 Okay, we're back. We're live. I'm Jay Fidel. It's 11 o'clock rock here on a given Thursday. We call this community matters. But more than that, we're going to talk about climate change coming to Hawaii. We're going to talk about a disaster recovery plan for Waikiki. We're going to preserve our economy is the point because we have to preserve those things that earn the state a living. And Waikiki is that. So we need a plan by which we can restart our economy after a disaster. And for this discussion, we have Carl Kim is the executive director of NDPTC. I'm going to sing that now. The National Disaster Preparedness Training Center. I know that it's actually written on the insomniate eyeballs. Okay, he's also the chair of the he's a national officer of NDPTC. Well actually of the National Domestic Preparedness Consortium. Okay, call it whatever you wish. He's national. And the organization he controls is national. Okay, and joining him today is Rob Poro. He's a coastal engineer, which means an engineer that looks at the coast. And that's especially important. You know, I get in the elevator on the way up to the show. And somebody says, oh, it's really a hot, beautiful day. And I said to him what I always say. I say, yes, it is one day closer to the next extreme storm. Just wait coming soon. It is coming soon, isn't it? It's coming. Yeah. Yeah. That's the problem. So that's a prepare for it. And that's what you're all about. You've served in this position for three years. And I hope you stay active in it. And I hope it continues to be operated right here for Street across the street from us a national organization across the street. And you're here in the studio talking to me. Oh, thank you. So what is NDPTC? This is the National Disaster Preparedness Training Center. And we're an organization housed at the University of Hawaii, but funded by the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA. We're a national organization. And what we do is we develop FEMA certified training courses for state and local government and emergency managers and first responders. And to date, we've trained more than 31,000 people across the US and more than 500 cities and towns. Who are they? Oh, who are the people we've trained? Emergency managers, first responders, people that are involved in disaster response. Police require police fire, EMS, public works, transportation agencies, others that would be called in in the event of a disaster or emergency. What's your relationship with FEMA then? Well, we're a trusted agent of FEMA. We develop training courses for FEMA. We work closely. You train FEMA? Yeah, well, yeah, we've trained for FEMA. We've had, but we primarily work with state and local governments, tribal entities, also in the territories and flag and trust territories as well, too. What do you train them about? Preparedness for hazards. We have a special focus on natural hazard, in part because we have so many different natural hazards and threats. So it's not just extreme weather. It's lots of disasters. Many, many different. How do you sleep at night? You know, for the king of disasters, or the king of disasters, as it may be. Right. Yeah, this is a growth area. It's a growth area in the industry. But part of it is that I have a great team. Rob is part of our team. He's got a really interesting background as an engineer and he's worked on projects throughout the country. Rob, why don't you say a little bit about your background? Yeah, what do you do? How do you know Carl? Well, Carl gave me the opportunity of getting a master's degree in urban regional planning at UH. He's a planner right there. He's an academician, too. In fact, it began with being an academician. So he was your teacher. He was. He was my advisor, yes. My teacher, too. Yeah, prior to that, I was in the Navy, actually. I spent some time in the Navy as an engineer, civil engineer, and then decided to go back to grad school and really pursue working with the coast again. And that's where Carl comes from. So your degree is a degree in engineering? Yeah, my undergraduate degree was coastal engineer and then my master's in coastal planning. Very interesting. It's perfect for this situation, especially in Hawaii. Yeah, we have a real interesting key. You know, I brought in our meteorologists, our weather guys. We have geologists, volcanologists, all kinds of folks. And so that's part of the strength of our team. It's multidisciplinary. It's multidisciplinary and includes really talented folks like Rob and others who are interested in the subject, as Hawaii, as well as other places as well. So with these experts, one, you develop courses where you're teaching people who are first responders and who would have to stand up in the event of a disaster. And then you're also making plans. Can you distinguish that for me? I mean, exactly. How is that different or the same? Well, a lot of what we do is we develop our coursework and our training programs based upon real places, real disasters, real experiences. And that's what we're here to... Evidence-based learning. That's right. That's right. Because that way it's more grounded. And it makes a lot more sense than just being some sort of theoretical or textbook type of case. And it also provides a way that we can invest back into the community. And we have a range of different courses. Many of our courses relate to the specific types of hazards, volcanoes or tsunamis or hurricanes. What to do in the event of a disaster with this, that or the other thing. We also have tools-based courses. We have a course on social media. How to use social media. We have a course on UABs. I think your buddy Ted has been real involved with that course. We have a series of different courses. And this latest one that we've been focusing on for FEMA, again, is on recovery planning. Because when we surveyed the literature and based upon our experiences, that is a real gap in terms of our capabilities and people really need to have more training and preparedness to recover from all types of disasters it has. So this sounds like there's a whole bunch of steps here. One is you have to get to know the disasters. And you have to make some kind of predictive analysis about what's going to happen and how bad it's going to be and who is it going to affect. And then you have to figure out, well, if we have a disaster, which we haven't had before many times and maybe worse than we've ever had, then we have to figure out what's going to happen exactly and how is it going to affect the community. There's a certain amount of predictive analysis in that. And then we have to figure out what people are going to do and what they're going to need to rebuild. So you have to ultimately have a target of rebuilding. It's really interesting. You're in a bad disaster. You're going to remake the society. This is how do you sleep at night? And it's really about choices as Walter and in trying to frame the different types of choices that one would have to make in the event of catastrophic choices like what? Well, you build back exactly what you had before. Do you build it back as quickly as possible? Do you make it stronger? Do you make it more energy efficient? Do you change the pattern of development? So that's a lot of what we've been working on as well, too. And this ties in with our other courses that are related to preparedness or mitigation or other types of activities related to preparing for disasters. Indeed, can I show that second slide? Start with the first one if you like. Let's go flipping through the slides here. We kind of talked our way through that first one. There you go. You wanted some news, right? This is hot off the press. We've now trained 31,000. More than 31,000, I think those blue dots represent the hometowns of the first responders and emergency managers that we've trained across the country. Including in remote areas. In remote areas. And then we've trained something like 500 different cities and towns. What's really interesting about this diagram, too, is those red areas there, those show the number of federal disaster declarations by county that have been issued over this period. 20 real disasters. Right, right. Since 2010. Right. And so you can see that there's many, many types of disasters that are occurring. Primarily natural disasters, flooding, tornadoes, weather related disaster wildfires. But knowing that you can do predictive analysis on weather and when and how it's going to happen again. Right, right. And so this is part of the work that we do. We analyze what the needs are and then try to design courses that are appropriate to this. And in our assessment of what the needs are, what jumps out is the need for training about recovery. And there's a lot of training courses that we do on preparedness on response. But actually very few courses on recovery. So then we were developed, we're working with FEMA, the National Federal Emergency Management Agency, to develop a FEMA certified training course on recovery. And Rob is actually one of the leads on the development of that course. But they don't have coastlines in Montana. You can quote me on that. That's true. That's true. That's where my urban planning degree comes in. Yeah, so we are developing a disaster recovery planning course. The title of it is Community Planning for Disaster Recovery. So it focuses on the long term part of recovery. How a community will recover in the long term. And so the short term, the response type stuff we deal with in other courses, but this one really focuses on the long term part of recovery. Part of that is going to be severity. So if it's not very severe, it's a smaller disaster than rather a large one. I hate to put it in those terms, but you have a different recovery plan. You have to recover different things. It's a larger one. There's going to be more damage, more infrastructure will be destroyed and more people will be lost. You have to have a different plan. The problem is that the extreme weather that I mentioned coming up the elevator is not really, we don't know yet. It's climate change and it could be worse than we've ever seen. Yeah, that's what's so fascinating about all these different types of disasters. You can have an earthquake, which you have virtually no warning, and then you have these kind of creeping, slow moving disasters, like some volcano hazards are like that, or sea level rise, or climate change, or drought, or other things that... Becomes the new normal. And then we have to address it. So this is not easy. You have a sliding scale of severity, and therefore a sliding scale of effort and recovery. And you build that, you factor all that in? That's true. Yes. We take, in the development of the course, we take the latest research, the latest federal guidance, latest academic guidance on disaster recovery planning. And planning, recovery planning generally takes up this multi-hazard approach. So you are prepared for anything and any scale, really. But the important part is having an organization, roles, and responsibilities in place, so that you know what to do when the event takes place. And the organization includes all the disciplines. I mean, for example, I heard a story on MIRSA. I believe there's 700,000 people die of bacteria that are resistant now, today. And the expectation is that's going to go up by multiples in the next 10, 20 years. So the question is, so you have a physical damage because of the disaster, slow or fast. And now you have secondary effect. So your planning has to be very sophisticated to figure out what else is going to happen. Are we going to have, for example, some kind of epidemic come out of a disaster because of the lack of water, the lack of hygiene, the lack of food, and the lack of medicine. Right. Right. So it's not just the physical structures that we're talking about recovering. It actually is also about the communities. It's the livelihoods, the jobs, the economy. That's job one, is it? It is job one. But it's also about all the other activities that we can be involved in, education, to religious activities, to social activities, all of those types of activities would also be impacting in the case of a very serious disaster. To recreate a society, hopefully a better one, but first we've got to get people to work again. Right. Right. Yeah. So when we surveyed the literature on this, when we looked across the country, we found that a real gap was in terms of recovery planning. So that's why we jumped into it and we said we're going to work on recovery planning. And that's something that's going to be good for the nation, good for Hawaii, and then also good for our center. And what we try to do is we try to work on projects that help us in Hawaii. So one of the things that we have is a very good, robust partnership with Waikiki Business Improvement District Association. And with them, we did a joint project over the past year or so on doing a pre-disaster recovery plan for Waikiki. There's been a lot of research that has been conducted that shows that those communities that engage in pre-disaster recovery planning are better off when a disaster strikes. The recovery is faster, the quality of the recovery is better, and there's a lot of evidence to support that. And so... What is it? What is a pre-disaster recovery plan? Well, that's what we're going to talk about, in fact. Oh, wow. That means we got to take a short break. We'll come back, we'll launch right into that. We're going to cover some more of your slides, lots of slides. We'll be right back. You're watching Think Tech Hawaii, 25 talk shows by 25 dedicated hosts every week, helping us to explore and understand the issues and events in and affecting our state. Great content for Hawaii. Okay, we're back. We're live with Carl Kim and Rob Porrow. And we're talking about disaster recovery planning. And that means job number one is getting the economy back on track. And they are working on a plan vis-à-vis Waikiki, improvement district, so that Waikiki can recover after a disaster, whatever kind of disaster. Really important, because that's the engine of our economy. And if we don't recover the economy, whoa, what do we do all day? How will we earn money? And how will our life be in order to move the society ahead, keep everybody occupied properly, and keep the goods and services flowing, we have to have an economy. So tell us about the plan. Okay, if we can turn to the slide. We're going to go to the third slide now. Let's see what it is. This is kind of an overview of the project, which had really four different elements to it. We did some background research. We did a risk and vulnerability assessment. We had a whole series of community engagement processes, including a survey, some workshops, working group meetings, and then prepared a final report, which actually went through several different drafts, and then which provides some recommendations for this. Basically, if we go to the next slide, why plan for recovery? I think one of the things that affected us was that I think in 2015, there were 14 named storms in the Central Pacific that could have hit Hawaii. This is kind of an amalgam of those storms around there. That's pretty threatening. We were lucky. We were lucky. And then if we go to the next slide, we know, as you mentioned, that Waikiki is the economic driver in terms of visitor spending, gross state product, tax revenues. It's also a very densely populated area. There's something nearly 30,000 residents, nearly 100,000 visitors per day, a large concentration of jobs and employees there. And so this is a very, very important part of our community that we need to plan for in the event of that. Also very vulnerable from a physical point of view, from a geological point of view, from a, may I say, a coastal engineering point of view. Which takes us to the next slide and Rob's background here. That's right. So like you mentioned earlier, planning involves a certain element of predictive analysis. So our planning project involved a vulnerability assessment where we looked at coastal hazards that may impact Waikiki. And so taking some of the research that's been done out of the university, taking some of the modeling efforts that have been done, we performed a vulnerability assessment. So overlaying these three hazards in particular, storm surge from a simulated category four hurricane, tsunami inundation and river flooding or raining event, 500 year event. And overlaid that on the parcels in Waikiki and data that we collected from census from the city. Next slide. Well, this looks like the chip fletcher charts out of SOAS, right? That's right. So coastal inundation charts. That's right. Those particular maps were generated from a joint project we did with University of Hawaii Sea Grant. Sea Grant, yeah. Right. And those, again, those are extreme events. So our project focused on what to do a roadmap essentially of planning for one of those really big events that would pretty much shut down Waikiki. So we overlaid those hazards on some of the data we had on Waikiki. So it's the economic data, land use data, the building data, and to really identify what the hot spots were. I mean, where it would be completely inundated and have a profound effect. Correct. Which areas were most vulnerable basically to these particular? So it's the hazard, but also the assets that were really in the people, the buildings, the economic activity, the jobs. Right. Where it would really be damaged. I mean, damaged, have a long, long shadow of damage. But you know, one thing that comes to mind is there was a woman by the name of, she'll come back to me, Drake. Susanna Drake, who came out here. She gave some lectures at the architecture school. And she's a boutique architect in Brooklyn, actually. And she went through the mayor, then Bloomberg. And she said of New York. And then she said, you know, you don't, you know, you're going to get inundated in Manhattan and all that stuff under the street is going to be destroyed. What are you going to do about it? And the mayor said, well, we don't know. She said, I got a plan. I got an infrastructure plan. You know, it involved infrastructure, concrete, whatnot. I don't know exactly what barriers so that the inundation would be minimized, limited. And they're actually doing it in New York, which is impressive. And so does the plan talk about that? Does the plan talk about how we're going to build physical structures that will protect our assets? It does. It, as if you go, if we remember the previous slide, there was a few different elements to the project. One of them is community engagement. And so we really wanted to take input from the community in addition to the things that we know as far as coastal infrastructure, coastal engineering protection, things like that, and kind of come up with recommendations, things to consider when putting together a formal recovery plan. And yes, that does include building certain structures to protect Waikiki, incorporate, not just with concrete, but also natural type solutions, beach nourishment for sure. Those are the clever ones. That's right. So recognizing that, you know, what draws people to Waikiki, what, why it's the economic engine is, are the natural resources. What I hear is that you can do this. You know, we know, we know the inundation patterns. We know the assets pretty much. We know people are concerned about it. Hotel owners would be very concerned about it. And, you know, the whole community should be concerned about it. But how do you reach political will to actually implement the plan? Well, our belief is that through stakeholder engagement and working closely with a diverse array of property owners, people that are involved in running in hotels and businesses in Waikiki, as well as providing essential services from the public sector and private. So it isn't necessarily a government. It isn't part of it, but not the whole thing. Especially when it comes to recovery, right? So that's one of the important lessons that we take away from this, that recovery really has to involve a broad base of stakeholders that are engaged in a process. You know, we do that for first response. We have mutual aid agreements. We have different types of agreements to share resources. But less of that has been done for recovery plans. So that's part of what we're trying to do in this. And so we conducted surveys so that we got what people would say anonymously and then brought them together and had committee meetings and workshops and talked about the different alternatives and designs. Some of them are physical designs, some of them, but some of them involve other sorts of changes in patterns of land use and patterns of development, intensity of development, the type of development and so forth. So it's a very, very interesting and complex problem. And I think it's much better done before an event happens rather than trying to do it immediately after, at the time you're dealing with so many other things as well, too. The other good outcome of this is the studies show that if you do this and you do have a pre-disaster planning, you're much more likely to get more federal aid as well, too, because you have a plan, you have the relationship. They know you're serious and so forth. It's all very healthy. Right. Now is that aid being affected by the current administration? Everything is being affected by the current administration. We still have to do it. And what comes to mind, I know we want to cover some more in slides that are relevant to this, but is the question of who does what? Now I assume that's in the plan, but I also suggest that if you say that Joe Dokes has to do something under the plan, then A, he has to know about it. He or the people around that office, they have to know about it. And B, he has to be willing and able and what do you call it, committed to do it. That's part of the plan, too. So we took this problem and broke it up into basically three chunks. And the first one was authorization, because if you don't have authorization to plan, it's just a bunch of people coming together and having a good chat like us. So thinking about how do you authorize the plan and who has the responsibility and so forth. So that's one chunk. The second chunk is really what everyone focuses on. There's a lot of operational detail to recovery. And so part of what we wanted to do was to bring together all of the different groups and stakeholders and interests and say, well, assuming that we have a really catastrophic event that occurs in YPP, what are the specific types of activities? And how can we organize these operational activities in a way that first is consistent with what the federal government wants so that we'll get reimbursed for the costs. You got a slide on this, right? It's called operations. But it also helps us transition from the short-term response, relief types of activities to the more mid-range and longer-term activities. And so part of it is you have to set up a structure for handling all of these different elements. And so part of what we came up with, if you go to the next slide... Next one, operational support function. So obviously there are concerns like infrastructure. You can't do anything without utilities or water or electricity or communications. You also, a big issue is debris management as well, too, for a big storm. There are other specific concerns to Waikiki related to economic activities as well as broader community services. And then we also have concerns that we don't want to ignore in terms of our natural and cultural asset and resources in this as well, too. So this shows you some of the things that we work through with the... With the stakeholders in the groups. But how do you deal with this though? And we only have a minute left, but how do you deal with this? So now the plan is being implemented. And Joe Dokes is taking his responsibility and he comes out on the street and says, I want you guys to do this, that, and the other thing. The public. I want the public to do this, that, and the other thing. The public doesn't know who he is. The public says, yeah, yeah, yeah. You want us to do those things. Why should we listen to you? So how do you establish the command control kind of aspect, or we'll call it the socialization aspect, so that the plan, you know, accepted by people accountable, can actually be accepted by the public when the time comes? I mean, it starts as kind of command and control. But part of this is that we have to transition back to a democracy. We have to transition back to, that's part of the recovery process as well, too. Otherwise we have martial law or something like that. But the most interesting questions actually pertain to the longer term development challenge. And so that was the other thing that we thought was, I mean, everyone could say, oh yeah, we just want to build back everything exactly as it was before, exposed to the same hazards and risks, actually probably worse because of the changes in the environment. Or we can actually do things in a more intelligent way, build back so that we're stronger, better, and so forth. And we can deal with the next disaster a little better, too. Right, right. So if we go to the very last slide, you know, maybe Rob can say something about it. Well, Rob, it's that time now where we're coming to an end and we're at a time, but I'd like you to spend a minute and just summarize all we've talked about and give the message to the people, yeah. Well, if we go to the last slide, I think it summarizes it kind of well. Thank goodness. But yeah, so kind of going back to your point of how do you get the public or stakeholders to accept the plan. The important part is making it as inclusive as possible. And that's what we did. And so we tried to get input from as many stakeholder sectors as we could. And this plan here, this is purely conceptual. I'd need to throw that out there. It's basically a result of brainstorming sessions we had with different stakeholders that recognize strategies that we can employ to reduce vulnerability, but also to make improvements to Waikiki. And so that's kind of how we wrap up the plan and we provide some recommendations as to how to move forward in the planning process. Very important. And Waikiki is the most important. But also it suggests that this is kind of a laboratory for planning because when you finally put the cap on this plan, there are other areas and other things in the community, physically and structurally through the community where we also need plans. Well, thank you, Carl. Carl Cameron, he's actually the director of the National Disaster Preparedness Training Center. Okay. And Rob Porrow, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.