The worsening disasters in Lake Charles highlight the need for disaster preparedness

Most Americans will remember 2020 as the year the pandemic changed everything. But for Lake Charles, Louisiana, and its neighbors along the Gulf Coast, it was also the year of record disasters, with once-in-a-lifetime storms hitting in such rapid succession that their impacts blurred together.

A recent National Academies consensus study I worked on looked at the compounding disasters the region faced—both physical and socioeconomic—as storm after storm arrived during the pandemic with little time for recovery.

It concludes that Lake Charles’ experiences could be a harbinger of what’s to come in a warming world unless the nation fundamentally rethinks its disaster preparedness, response and recovery strategies.

Lake Charles Disasters Aggravated

Hurricane Laura made landfall near Lake Charles on August 27, 2020 as a powerful Category 4 storm with wind speeds exceeding those that local building codes were designed to protect against. The ongoing pandemic has made it more difficult to submit FEMA assistance applications and insurance claims. Appraisers could only view properties remotely, and on-site application support was suspended, forcing residents to log into untested online systems.

As the community struggled to document its losses, Lake Charles was hit again five weeks later by Hurricane Delta. The storm battered already crippled buildings and sent debris flying, causing additional damage and creating complex claim scenarios.

It was almost impossible to tell the new damage from the existing damage made worse by the last storm. Delayed recovery assistance has left municipalities without funds to pay for more debris removal.

Then February 2021 brought a freeze to still-unrepaired homes, bursting pipes and adding more water damage inside. Tarps that protect worn damaged roofs, allowing even more water to enter from above. Debris continued to pile up along the streets.

When record rainfall arrived in May 2021, debris-clogged stormwater systems were overwhelmed. The floods inundated properties, pushing yet another series of losses into an already overwhelmed relief and damage system. Uninsured losses have accumulated as floods have reached areas that are not expected to flood under “normal” circumstances and are therefore not required to carry flood insurance.

This is what a worsening disaster looks like. The rising economic toll has left many homes unrepaired. Blighted rental properties were quickly absorbed into buyout programs or flipped into suddenly profitable real estate markets. Lake Charles’ housing recovery lags behind to this day.

What happened in Lake Charles in 2020-21 illustrates an important truth: Aggravating disasters are avoided only by reducing recovery time after each storm.

This is a challenging prospect, with storms hitting more frequently due to climate change. As the study team’s resident engineer, I believe it will require prioritizing housing resilience, creating more flexible support systems, and building adaptive capacity that can handle new storm scenarios.

1. Build strong houses

The best way to reduce recovery time is to eliminate the need for recovery at all. That starts with building homes that are able to withstand extreme storms.

Unlike other critical infrastructure that is strictly regulated, most housing is governed by the private decisions of property owners who receive very little information about the vulnerability of their homes. So it’s no surprise that they don’t realize how cracks in a window or garage door could propagate to destroy their home.

Worse yet, existing aging properties are not required to meet the latest building codes, making the nation’s aging housing inventory particularly vulnerable to worsening disasters.

States could adopt and enforce improved building standards, but the political will is lacking in many Gulf Coast states. Beyond developers’ concerns about rising construction costs, code reform can become politicized.

An example is Alabama, which does not enforce a statewide building code. Jurisdictions in Mobile and Baldwin counties chose to apply the Coastal Building Code Supplement, created after Hurricanes Ivan (2004) and Katrina (2005) to strengthen homes beyond typical code minimums. This, along with the Strengthen Alabama Homes grant program, has led to more homes being built to a higher standard along the Alabama coast. Many of those homes were unscathed when Hurricane Sally hit in 2020.

These local programs provide a template that can be replicated in states like Louisiana, which similarly emphasizes affordable resilient housing as part of its rebuilding better strategy.

2. Recognize that 1 size no longer fits all

Housing recovery in Lake Charles has been particularly hampered by the rigidity of the nation’s current disaster relief apparatus, which views each disaster as a discrete event managed through a standardized and sometimes restrictive process. This led to significant delays and denials of assistance during the worsening disasters of 2020 and 2021.

In stark contrast, pandemic relief funds reached these communities in the same timeframe with few restrictions, giving municipalities the flexibility to respond to acute needs and even build long-term resilience. Communities used the funds to provide emergency rental and utility assistance, strengthen vulnerable infrastructure, and improve flood management capacity.

The 2020-21 storm sequence bankrupted a dozen Louisiana insurers and left the national disaster fund depleted. The federal government now has an opportunity to redesign national assistance systems to move from a rigid historical, event-based view of disasters to a more flexible perspective that more fully accommodates the varied and protracted effects of worsening disasters in of the needs and capacity of each community.

Today’s disasters are compounding in ways unimagined when the Stafford Disaster and Emergency Assistance Act was written 35 years ago. It set out how the federal government, and FEMA in particular, helps state and local governments prepare for and recover from disasters. The revision of the law could bring about a major reset of national disaster assistance policies.

3. Learn from the pandemic

Beyond accelerating recovery through flexible financing, the pandemic has forced communities to develop new resilience to crises, likely helping them respond to worsening disasters to come.

The COVID-19 crisis has spurred improved data collection and reporting capabilities. We found that it also improved coordination within and between organizations.

And it has forced the provision of virtual services – schools have developed online learning systems and doctors have popularized telehealth. Those new technologies were already in use in Lake Charles when storm damage closed schools, a day after the first in-person classes since the pandemic. Such rapid adaptation is unlikely to have occurred without months of a pandemic building that adaptive muscle.

Climate change will bring new weather patterns that go beyond current emergency managers’ handbooks, which are filled with protocols honed by past experience. Adaptability will be essential when those textbooks cannot cope with worsening disasters that few have imagined.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here: https://theconversation.com/how-back-to-back-hurricanes-set-off-a-year-of-compounding-disasters-for-one-city-and-alarm-bells- about -risks-in-a-warming-world-236384.

Photo: In this Aug. 27, 2020 file photo, buildings and homes are flooded in the wake of Hurricane Laura near Lake Charles.

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Catastrophe Natural disasters