Mega-Disaster Recovery For Cities Multilayered, Expert Says

With a mega-disaster such as the recent Japan earthquake and tsunami, recovery occurs on many levels, much of it dependent on the culture and community of the inhabitants, according to an author and researcher.

All else being equal, strong communities are likely to suffer fewer adverse consequences than weak communities, says Daniel J. Alesch, co-author of “Managing for Long-Term Community Recovery in the Aftermath of Disaster.”

Preparing for disasters means “spending money up to the level that you can, much like an insurance policy,” he says. “You do that and it doesn't take much money to protect yourself against modest events—the ones that happen 20 times a year in any particular place.”

But “there are the ones that happen once in a lifetime or once every couple of lifetimes, which is what Japan had, and there's really no way to protect against that.”

What's required for that type of event, he says, is long-term advance planning. “If you're smart, what you try to do is not put dangerous things in dangerous places.”

Alesch uses the situation at Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant as an example. “You need the water to cool nuclear power plants, but you don't want to have to pump the water to higher locations. But it turns out that it's cheaper to pump it a short distance than a long distance. And since that area was in a low-risk part of Japan, it probably made sense at the time.”

Overall, he says, Japan is “about as well prepared as any place for these kinds of events. A big part of this is cultural.”

He explains, “Japan is the only place I've seen where when the light changes, everybody starts out at the same speed. It's a place where culture is shared widely and where the social rules are embedded in the culture.”

After a disaster such as that seen in Japan, recovery is necessary on many levels, Alesch explains. For cities, recovery means getting water, treating sewage, and making it possible to conduct commerce and lead a life.

This kind of recovery, he says, takes time. “It's different when a city is damaged than when a city is demolished.”

He compares what has happened in Japan to the big tsunami in the Indian Ocean in 2004, where entire villages disappeared. In Japan, “whole urban complexes disappeared,” he explains. “There are many levels of recovery of many kinds of systems.”

Despite the depth of the devastation, Alesch is confident Japan will recover. “If you look at New Orleans, it was a failure before [Hurricane Katrina]. Too many people, too few jobs, so their prospects for a recovery as a city system, within the New Orleans Parish, might be 20 years.”

In Japan, however, the population has shared goals, and he surmises that within 15 years they will be doing well.

Alesch's book, the result of years of cumulative research in dozens of communities experiencing extreme events, is available through PERI, the Public Entity Risk Institute.