Kickoff to Hurricane Season 2020: Communicating Risks – A discussion with the Federal Alliance for Safe Homes
What we’re talking about
Disaster Recovery Roundtable welcomes Leslie Chapman Henderson with the Federal Alliance for Safe Homes (FLASH) to discuss their hurricane mitigation and preparedness programs. Leslie will share information available to emergency managers as they prepare for hurricane season, including the latest on the Hurricane Strong initiative, efforts to promote improved building codes, COVID-19 impacts to their operations, and details about a new FLASH podcast.
The Federal Alliance for Safe Homes (FLASH) was formed as a volunteer committee in the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew in 1992, and today supports emergency managers and others in preparing for disasters. The organization is best known for its efforts to promote stronger building codes in coastal states prone to hurricanes. FLASH’s CEO Leslie Chapman-Henderson will share the latest opportunities available to communities promoting hurricane resilience through the Hurricane Strong designation initiative and how they are updating the program based on a new survey of public input based on this year’s concerns with COVID-19.
Transcript
(0:00 – 1:19)
This is Disaster Recovery Roundtable, a platform to explore, engage, and educate the emergency management community. Our topics are timely and relevant, intended to promote the exchange of ideas and best practices. Now, here’s your host, Greg Paget.
On this episode of Disaster Recovery Roundtable, we are sharing best practices and having a discussion on communicating risk to the public. One organization that’s been doing that for decades is the Federal Alliance for Safe Homes, known as FLASH. Whether it’s promoting stronger building codes or mitigating against earthquakes, FLASH has been on the front lines.
And we’re so fortunate to have FLASH CEO, Leslie Chapman Henderson, on our show today. Welcome, Leslie. Thank you.
Thank you. It’s great to be here. Now, Lizzie, you and I have worked together on several projects over the years with FEMA, volunteering together with the National Hurricane Conference, working on FLASH projects together.
But for our listeners who maybe don’t know about FLASH, can you tell us a little bit about how the organization started and your role? Sure, sure. So, our organization started out as a volunteer committee in the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew, believe it or not, in 1992. And we are and remain a very diverse collective of folks who come from all the different fields that are relevant to making people safe and keeping homes intact after something like a hurricane.
(1:19 – 2:04)
So, it’s everyone you’d imagine. Emergency management, the hurricane center, the building code community, the builders, and all the other stakeholders pulled together by us. And our role is risk communication.
So, we see our role very simply as taking the science and the information that people need to be safe and to protect their homes and bringing it through and delivering it in a way that’s understandable, useful, maybe not overly complicated. We don’t need to turn everyone into a builder or a meteorologist. We just need to give them the parts of the how-to so that they can be safe and know that their home is going to survive as well.
(2:04 – 4:07)
So, after we started in 1992, it was all about hurricanes, but we realized very swiftly that there’s a lot more happening in the natural world. So, we expanded very rapidly across the last 22 years. And we’ve got information for you on hurricane, tornado, flood, tsunami, earthquake, you name it.
If it’s happening out there and affects families and homes and it’s called a disaster, we’ve got some advice and some helpful information for you. We are non-profit. Our information comes from the best sources from either the academic community or the science researchers and laboratories and corporations in the U.S. and beyond.
And so, it’s a really successful formula and one that we have really continued the same method since we started. In relation to our topic that we’re discussing today, communicating risk to the public, for the emergency manager that’s out there, what resources do you have available to support their efforts as they get the public ready for the start of hurricane season? Well, we’re really excited this year that we were able to do a survey to really fine-tune what we have to offer, because as we know, in 2020, we’re not just up against hurricane season, but we’re up against COVID-19. So, we did a survey of consumers in 10 states that are frequently affected by hurricanes.
And it’s all the people you think, you know, Florida over to Texas, along the Gulf Coast, and all the way up the eastern seaboard. And we asked them, what’s on your mind? What do you need? And how can we help? So, we used what we learned from the survey to take our Hurricane Strong program, which is available online at hurricanestrong.org, and fine-tune and enhance all the information there. Again, with the formula, simple, downloadable, and in this case, self-actualized, to use a fancy word, things people can do themselves along the DIY and affordable track this year as they’re looking at COVID.
(4:07 – 8:16)
In the survey, we learned what we expected to learn. We learned that people are concerned about the dual challenge of being prepared in an environment where supplies may not be as readily available. You can’t wait till the last minute this year and get what you need.
We also learned kind of an upside aspect, and that is that 7% more intend to prepare this year than did last year. Again, because they know they can’t afford to wait until the last minute. Many people told us they had more time on their hands, so they’re getting to those things that have been on the to-do list for multiple hurricane seasons, yet this year, for the first time, they’ve gotten outside, they’ve measured their windows, they’ve had the boards cut, and they pre-drilled the holes so that emergency board up can be done faster and more easily.
One of the things that people told us too is, I want to be able to stay home because I want to be able to socially distance, but I need to know I’m safe. They’re taking those extra steps, even if it’s something as simple as applying adhesives inside the attic to keep that deck tied down stronger. So the survey gave us a roadmap.
We already had the Hurricane Strong program. We created it in 2016. When you go online, what you’ll see and everything there is available both in English and in Spanish, you’ll see new checklists.
We are so excited that we’ve created a soup-to-nuts review on hurricane shutter options, from the least expensive to the high end, with the ups and downs of each. So we go through metal panels, steel, aluminum, fabric, polycarbonate, accordion, roll down, all the different options, how they’re, you know, kind of the cost ranges. These are real-time numbers, so people can say, okay, I’ve got shutters on part of my house, but I have this one weird window that I’ve never, you know, taken care of.
And this is all, again, with a focus on things you can figure out yourself, whether it’s your building code or getting some shutters, really important safety reminders for your supply kit, how to use a chainsaw. You know, we’ve got it all there, and that’s, I think, especially important this year because people, you know, we just can’t afford to wait until the last minute. I remember Hurricane Strong when it came out in 2016.
If I’m not mistaken, wasn’t Leon County in Tallahassee there, where you’re located, the first county that came on board? So we have two. Hurricane Strong was so popular that it kind of created another version of itself. Hurricanestrong.org is for families and individuals to help get ready and to prepare.
And right after we put it out there, Leon County, Florida, came just and said, okay, we know what it means now to be Hurricane Strong as an individual or a family, and there’s the five steps, and we can talk about those in a second. What Leon County said is, what does it mean if a community or a county, like we are a city, what is the definition of Hurricane Strong for us? So if you’re an individual or a family getting ready, we have five focus areas for Hurricane Strong. It’s personal safety, which is all about knowing where you’re going to be, figuring out your evacuation zone.
The second part is preparedness, supplies, plans, pet food, medicine. The third piece of Hurricane Strong for the family is financial security. Have an insurance checkup, okay? The fourth is that damage prevention piece.
Can your house handle it? That’s the question you have to answer. So you figure out what your building code is, you take steps to make sure you can protect your openings, and you assess, can I be here or not? The fifth step of Hurricane Strong for a family is community service. We’re telling folks, hey, you know, now that you’re ready, what can you do for your neighbor? And it doesn’t have to be fancy.
(8:16 – 11:03)
It may be one elderly neighbor that just needs a little bit of help making sure that dead limbs are removed in time for them to not become wind borne missiles. The community version of Hurricane Strong, we’re very excited, last week we announced a new community, Cape Coral, Florida was added, and we’ve got another one coming, but it’s a surprise, I can’t tell you who it is yet. The community definition of Hurricane Strong is a larger scale thing, as you can imagine.
It’s a lot of community leaders, like the county commission or the city manager, have said we want to be designated Hurricane Strong. We look at the metrics that are already in place for their building code quality, their NOAA storm ready designation, which means they have good alerting, their school based education, their flood insurance sales, and the kind of macro measures that can tell us that this community is really on the ball and doing the things that can make us Hurricane Strong. So we’re excited that the underlying program for individuals has given rise to the community program, and we’re just really getting started.
I think we have six communities out there, Chatham County, Leon County was first, Miami-Dade County, Florida, was right behind them. Chatham County, which is Savannah’s county, came on next. We just added Cape Coral, and then we’ve got several in the chute.
It’s not really anything that they have to do differently. It’s just taking all those, I mean, Greg, can you do this? Hurricane readiness is a complex formula. There’s so many moving pieces and parts and elements that have to go the right way in order for things to turn out well.
We can’t prevent the hurricane, but if they do all these different things, they can come back from the hurricane faster. That’s what we’re going for, right? Resilience. So with Hurricane Strong, what we’re doing is we’re trying to streamline it so people understand what those steps are, and they’re not overwhelming.
And with respect to a community that’s Hurricane Strong, we’re basically just recognizing them for taking all the steps from a policy standpoint and a public education standpoint that are going to move them toward the best position. Unfortunately, sometimes, and it’s just the nature of how society works, we’re really good at things after it happens. What’s fun about the Hurricane Strong designation for community leaders is that they can get recognized before the hurricane comes.
(11:04 – 13:43)
So it’s been a great model for us, and I suspect we’ll expand it to other perils in the future. And it sounds a little bit like storm ready, perhaps not as complicated for an emergency manager to go through the process to get to be part of the program, right? Right. And that’s what’s, so when we looked at, okay, we said, okay, Leon County asked us, what’s a community definition of Hurricane Strong? That was what we said is, what is the definition? And we had to kind of cast about and look at all the different things.
Well, storm ready for NOAA is a signature element, so we didn’t have to reinvent anything there. But you have to have the NOAA designation, that’s step one, on the path to Hurricane Strong. So we’re not being redundant, we’re reinforcing each other.
And most of the metrics are existing, objective, well-established measures. Another one is BSEGS, which is the Building Code Effectiveness Grading Schedule. Not something everybody knows, but every community, almost every community has a BSEGS score.
So to qualify for a Hurricane Strong community designation, you have to have a BSEGS in the five and below. It’s actually like golf. So the lower, the better with BSEGS.
Are there certain states that don’t have that code or don’t recognize that code that won’t qualify? Well, there are some jurisdictions and states that are not necessarily a part of the BSEGS measurement system. I think there are five. Three of them are hurricane-prone areas, Hawaii, Mississippi, and Louisiana.
But if a state, if a community in one of those states wants to be designated Hurricane Strong, we can do our own analysis because we also started two years ago another initiative called No Code, No Confidence, where we’ve developed the first, and it is such an undertaking, but we are developing and growing the first transparency database for building codes down to the local level. And so we can do our own research and verify the quality of the code. The BSEGS makes it faster, but we can always supplement and fill that in if they want to become a Hurricane Strong community.
But, you know, we’ve always said if you don’t have a good building code, if you don’t build it right, you can’t skip the code and ever get to resilient. It just doesn’t work that way. It’s that fundamental.
(13:44 – 19:02)
Well, I know you dream building codes in your sleep because if you ever want to have a really in-depth conversation about building codes, you go to Leslie Chapman Henderson and she could tell you everything and anything you need to know. Folks can definitely go to the website and learn more from flash.org about those building codes and where we are with building codes. I know it’s just, that’s almost a topic for another day where we could spend so much time on that piece, but that’s great to hear about what’s happening with, you know, Hurricane Strong.
Another question I have for you is about COVID-19. You brought it up, but how has it impacted what FLASH is doing in the field? We have, we’ve always had a lot of event-based activities. The way we kick off Hurricane Strong each hurricane season, in fact, is with a tour.
And we join a tour of Hurricane Hunter aircraft along with NOAA and visit five cities each year. So, clearly we did not do that this year. And so, our five-day launch of messaging for Hurricane Strong did not take place.
What we did instead is a five-week campaign. We are in week five right now because we are leading up to June 1. One of the really nice things about this year and having the extra time, and it’s a lot of extra work, but we had a lot of good things to work with, we had a donation from Lowe’s. And so, through our Lowe’s partnership, every week in the five weeks leading up to the hurricane season, we have been doing a contest with $150 Lowe’s gift cards.
And what better way to get that disaster supply kit refreshed than having an electronic gift card? Now, the contest has been running on Twitter, and the conversations have been excellent because we’re bringing people to the website to talk about what are the steps to Hurricane Strong, and what does a kit look like, and what is an insurance checkup, and why do I need one? So, that’s how it’s affected us. We really stretched out our time periods. We’re, of course, digital all the way.
And as far as our in-person work, we did not do any awareness work on the ground in the cities. We obviously hope to be back on the tour next year, visiting cities with the hurricane hunters, the hurricane center, scientists, and the leadership, and the local leaders, because it’s really important to have those rallies to get people excited about the season. You’re listening to our special coverage of hurricane season 2020.
Now, here’s a preview of our next episode. Our coverage of hurricane season 2020 continues as we welcome the leading researcher in hurricane forecasting. We’ll hear from Dr. Phil Glotzbach on the eve of his release of an updated hurricane forecast for the 2020 season.
Kind of the general consensus isn’t necessarily that we’re going to see more storms, that we may actually see fewer storms in the future, but potentially the storms will be a bit stronger. You’re listening to our special coverage of hurricane season 2020. Now, back to your host, Greg Paget.
And welcome back. We’re chatting with Leslie Chapman Henderson, the CEO of FLASH, the Federal Alliance for Safe Homes. Leslie, I know some folks who want to get really involved with your organization, have some opportunities out there.
From what I understand now, it was the third year, maybe, or the fourth year you have a conference that you guys sponsor every year in the fall. We do. Now, this year is going to be different because of COVID on the long range side.
So, we’re looking at some different options, but we do, we will have, whether it’s a combination virtual or roundtable that’s virtual and in person, the National Disaster Resilience Conference will continue in one shape or another. And if people are interested in getting involved with that, they can email us at info at flash.org. We also are very excited that we were successful in completing and launching the National Earthquake Conference. We had just, we actually finished it the first week of March and we had a thousand people there.
We had 650 folks plus 350 students from around the globe. And that one is really important, Greg, because it only happens once every four years. So, we’re very, very relieved and grateful that we were able to pull that off successfully with zero problems or tracing on the COVID front.
Interestingly, we did have gallons of hand sanitizer and protocols and elbow bumping, and we banished handshaking. We did all that. And in the early stages of that conference, when people first got there, they thought we were a little overprotective, I think.
Hindsight being 2020, everybody is hailing the precautions that we took and we’re exhaling because we realized that we were able to keep people safe. So, NDRC, as we call it, the National Disaster Resilience Conference is an annual event. We will have something exciting this December in 2020, as scheduled.
I’m not sure exactly what it’ll look like yet, but we’ll be back hopefully all together in person in 2021 and beyond. And for anybody out there who misses their Leslie time, you’ve got something new as well with Flash. You have your own podcast.
(19:02 – 21:18)
Well, we’re trying to take a page out of your book and learn from the best. And so, we have a new podcast. That’s another change we’ve made because of COVID.
We’ve had the time and realized that podcasting is a great way to get information out. So, we do have a new podcast called Strong Homes, Safe Families. Our third episode is coming up this week.
Our focus is on delivering information that people can use when they need it. So, our first recording is with Ken Graham, Director of the Hurricane Center, to kind of set the tone for hurricane season. Our second one featured our new information about hurricane shutters A to Z. The next one we have that’s coming out this week is tied into some of the tax-free holidays that are upcoming with a really strong emphasis on disaster supplies, but the safety in your kit.
You know, we lose people every hurricane season to carbon monoxide poisoning from improperly placed generators or accidents with chainsaws, and we want to zero that out just with good information and safety up front. So, we’ve got that one coming, insurance checkups and more features, some new science coming out of the labs, you know. So, throughout the summer, Strong Homes, Safe Families will be podcasting away, and it is just, it’s a journey to do it, but I think what I really like about it is it’s evergreen, and when people are really interested, they’ll be able to just run down the list of topics and get what they need.
And, you know, speaking of topics, anything you really need to know about disasters, mitigating against disasters, they can find it on flash.org. The reason why we wanted to invite you on the show today, because we want those emergency managers who are out there, many of them are, you know, one person shows in their community or in their county and don’t have a lot of resources. Go to flash, visit the website, see what they have available for you, especially with the start of hurricane season. If you live in one of those hurricane-prone communities, you will find a lot of great resources there.
As always, Leslie, thank you so much for being part of our episode on communicating risks to the public as we continue our special coverage of hurricane season 2020. Stay healthy and strong. Thank you so, so much.
(21:18 – 21:44)
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