Translator: Leonardo Silva Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
In August 2017,
Hurricane Harvey devastated communities across Texas and Louisiana.
Three and a half feet of rain fell in just four days.
A hundred and fifty thousand houses were flooded.
Seventeen thousand people had to be rescued from the flood,
and more than 36 people died.
We watched, rapt.
Our hearts broke for those who lost everything
and soared with pride at the sight of the spontaneous volunteers,
our Cajun Navy,
who deputized themselves and their fishing boats
to rescue stranded survivors.
(Applause)
"Unprecedented," we said.
"Unforeseen."
"A terrible act of God."
"One of the worst natural disasters in US history."
But you know what?
I don't agree.
Yes, of course,
what happened in Hurricane Harvey was horrific,
but it's the "natural" in "natural disaster"
that I take issue with.
Just like climate change is 100% real and caused by humans ...
(Cheers) (Applause)
so are what we call "natural disasters."
Yes, of course, wind, rain and hurricanes are naturally occurring,
but to call the death and destruction caused by these events "natural"
makes their devastation seem inevitable and out of our control.
But it is not out of our control.
(Applause)
I have been an emergency manager for 15 years.
Most of my time was spent helping communities prepare for disaster.
But I've also helped them
respond to and recover from more than 50 presidentially declared disasters,
from Katrina to Maria,
Northern California wildfires to Colorado floods,
and countless in between.
Out of that experience, I cofounded a company called Geospiza,
where we use data to help companies and communities
understand and mitigate their disaster risk.
And across all of that, all of that experience,
the key thing I learned
is that nearly all of the trauma and tragedy
we call "natural disaster"
is not only predictable; it's preventable.
Disasters are 100%
a result of poor human decision-making.
That anybody in this country should die
or lose everything as a result of a so-called natural disaster
should make you angry to your core.
Incredible advances in mapping, modeling and atmospheric science
have given us 7 to 10 days notice of a hurricane's landfall
and allowed us to predict, often to the individual house,
how much damage we should expect.
Flood modeling is so robust that days, days in advance,
we can predict on what day, at what time and what locations
we expect rivers to overtop their banks.
And even more amazing than our ability to predict a specific event
is our knowledge of how natural hazards affect communities
and what we can do to prevent the damage.
To show you what I mean,
let's take a deeper look at Houston and Harvey.
Houston is the largest US city with no formal zoning.
And between the late 90s and Harvey, it was also one of the fastest growing.
At its peek,
275 people moved to Houston each day,
and with all of those people came the need for housing.
Houston accommodated
by paving over more than 30% of the wetland and prairie,
and trading naturally absorbent land for impervious houses, driveways and roads
has consequences.
Rain water can't rapidly absorb and stow.
Instead, it funnels, collects ...
and floods!
More than a decade before Harvey,
a US Army Corps of Engineers' report mapped locations in Houston
that would experience catastrophic flooding
in significant rain events.
But developers, together with city officials,
willfully disregarded that known risk.
They traded short-term financial gains
for the long-term safety of future residents.
They explicitly chose to build in areas they knew would flood,
and people died!
The disaster data illuminates another heartbreaking reality.
Because disasters are not natural but a result of human decision-making,
the same systemic inequities that exist in our community every day
are magnified in disaster.
Disasters do not distribute their wrath equally.
Historically marginalized communities suffer disproportionately.
Through redlining
and by placing affordable housing in high-risk geographies
like the Lower Ninth Ward, in New Orleans,
or the Far Rockaway, in Queens,
we've created a system where brown, black, disabled and poor people
are far more likely to have their lives and livelihoods washed away.
And the super rich, like Kim Kardashian and Kanye West,
hire private firefighters to protect their homes,
while the rest of us depend on a public firefighting force
that is 69% volunteers!
Those Northern California wildfires
are another example of our failure to use data.
Medicare data available to emergency managers
identifies people who have daily in-home healthcare.
Other data identifies people who have a hearing impairment.
Websites show us where there's spotty cell phone signal,
and public-facing notification plans tell us that in an emergency,
evacuation orders will be issued by a text message
and that police will drive through neighborhoods,
announcing evacuation from their bullhorns.
A simple overlay of all of these elements tells us
there are huge numbers of people for whom these strategies would not work.
We knew they wouldn't hear the text alert,
and we knew that even if they could hear a bullhorn from the street,
they wouldn't have been able to get out of their beds independently,
let alone out of the house,
and 46 people died who didn't have to!
We don't yet know how to be fully disaster-proof,
of course,
but we can do a hell of a lot better than we do today.
And one of the key ways is by investing in mitigation.
Projects like raising the electrical equipment
in high-rise buildings or hospitals
from the basement to upper floors,
or by clearing brush from around houses, or installing flame-resistant roofs,
or even by increasing the drainage adjacent to roads
are not sexy.
It's not sexy at all.
It's not nearly as sexy as the dramatic rescues we see on the news,
but these projects save lives
and huge amounts of money.
Sure,
a project in Reedsburg, Wisconsin,
to raise telecommunications equipment just four feet higher
sounds super boring!
But that 235-thousand-dollar project
is going to save $ 2.2 million
by avoiding losses from flood!
These are venture-capital-level returns.
A comprehensive cost-benefit analysis
by the National Institute of Building Sciences
found that for every dollar we invest in mitigation,
we save at least six
in disaster response and recovery costs.
On some projects, the return is 32 to 1.
The good news is that some communities are putting data to work to save lives.
We think of Portland as a lush, verdant metropolis.
It's temperate and green,
but that beautiful tree canopy is not equally distributed.
Neighborhoods in Northeast Portland
have less than half the tree cover of other parts of the city,
and that lack of trees dramatically increases surface and air temperatures.
On summer days,
Northeast Portland can be more than 20 degrees hotter
than the rest of the city.
Even in this theater,
we can imagine the difference of a lovely 75 and a sweltering 95.
And those tree-poor neighborhoods are also dollar poor,
and their residents have elevated asthma and heart disease rates.
And the evidence is clear
that heart disease and asthma and poverty
all increase a person's risk of dying in a heatwave.
So on extremely hot days,
which are now way more common thanks to climate change,
residents of Northeast Portland are going to die disproportionately.
But Portland is taking action.
City agencies, together with community members,
are planting and nurturing trees.
Not only are they beautiful;
they reduce urban heat and absorb air pollution
and reduce the risk of dying from a heatwave.
It is so simple.
Nothing about this is rocket science.
Here's the bottom line:
calling wildfires, heatwaves, hurricanes and flood natural disasters
obfuscates our human responsibility.
It lets us off the hook for the death and destruction.
It might feel awkward for a while, but let's call them human disasters.
And let's also stop behaving as if we're powerless against their consequences.
What if we treated airplane crashes the way we treat human disasters?
What if, when a place crashed, the FAA said, "What do you want from us?
We are flying tubes of metal filled with people through the air!
We're defying nature, and it's hard ..."?
(Laughter)
What if they took the incredibly rich data
from the black boxes and the voice recorders,
and they just put it on the shelf, and planes just fell out of the sky?
We would be enraged.
But this is exactly how we treat hurricanes, floods,
wildfires and heatwaves.
Whole communities are wiped out,
leaving their residents emotionally and financially devastated
and others dead,
and our leaders literally shrug.
They say,
"Mother Nature."
"Acts of God."
"We did the best we could."
No.
No, you didn't.
We know how to stop the suffering.
We have the data!
We just need to use it
to create policy that prioritizes mitigation,
to stop building houses in areas we know are dangerous
and to take protective action against climate change now -
(Audience member) Yes!
Before it's too late.
(Applause)
We have the power to save lives,
and we must use it!
Thank you.
(Applause) (Cheers)