 Think, take away, civil engagement lives here. Bingo. It's Friday. It feels like we're already well into Friday, given the national events, okay? This is Community Matters. We're talking about a Puerto Rico practicum, and we're going to learn the meaning of that, also the spelling of it in a minute or two, okay? We have three distinguished visitors here, Rob Porro, and he's with the Coastal Management Manager Service in NDPTC, the National Disaster Preparedness Training Center. Welcome back to the show, Rob. Thank you, Jay. What was it, properly named? Coastal? I'm the Coastal Program Manager at NDPTC, you got that right. I'll never forget that. Yeah, okay. All right. And he's the senior man. He's a graduate student, taking a PhD at Urban Planning at UH Manoa. Am I right? You get that right. I am. I am doing it. All right. I'm not telling you. Okay. All right. Next to him, to his right, is John Canner. John Canner is a graduate student at UH Manoa. Also am I right? Also in Urban Planning. I'm also in Urban Planning. All right. See? I got that right, too. And the third one is Shubhanshu Jane, okay, who is to John's right. And he is likewise, get this right, likewise, a graduate student at UH Manoa in Urban Planning. Exactly. You're there for three. All right, fabulous. Now you guys, you want to give more on the way of biography, you know, like how well they do in school? A grade point average? Maybe not into those details, but I'm sure they do, they do pretty well. But yeah, no, so I'm with NDPTC and as you know, NDPTC develops and delivers training for FEMA related to disaster management, right? Natural hazards. So we deliver those trainings nationwide, including Puerto Rico. We've done a lot of trainings down there and have pretty established partnerships with... Why Puerto Rico? Well... Why did you train in Puerto Rico? Did you suspect that something was going to happen there? Well, anything's possible anywhere in the country, right? I mean, natural hazards happen everywhere. So we train in every state, every U.S. territory. So Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, Guam, I mean, everywhere. This is going to be on the final exam. It's the National Training Center for National Preparedness, National Disaster Preparedness Training Center. But the N is on the exam and N stands for National. So these guys, they're across the street actually, they're a national organization and they're about disaster preparedness training. Right. That's why they go everywhere. That's why we go everywhere. And so to answer your question, that's why we're in Puerto Rico. But there is something unique about Puerto Rico and there is a reason to focus on Puerto Rico is because it is so similar to Hawaii. We share a lot in common in terms of our patterns of development, our isolation, our the hazards that we face. So that's another reason we train in Puerto Rico and a reason that we got involved in this project at the Department of Urban Planning, which is a student-led project. Practicum is what it's called. It's part of their curriculum and I'll let them get into a little more detail on that. But essentially it's a project-based class where there's a client. And so NDPTC served as a client in addition to the Office of Climate Change, Sustainability and Resiliency at the City and County. We served as a client for this project, this class project essentially. And so I'll let these guys talk a little bit more about what that class is, where it fits in the curriculum and the process of that. How do you spell practicum? It sounds like a bacteria. P-R-A-C-U-Practicum. P-R... Oh, I could spell it. I'm very dyslexic. It's like... Puerto Rico practicum. You can look at this. P-R-A-T-I-C-U-M. Okay. And that's the second point on the exam here. Okay. So what is a practicum? It sounds practical. Practicum is a real-world deliverable that we actually have a chance to not just sit in the classroom and learn from books. You mean you get out. It's about getting out. It's about getting out of the box and learning something new and interacting with a client and giving something that they can use and hopefully increase our skills. That's good training, isn't it? Yeah. Because you're going to do that professionally. And so you want to have skills in that way. It's like when I went to law school, they put us with legal aid and we had to talk to real clients. It took a while to get comfortable with that, too. Yeah. Okay. What would you add to what John said, Shubhanshi, Shubhanshi? And if you disagree, now's the time. Yes, the practicum, I do agree with him. The practicum was about giving us more real-world experiences, working with clients like the NDPTC and the Office of Climate Change, Sustainability and Resilience. And through this practicum, we could interact with researchers and stakeholders and Puerto Rico, like the FEMA joint office, the NOAA office of coastal management. And a lot of community members, and we found such stocking similarities between communities and Puerto Rico. Yeah. Very valuable. Wow. Which was a very valuable lesson to learn how extreme events can really affect both the societies because we are very geographically isolated, just like Puerto Rico. And we have similar socioeconomic vulnerabilities like them. Yeah. To give a little context, the practicum is part of their master's curriculum. It's typically towards the end of the program. And it's, I mean, like everybody's been saying, it's an opportunity to give students kind of on-the-job real-world type training and experience before they graduate. You take one practicum or many practicums? It's one. Yeah. It would be practicum, wouldn't it? I actually don't know the plural of practicum. Just one. And how do you determine how much the student learned, how well the student integrated all this information and what value it was to him and the program? How do you determine that? Well, it's actually, so it's, the intent is to simulate kind of a real-world planning project, right? And so the student class is the project team. So John and Shabancho here were two of the eight students that were part of the team. And it's really up to the students to kind of figure out what the objectives are, what the problem is, how to research it. And you just let them run. We guide them. You guide them. Yeah. This is very valuable. I would love to, next time you do this, but can you make a place that got less busted than Puerto Rico over the next month? Why did you pick Puerto Rico? Because it was busted. Well, like I said earlier, we have a lot of partnerships there. We've done a lot of work there. And obviously, they went through a very extreme, difficult event and are in the stages of recovery now. And so from a planning perspective, it's an opportunity to look at what's happening there, try and tease out some lessons, get some insight on their experiences on the ground, at the community level, and just kind of identify some things that we would need to focus on here in Hawaii. So that's what the students really, really looked at. So it must have been pretty exciting going to a place where you were going to find things that maybe would shake you up a little bit. What was it like for you, John? It was vastly different than I thought it was going to be. Interesting. I mean, I knew it was going to be a great experience who doesn't want to go to Puerto Rico on their summer vacation, but it wasn't vacation. We were there to work. And the amount of parallels between Puerto Rico and here just really struck me. And the amount of the loa that they have is, it was striking. You know, I've never been to Puerto Rico. I hadn't heard a lot about it, but actually going there was such a great experience. And I really took that home with me when we were figuring out how do we formulate lessons learned for here? How do we become more prepared? Well, that was a lesson we found people were collaborating with each other, and there was a loa among them. You went in May, right? This past May, was it? It was June. June. So that was, what, about 10 months after the Maria storm? And still, the amount of damage was, it was shocking. I mean, there was the streetlights. Not many of them worked. There was a few in San Juan, sort of near their business district and where the hotels were, that was slightly working, but we went on the highway and there's this section where you have to get off, and then there's a light that doesn't work, and we sat there for about five minutes going, do we just run this red light? And then when the people started passing us, we were like, oh yeah, that's what you do. Broken. Yeah. And so, but just the amount of resilience that the people had, you'd never know what was going on just from talking to somebody there. Shubhanshu, you said aloha too, both of you guys are into that, and I'm thinking of something I saw in a recent CNN movie on the state of things in Puerto Rico now, is that a lot of the people they interviewed said, we are more aloha now in the troubled times. We are more aloha putting Humpty back together again than we were before. We have learned how to collaborate because we need to collaborate to rebuild our community. Do you agree with that? Did you see that? I read it somewhere that disasters are not just a catastrophe. It's a very important learning lesson. They do overwhelm the local capacity, but it also gives us a chance of rethinking and processing how we can improve ourselves. It has surely happened a lot in Puerto Rico. Both Puerto Rico and Hawaii have a very, it gives a very strong, they have a very strong identity, a cultural identity. And I could, when we were interacting with people, there is a strong sense of resiliency and that is improving and that helped a lot to people to recover. It strikes me, Rob, that if you're on a mission like this and it's either before or after a given adverse weather effect or other disaster, you, NDPDC, want to encourage this development of a collaborative feeling, this development of aloha. You want to describe it to people how it works and encourage them to process it that way so that anything bad happens and they know it pays off to come together. It's part of the guide, isn't it? That's true. That's true. Yeah. In fact, a lot of our training courses really focus on the role of community members in preparing and planning for disasters. We have a few courses that have the word community in it. And that's an important aspect of a lot of the federal doctrine that's on disaster management. It's a recognition that community plays a major role and what community is, is a range of stakeholders. There's a lot of people that have roles and have stake in how a community responds and recovers from a disaster. So yes, we do encourage and highlight the importance of kind of collaboration among all these different players in disasters. OK, well, you know, we do have pictures and we're going to show the pictures. And we're going to, for now, we're going to treat the pictures as a cliffhanger. We like cliffhangers. So we're going to tell you that we're going to have a one minute break and come back and we're going to see these pictures. And they are memorable pictures. You've seen a lot of pictures of Puerto Rico after the storm. These pictures are special. We'll be right back. Hi, I'm Bill Sharp, host of Asian Review here on Think Tech, Hawaii. Join me every Monday afternoon from 5 to 5 30, Hawaii Standard Time for an insightful discussion of Contemporary Asian Affairs. There's so much to discuss. And the guests that we have are very, very well informed. Just think we have the upcoming negotiation between President Trump and Kim Jong-un, the possibility of Xi Jinping, the leader of China remaining in power forever. We'll see you then. Aloha, I'm Wendy Lo and I'm coming to you every other Tuesday at 2 o'clock. Live from Think Tech, Hawaii. And on our show, we talk about taking your health back. And what does that mean? It means mind, body and soul. Anything you can do that makes your body healthier and happier is what we're going to be talking about, whether it's spiritual health, mental health, fascia health, beautiful smile health, whatever it means. Let's take healthy back. Aloha. OK, we have Rob Poro, John Canner, and Shubhanshu Jane from the, well, I guess you can see there from the National Disaster Preparedness Training Center. But they're also from the Urban Planning Department, U.H. Manoa. So I promised everybody, I hope they stuck around because this is really good and interesting and maybe a little bit scary to see the pictures you brought back. Can we go through them now? Sure. So just want to show you guys what some of the things we saw on the trip. So again, we have a lot of partnerships in Puerto Rico. They were gracious enough to take us around the island and show us some of the impacts after Hurricane Maria. And so we'll go through some of that just to show what some of the impacts were. This is in a town called Luisa, close to San Juan, but actually fairly isolated. And it just shows you some of the impacts to infrastructure. This is a road leading to nowhere, basically. And you see kind of a manhole in the middle of the beach there. And we could keep going. Again, just some of the wind damage. This is a structure right along the coast. There's wind damage. There's storm surge damage. You can see the coast in front of it. It's eroded. And keep going. Just another example of coastal structures being pretty much destroyed. I believe this was a Fisherman's Union's building. So after that, they had nowhere to operate pretty much. A lot of coastal development on the coast is kind of the takeaway from all of these. And this is a home right on the coast, similar to what we would see here in Hawaii. And as you can see, erosion, storm surge, wave damage pretty much rendered this home unusable, unlivable. Yeah. It's not going to fall over any minute. Yeah. And so this is kind of a different angle of that same stretch of coastline. These are homes here. Again, similar to what we would see here in Hawaii, coastal homes right up to the waterline. We could keep going. It's an aerial view of the same area. So it wasn't just single kind of single family home is right on the coast. You can see on the left condominium buildings, similar to what we might see in the South Shore. So a closer view of that. So this particular condominium was pretty much rendered inhabitable, basically. Uninhabitable. Uninhabitable. That's right. It doesn't look too bad, but I guess... No. Erosion was eroded away. It compromised the structural integrity of the building. In fact, that building broke in half. You could see on the right hand side of the picture, the balconies are kind of leaning over. That's because the building broke in half, essentially. And so, yeah, another part of the coastline, just give you an idea of the severity of the impacts there. And looking at this picture, you see there's a lot of debris that makes its way into the coast, into the water, right? And so the question is, what do you do with all this? How do you get the beach back? There was a beach in front of all of this. And so we could keep going. Aerial view, there's a great view of what I'm talking about. So this is the damage along the coast. These homes are destroyed, but the debris from those homes are in the water. And you can see the beach that used to be in front of these homes is gone. And so now you have this problem, not only of erosion kind of causing the loss of the beach, loss of recreation, but you also have an environmental issue with all of this debris in the water and figuring out how to remove it. And so these are the kind of things we wanted to identify as things we need to consider assuming that we're going to be in a similar situation, which I think it's a matter of when, not really if at this point. That was one thing that really hit me. It's just how strikingly similar this area at Rincon is to here. I mean, on the North Shore, we were seeing beach erosion. We're getting a lot of east swells, north swells. And it's taken away the beach. And when I came back, it really hit me. I was like, wow, this could be us. So I thought that was pretty powerful. Yeah. So a lot of those pictures that we saw, a couple of them were from that community of Louisa I mentioned that's near San Juan, which is in the northeast part of the island. A lot of the other pictures were in a community called Rincon. It's a tourist destination, of sorts, kind of a smaller, smaller than, say, the tourist destinations in tourist centers in San Juan, not like Waikiki size, but it's more similar to the North Shore of Oahu. So the draw is the beach. The draw is kind of more ecosystem or ecotourism type of activity. Yeah, a few more pictures. Want to go through them? Sure. So again, this is near Rincon, like I said. So it's a tourist community that also has a large residential community as well. So this is just somebody's home, basically, in the water there. So it's not all doom and gloom. So the trip, one of the positive things that came out of it is provided an opportunity for the University of Hawaii students to meet and talk with the University of Puerto Rico students. Like I said, we have good partnerships in Puerto Rico, one of them being the University of Puerto Rico, the Puerto Rico Sea Grant College program. So they arranged these opportunities to meet and talk with different stakeholders. And this one was really one of the great things that came out of the trip, is the students being able to talk to students from there. And hopefully that kind of initiates kind of a more longer term collaboration between the two universities. It was really great to talk to those students. They're really motivated and passionate. And they were doing a study and going into one of the most vulnerable communities that was in a flood zone. And actually, some of us kind of look serious there because we were hearing a story about a 72-year-old man that swam in six feet of water in his house for almost 18 hours. And out of his three dogs, one made it. So I mean, it was just horrific to hear what some of the people went through. I remember NDPCC had a program within two or three months after the Puerto Rican event here in Hawaii. And a number of people from Puerto Rico came, officials. And there's nothing like somebody who's been in the eye of the storm. They come with passion, and they come with heartfelt advice to us. So I can understand how valuable it was for you to talk to other students. Now, the party at the end strikes me that that's not on a coastal area that lost its coast. That's in San Juan, probably. That picture with the students. That was at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayague West campus. So it's on the west side of the island. Which means, I mean, I just want to ask you one question. I mean, if it wasn't on the coast, then the damage wasn't as bad. Am I right about that? Or was it inland also? Was it in San Juan? Well, there was a lot of wind damage in communities far away from the coast, certainly. There's communities up in the mountains that were not only severely damaged but isolated. And so that's one of the other kind of takeaways from this is how do you deal with, how do you provide relief to those communities that are isolated? How do you prepare them so that they are able to sustain themselves before assistance comes? Because we have communities like that here, I think, along the east side of Oahu, the west side as well. That one road going in, and if that access is cut off, they also may not get assistance right away. When you go to a practicum like this, your head would be spinning trying to see what happened and how it could have been prevented. And how it could have been prevented in a parallel setting here in Hawaii. So what did you learn? I'm back home. I wasn't there in Puerto Rico. You guys are my agents, my proxies, my advisors and counselors, my coaches. What is your advice to me? What did you learn that you bring back for me? One conversation was of San Juan's chief resiliency officer. His name is Alejandra Rodriguez. The officer said that it's really important to plan in the island context. What we are doing is not planning in the island context. More community inputs for planning and a small scale planning would be really good in the context of both Puerto Rico and Hawaii. Understanding that disasters, for disasters, the communities are the first responders too. So involving them through community science projects would be really important. How about some specifics now? What do I do for my house so it doesn't slide into the ocean? Is there anything I can do? You should probably take some of the trainings that are provided by NDPTC. What in the training would you make sure to include based on your experience? They are trainings for Hurrican, how houses can be prepared for Hurrican. They are trainings for how community members should respond during disasters and after. John, you were bursting with some advice you wanted to give me. I think that there are some great programs that NDPTC offers at the recovery. Could you rewrite them after you get back? It takes a long time to get FEMA certification. We definitely found out just how important community is, especially in the recovery process. Shabonsu said it perfectly and we were lucky enough to be taken around by some really knowledgeable people at the University of Puerto Rico. One of the people there that is the honorary mayor, Chapa, he actually said that. Your first responder is your community. They are the people that are going to help you in that kind of situation. Really strengthening those bonds and forming more social cohesion. Social bonds, community bonds, collaborative bonds within the community. One thing the pictures demonstrate to me because the pictures were taken in June 10 months after and if I am the owner of the little house that is sliding into. This reminds me of Aniki. My in-laws had a house in Kauai, Kauai. The roof came off. They waited a long time before they could marshal the assets, the resources, insurance proceeds, whatever it was and put something on top of the roof again. They lived under bisqueen plastic canopy for a long time and that is what happened here too. So what did you learn about that? What did you learn about the speed at which you can recover and how to expedite that speed? Well, so the speed varies. There is no timeline to recovery. There is no six-month timeline where, okay, six months were recovered or we are now transitioning to long-term recovery versus short-term recovery. There is no kind of one-size-fits-all. That is kind of a takeaway, right? But there are things that you can do to kind of help and speed up that process. Things you can do prior to a disaster. So that is kind of what we try to do at NDPTC through our training. One, identify kind of things we can include in those trainings by taking these trips, by doing research, identifying lessons from events. But some of our more recent trainings, so we just certified a recovery planning class. It is called community planning for disaster recovery. And it really stresses pre-disaster recovery planning. Because if you kind of look at the issues, I think we have a couple pictures left, but if you look at the issues that they faced, you can kind of think about and talk about with stakeholders, planning stakeholders, what we would do in a similar situation. And you can do that prior to a disaster, right? And so that will help speed things along after that. Let's see the pictures. Yeah, so this isn't damage really, but I wanted to kind of stress this. This is a hotel that used to have a beach in front of it. And so it's not just damages that you have to consider. It's also things that impact economic activity. So if this is a hotel which the draw was the beach previously and now there's no beach, those are the kind of things you need to consider. How is that going to impact the economy, the livelihoods of the people that live in that town? I think we have areas here that obviously the draw is the beach. Waikiki, the beach is all around the island. People come here for the beach. So if the beach disappears, do we have plans in place to restore the beach, right? In addition to the damages to people's homes, because that's obviously also important. But so there's all these different aspects of recovery that you need to consider in the plan. Sure, and it's a moving target too. Correct, right. You know, I think I mentioned there was a CNN movie about Puerto Rico about a week ago on cable. And it was very interesting. And they interviewed a lot of people there, including from the government. And one of the things that came up was the idea about rebuilding. And I think it was the governor of Puerto Rico. He said, we're not just planning to rebuild it as it was. We're planning to rebuild it better because this will happen again, okay? And when it happens again, we want to have less risk, not the same or greater risk. I mean, that's the ideal recovery, isn't it? It's to bounce back, to create something better. I mean, if your new normal is worse, it's recovery, but you're not as resilient as you could be. Yeah. So it means you've got to think about it. Yeah. You have to look at this one area, this one place, and see how it worked in the storm and then figure out how to make the infrastructure, in fact, all the structures, more strong, more resilient than they were. You never can settle for the way it was now that you've been hit. Okay. That's a good question for you, Jimanshu. And that is, you went to a place that was similar to Hawaii, and you looked around, and you saw the similarities, and you saw the damage. In some instances, I'm sure it was not what you expected because it was greater damage than you might have expected because it's greater damage than we have ever experienced theory, even in Iniki. So how do you feel is the comparison between Puerto Rico and Hawaii a good one? Are we safer? Are we less safe? Are you worried more? Are you worried less? What was your reaction seeing that as compared to this? I found Puerto Rico to be very resilient because there's a very strong sense of community, and that makes these, the people in Puerto Rico very, they can have a really good recovery despite the problems that they've faced. When I come to Hawaii, and there are problems of economic disparities, which are much more than probably Puerto Rico, and in case a disaster of that scale would, I hope not, but if that happens in Hawaii, it would be, we have to really rethink how our strategy is going on. One of the things that I could recommend is about small business recovery plans. So at NDPTC, we do give trainings on how small businesses can have a very strong business continuity plan because most of these businesses close down as the power lines go off and there is the supply chain issues. So how that risk can be managed, it would be really important to understand. And it takes all the skills, all these disciplines that you age, really. It's in science, it's in economics, it's in sociology, it's all there. You guys, one time I wanted to be a planner. I still do. You would have been a great planner. Thank you very much. Jubanshi Jane and John Canner and Rob Poroth, NDPTC and UH Minoa Urban Planning. Thank you so much for coming down. Thank you. Thank you. Very fun. All right. Thanks.