenarios based on interviews and real events that introduce the human side of disaster. The stories examine how attention to, or lack of, preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation affect outcomes. Each subsequent chapter refers back to the original Experiences chapter and provides insights that can be applied not only to events such as hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and floods, but also to man-made threats including industrial accidents and acts of terrorism. The author explores how people’s responses can be predicted, the long term effects of disaster on the psyche, and the key issues involved in recovery.

A balanced interpretation of research, results, and experience, the book demonstrates how traditional warning methods and high-tech systems can work together to improve communications, evacuations, and reconstruction efforts. It highlights the role of the human element in any disaster situation and demonstrates how to use that element as part of a planned disaster response.

Resilience in Human Systems

While not directly about Katrina, the web magazine People and Place has an article "Six Habits of Highly Resilient Organizations" that addresses the issue of resilience in human systems. The key point is that people have the capacity for foresight but social structural demands for short-term results often result in inadequate attention to the longer term. Thus, in the case of Katrina, the powers-that-be were well aware of the catastrophic potential of a hurricane hitting New Orleans (FEMA ranked it as the most dangerous natural catastrophe facing the US, even more problematic than a major earthquake in southern California). But, despite this awareness, proper precautions weren't taken. The article provides some insight into why that wasn't the case:

"successful, resilient organizations are those that are able to respond to two conflicting imperatives:
• managing for performance and growth, which requires consistency, efficiency, eliminating waste, and maximizing short-term results
• managing for adaptation, which requires foresight, innovation, experimentation, and improvisation, with an eye on long-term benefits
Most organizations pay great attention to the first imperative but little to the second."

The article also provides some suggestions for improving the resilience of human systems:
1. Resilient organizations actively attend to their environments.
2. Resilient organizations prepare themselves and their employees for disruptions.
3. Resilient organizations build in flexibility.
4. Resilient organizations strengthen and extend their communications networks – internally and externally.
5. Resilient organizations encourage innovation and experimentation.
6. Resilient organizations cultivate a culture with clearly shared purpose and values.

The Sociology of Resilience: Panarchy and Post-Katrina

Our planet is faced with an array of ecological crises—in particular, peak oil, climate change, and fresh water scarcity. Scientists have begun in earnest to examine the impacts of these crises on natural and social systems, and how these systems respond. The ability of a system to respond to and survive crisis has come to be known as “resilience.” There are many theories of resilience, but one that has attained great influence recently is the resilience theory of Canadian ecologist Buzz Holling and his coauthor, Lance Gunderson. Resilience theory is part of their monumental work on cycles of transformation in natural systems called Panarchy. Their theory of resilience was developed out of detailed research on the life cycles of forests (including New Brusnwick) and other ecosystems. In Panarchy, they attempt to apply these theories of transformation and resilience to human social systems, in particular, the ability of social systems to respond to environmental crises.

My early study of this work raised questions for me as a social scientist. In the course of their research, Holling and Gunderson had to admit that human social systems were different from natural systems; social systems didn’t neatly fit the model. So they developed a set of “exceptional conditions” for social systems to explain how human systems responded differently. But what I found particularly troublesome was that their theory of resilience seemed to be completely antithetical to the way we experience the human condition. Panarchy’s theory of resilience states that in third stage of transformation, the ecosystem breaks down, collapses, and in the process, releases all the biological “wealth” that was stored during the “wealth-building” and “conservation” (first and second) stages. During the collapse stage, the system’s raw materials, nutrients and species are freed from their former links to the ecosystem. According to Panarchy, it is in the collapse stage that the system obtains its maximum resilience to ecological crises. In the final stage, the materials and species released by collapse can be recombined, new niches are built, and new species, formerly suppressed under the old system, can become the new dominant species.

I found this concept of resilience a little troubling, especially when applied to human social systems. I immediately thought of Hurricane Katrina, perhaps the greatest ecological catastrophe in U.S. history. It was an ecological catastrophe, not just an environmental one, because it was caused by the combined forces and failures of both the natural system (climate change, hurricanes), and the human systems (systemic poverty, racism and a lack of preparedness to respond to disaster). To this day I can still remember the horror of seeing poor people of color drowning in the floods, stranded on roof-tops, imprisoned in hellish conditions in the Superdome, thirsty, hungry, searching for their families, for clean water, food, and a way out. To this day, I can still see the images of families walking down abandoned highways, carrying their few belongings, walking, walking toward they didn’t know where, trying to find a safe place to rest.

I had to ask myself, “is this maximum resilience?” Here you have a perfect test-case: complete collapse of both the natural and human social systems, and yet they these people did not seem to be “resilient” in the sense of "surviving.” More than 1400 people died in the storm. Half a million people left New Orleans and the affected Gulf region, the largest migration in U.S. history. Two years after the hurricane, only one-third of the City's population returned or remained in the area.(1.) Most of the evacuees never returned, and were forced to find homes in other cities and states. Not much is known about the fate of people who were forced to leave and resettle elsewhere, but one thing is certain: they left with little more than the clothes on their backs. Poor, traumatized, unemployed, bereft of connections and support from their former communities, how did they possess the resilience necessary to rebuild their lives? How is it possible that they would eventually be better off than before the crisis? Is this resilience?

These are the questions and concerns that led me to conduct research on the concept of resilience. I am not trying to discredit or debunk Hollings and Gunderson's theory, or Panarchy, because I think there is much in the theory that does work and is highly applicable to human social systems. But there also remains much in the theory that needs to be tested against the realities of the human condition. Human social systems are different from natural ecosystems, and thus we need to develop a sociological theory of resilience that accounts for that difference. And certainly I hope that research into the resilience of human social systems will yield knowledge and strategies that will help us face the many ecological crises ahead.

1. Source: NARAYAN SASTRY: Tracing the Effects of Hurricane Katrina on the Population of New Orleans: The Displaced New Orleans Residents Pilot Study

http://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/2007/RAND_WR483.pdf