 building resiliency, or is it building resiliency? Either way, you are in the right briefing, and thank you for being here today. My name is Ellen Vaughn, and I'm with the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, and I'm honored to welcome you here today for this briefing on this important topic. EESI, for those of you who don't know, has been bringing science-based expertise and experience on sustainable energy issues to the policymaking process in briefings like this, in issue papers, in fact sheets, and other educational activities for three decades now as an independent, not-for-profit organization. But we began life as a bicameral, bipartisan caucus, congressional caucus. So we thank all of our subscribers and listeners over the years and our donors for making this possible. Also wanted to thank Senator Whitehouse and his staff for hosting this briefing today. We're grateful for that, and we're also grateful for the senator's tireless leadership on climate change and policy solutions. So building resiliency is our focus today, and that's because it's a critical piece, we think, to focus on. Buildings in the United States consume 40% of our total energy, including 70% of the electricity produced and account for about 40% of greenhouse gas emissions. Most of this energy is to operate buildings. So the monthly costs that go into lighting, heating and cooling and running appliances and equipment, that's the bulk of these costs. This is not sustainable for the economy, for society or for the environment. It's just bad business practice. But buildings are more than what they consume. I think we would all agree. We invest our life savings to purchase homes. We invest in real estate, and studies have shown we spend about 90% of our time indoors. So today we're going to look at a number of issues that relate to improving building resiliency and sustainability. Last week, the Homeland Security Committee in the Senate held a hearing about the costs of not being prepared for extreme weather events, and one witness representing the insurance, a major global insurance and financial services company said currently in the United States, many private and publicly held assets from homes to critical infrastructure are not sufficiently resilient to withstand extreme weather events. So today we'll hear from our panelists, and I am honored to bring this expert panel to you today. They truly are immersed in these issues and each with sort of different perspectives. And I know many of you are working on policy measures that relate to this. After all the presentations, we'll look forward to your questions and comments and having further discussion. So I first would like to introduce Jake Oster on the far side. Jake is deputy chief of staff and legislative director with Congressman Peter Welch from Vermont. And Jake is pressed for time today, I believe, so I wanna get off the podium and let him give some remarks and then we'll move on. Is this on? Can you hear me? This is much more formal than I'm accustomed to. I assume a lot of you in the audience are staffers and are not used to sitting on the side of the dais as neither am I. So I had asked me to come here and provide an update on energy efficiency in commercial buildings, energy efficiency in buildings work that's being done here on the hill. My boss is a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee and one of his signature issues that he works a lot on, which means I work a lot on, is energy efficiency and energy efficiency in buildings is a huge part of what we do. 40% of our electricity is consumed by energy in buildings. And so it's always considered low hanging fruit of something that can be dealt with to deal with, whether it's climate change or energy savings or even just lowering the electricity bills for whether it's people in houses or commercial enterprises in buildings. So there's a wide and broad interest. There's bipartisan support for getting energy efficiency work done and it's something we've been heavily invested in and you will find it brings sort of the broad cross-section of interests here in Washington together to deal with how we accomplish saving energy. We work closely with everyone from the Sierra Club and NRDC to the National Association of Manufacturers, the Business Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce because while saving energy is good for climate change, it also tends to be makes good business sense because energy bills are very high for businesses. Energy is a major cost for businesses in commercial buildings and especially for folks in the industrial sector. If you're making things, your energy costs are a large part of what you do. And while there's some debate about how much we invest in energy efficiency and how far we go in mandating energy efficiency measures, there is general agreement that it makes sense for the federal government to be engaged in promoting and enhancing and studying energy efficiency measures and there's a real opportunity for doing things there. So I think many of you are following the sort of current state of play on the hill regarding energy efficiency issues. Know that Senator Shaheen Portman are reintroducing legislation today that will very much be the marker bill for energy efficiency this Congress that I think there's real hope to get done and they have baked in sort of 10 other items that were out there that will go in that hopefully get them to 60 votes. Here in the house, the most recent action has been that the Energy and Commerce Committee passed out with unanimous support, the Better Buildings Act that Congress has introduced. And to give you a quick just tutorial of what that does is there is an issue in commercial buildings, what's known as the split incentive issue. And so how many of you rent apartments in big buildings here in Washington? Show of hands. Few of you. So you all probably pay your own electricity bills within your buildings, right? But you don't necessarily control the insulation in your walls or the larger structure around your apartment building. So you have a finite amount of what you can control within your space. And your building owner has control about what they can do, but they aren't incentivized because they're not paying electricity bill, right? You pay the electricity bill, but they own the insulation. So there's no incentive for there to upgrade the insulation. There's no incentive for you to upgrade the insulation because you don't own it. So that's what's known as a split incentive. And that same split incentive exists in commercial buildings. And for what we hear from commercial building owners is that sometimes energy costs can be, for energy costs can sometimes be 50% from tenant usage in their buildings. So while they're running the HVAC units and they're running the lighting systems in the hallway as the elevators and things like that, just the usage within their tenant spaces can eat up 50% of their electricity costs. And so they have no control over what goes on in the tenant spaces. And the tenants have no control over the larger building. And so the federal government has a terrific program that you've all heard of called Energy Star. And there's Energy Star recognition for commercial buildings, right? You might stop in an Energy Star building on your way home downtown on K Street today. My boss has his district office in a commercial, in a Energy Star building in Vermont. But there's an Energy Star for buildings, but there's no recognition for tenants in tenant spaces. So there's no federal recognition program that says, hey, you built out a really energy efficient tenant space within that commercial building. There's no federal program to say, Congressional Welch's office here and then Energy Star building, that's a great space. You guys did a lot of work, you've met certain specs. We're gonna recognize that as being an energy efficient space. And so what the bill will do is a little study the best way to build out tenant spaces in commercial buildings to meet energy standards, to meet a high level energy standards. And then it will designate a voluntary recognition program called Tenant Star to look at those spaces and give them a recognition. So now we'll have an Energy Star for buildings program and a Tenant Star for buildings program. And if you bring the two in sync with each other and you start building out energy, tenant star commercial spaces in Energy Star buildings, you will maximize energy efficiency in those buildings. And you can save a lot of energy, you can invest in great jobs because building out commercial, building out energy efficient spaces creates jobs, it drives technology, and obviously there's the side effect of being good for climate. So that is what the bill will do. We're excited it's coming to the floor next week. We expect this may be an opportunity to do more energy efficiency. We hope this will open the door to doing more. There's a lot of other bills that are out there that I think are good ideas from other members. My boss is working on bills for residential energy efficiency, industrial energy efficiency. And we hope this will pave the way. So we're excited that we think it's a step in the right direction. Building commercial buildings to energy efficient specs, building tenant spaces to energy efficient specs is all part of building resiliency and developing smarter buildings in an age where we have to be conscious of the climate, where we have to be conscious of the cost of our energy bills and in our spaces and where obviously anything we can be doing to help create jobs and building architecture and building design are all smart things for policy makers. Jake, thank you. I should mention also that your boss is on a lot of caucuses, is very busy keeping you busy. So the high performance building congressional caucus and which he co-chairs with Congressman McKinley from West Virginia Bipartisan Effort. Also the ESPC energy. Energy savings performance caucus. Which is focused on performance contracting mostly in federal spaces. And for those of you who aren't familiar with performance contracting, there are contracts to building sign with private sector investors who come in and do energy efficiency retrofits in buildings. So say the Veterans Affairs Hospital in your district is old antiquated and is sort of wasting a lot of energy. Maybe it's time to change all the light bulbs, change out the heating and cooling units, put new insulation in, put in a cool roof. But yet there's not appropriated dollars for Veterans Affairs to do that at that hospital. Well, a company like Honeywell or Johnson Controls or Siemens could come in and say, well, we'll do this project for you. And we'll guarantee 30% energy savings from this project. And from those energy savings, you can slowly pay us back over the course of 15 years. And your energy bill, your actual total costs over year won't change for the next 15 years. You'll just pay us back the equivalent of the savings. And the end of the 15 years, you keep all the savings after that. So it's a way to bring in private sector investment into public spaces, guarantee energy savings, get the work done without additional appropriated dollars. And it's something that my boss is working on with Congressman Gardner of Colorado. And it's a real opportunity to also sort of foster private sector development, get more energy efficiency into federal buildings. And then of course the added benefit of reducing our impact on the climate. Thank you. So really a lot going on. We're very excited by this sort of wealth of efficiency measures that seem to be moving now and this bipartisan effort. And so we're crossing our fingers that there will be something at the end of all this. I know you are hopeful for that as well. I know you're pressed for time. Are you taking any questions? I'm having to take questions before I run out. I apologize. I'm a little bit scrambling today because we've got the bill on the floor next week. So if anyone has any questions, I'm happy to answer them. That was easy. Thank you. Okay. Jake, thank you so much for coming by. And we'll be eager to see what happens next week and beyond and thanks for your efforts. And please thank the Congressman for us too. So our next speaker is Cooper Martin. And Cooper is Director of Resilient Communities at the American Institute of Architects. And I will welcome you, Cooper, and let you talk about what you're working on. Just make sure we've got this. Oh, you're pulling it up for me. Perfect. Well, thank you, Ellen. And now that Jake's gone, thanks Jake for the introduction. I'm here from the American Institute of Architects. We're based in DC at AI National. We also have components all over the country. So wherever your district is, it's likely there's a component in it somewhere. And it's almost certain that there's an architect who is a constituent of yours. We currently have, at the American Institute of Architects, 80,000 plus members. Last I checked, it was about 83,000. We're on the upswing from the downturn. We count licensed architects as our members, but also aspiring architects, those who have not yet achieved their license usually aren't licensed until about 35. And several allied professionals as well. You can be associated members of the Institute. And we serve as the voice of the architectural profession and the resource for our members in service to society. And it's that last half that I'm here to talk to you guys a little bit about today, the service to society, because architects are always trying to find ways to give back. The AIA through another department also issues the architectural buildings index. This is a leading economic indicator that you guys might find useful, similar to the way the National Association of Homebuilders and issues their housing starts. You can track different commercial starts. This is work on the boards for architects. And a score above 50 means that there is more work on the boards than there was at this time last year. A score below 50 means there is less work on the boards than there was this time last year. It's a contracting environment. As you can see for the last decade, things haven't been particularly rosy. And even now, as we talk about recovery, you can see that we really haven't scratched the blue of that graph very much. It's pretty poor for most of our members. The AIA and emergency management work for decades, architects have volunteered in their communities, providing things like rapid building safety assessments after a disaster in response. They'll volunteer with a local county emergency management office or what have you and just go perform these assessments, tag buildings to really remove that lingering hazard after an event has taken place. You might have thousands of buildings damaged in your community and a limited amount of personnel or time to assess them. Architects are willing to step up and do that. In the course of that work, though, architects were really only affecting one of the four phases of emergency response, just the response there and not any of the other phases of emergency management. They want to know how they can get more involved in long-term recovery, in mitigation, and in preparedness. And that's where the AIA has kind of evolved our programming over the last several years to become better advocates for the safety and security of the built environment in a more holistic way. So that brings us to resilience and resilient design. The official definition writ large, the entire resilience community is the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from, and more successfully adapt to adverse events, more succinctly leave it to an admiral. Resilience is the immune system of our nation. And this is kind of the graph that has been canonized into the resilience scripture. You have the event, you have the downturn, or the impact of that event. And resilience is all about how quickly you can regain your functional capacity and what that level of new normal is that you establish after an event in the long term. Do you not bounce back to where you were before or do you bounce back a little bit better and bounce back to have an even stronger community and a stronger economy than you did before? So this is all about elevating the practice of architecture and how architects can get involved in all of these issues. The AIA architects, when we think about resilience, how we apply this lens to our own work, obviously resilience incorporates durability, you have to be able to resist the effect of whatever shock you're anticipating. But you also have to be more efficient in the way that you utilize resources because if you use fewer resources, then after that shock you will need fewer resources in order to recover. And of course we incorporate design. Now when we say design, as architects, we're not just talking about accessorizing a building, we're talking about the actual design process, sitting down and really thinking about how a building is going to function, how flexible it's going to be for your client and for any anticipated future clients down the road in the decades that that building is going to be part of the built environment and thinking about even how that building is decommissioned, how you disassemble that building to remove it from the waste stream. Approximately 50% of the waste stream, the solid waste stream in this country is actually building materials. So anything we can do to reduce that reduces our impact on landfills in addition to energy. So why has resilience sort of become this growing emerging topic over the last couple of years that you probably have heard more and more about? Frankly it has to do with the frequency of natural disasters. More and more we're seeing the impacts of natural disasters on the built environment. Forget climate change. The way we're building our communities, the way we're building our buildings isn't resilient to the climate and the variability in the climate that we have right now. So that's a significant threat, a significant risk to businesses and something that people are more and more cognizant of. A map that I'm very fond of that I didn't include in this because it's a little bit busy but you can find it on the Atlantic website is actually a map of Chicago that compares incidents of flooding and insurance claims from flooding with the actual locations of floodplains. And you'd be surprised to see that most of the incidents of insurance claims for flooding aren't in the floodplain. We don't do a perfect job of managing our floodplains in this country. We could do a lot better. But we do a really, really poor job of managing floods outside of floodplains. The level of concrete, the level of gray infrastructure and the level of impervious surfaces that we've placed in and around Chicago are actually causing more floods in areas that never were prone to them in the past. And so I encourage you all to look up that and just kind of think about that plating out over the course of many communities all over the country because you can certainly see examples just in DC where in Bloomingdale flooding is occurring where it didn't used to before. Certainly not a floodplain. On a global scale, disaster-related losses are increasing across all regions. Finds the UN report on disaster risk reduction. It's threatening the economies of emerging countries and outpacing wealth gains across many of the more affluent nations. So this is why it's becoming a more critical issue. Anytime you're seeing losses that are outpacing your economic gains, that's going to be a red flag. And this has made its way into the business sector as well. In a talk that I was listening to a couple of weeks ago, one of the senior VPs from an engineering company, a Fortune 500 engineering company, was talking about the triple bottom line and how maybe a decade, 15 years ago, you would see environmental issues or you would see social issues on a prospectus, but it was kind of one of those things where you'd check the box. And now I can tell you, and he frankly tells us, and the senior VP of a $50 billion organization tells us that those are no longer boxes you simply check. Those issues are as important in the business community as the economic issues. If you're doing a multi-billion dollar project, you would, it had better understand how that's going to impact the social welfare of the nation that you're doing that work in. And so that's, it's something that is increasingly well understood. Resilience often gets conflated with sustainability. So I thought I'd take the time to just say, resilience doesn't just exist in a vacuum, you're not resilient to some nebulous thing, you're resilient to a quantifiable risk. And this is another thing that comes from corporate risk management. You can actually calculate what your risk is for a given hazard. You can look at your vulnerability, you can look at your exposure, and then the second equation there, you can divide your vulnerability by your resilience or your mitigation efforts. The most simple analogy for this is to imagine a rabbit crossing a road. It crosses the road maybe two times every hour, and on the road, there are 10,000 cars that go down every hour. You can calculate exactly what that hazard is, what that risk is, and come to a precise number. Obviously the hazard, if the car impacts the rabbit, the rabbit's dead, so that's, that value is one. The other values, you can sort of calculate. But when you actually really get into all of this, you're usually dealing with ranges. So instead of 10,000 cars an hour, it's between five and 15,000 cars an hour. Or the rabbit crosses the road maybe an average of two times every hour, but it'll be 1.5 to 2.5. And so you get results that are said to be a little bit fuzzy or have uncertain ranges, but they're still quantities that you can use in your decision-making process. Construction practices today, and this gets into sort of preempting some of the next presentations that you guys are going to hear about different standards that are out there in the world. I wanna emphasize that this doesn't come from actual data, all of those little points out there that are meant to be individual building projects. Those aren't real-life projects that we've assessed or anything, but this is the general state of construction practices today. You can see the model code, the building code down there on the x-axis, the energy code kind of over there on the y-axis, different standards, aspirational standards that you can apply that are above code, things like the fortified standard, LEED, the international green construction code, further out you have passive house, you have living buildings, you have adaptive or even was it reconstructive architecture that you can get into, but the vast majority of the projects that are out there in the world today are not actually meeting those stretch goals, those aspirational targets. And in fact, a lot of areas where there aren't building codes that are adopted or the building code isn't well enforced, you're getting structures that frankly don't meet either of the codes. They don't meet any of the model codes that we have that are the consensus codes that are adopted by our industry. And so that's what we talk about when we talk about elevating the practice, we're not talking about pushing everybody up into the top right of that graph, we're talking about trying to eliminate the bottom left of that graph, the things that just shouldn't be a part of the built environment, they're hazards to the community overall, particularly when you start building more and more and more of them. The fundamental challenge, and this gets to why government has a role in resilience, is that resilient systems are by their nature diverse and redundant. People who study resilience particularly look at biomimicry, they look at natural systems, they look at the ability of those systems to adapt to stresses, to have redundancies built into them. And comparatively efficient systems, systems that we usually find engineered in our own society, systems that are economic systems, are very focused and they eliminate redundancy. So you have this tension. And again, this is something that's well understood in business practice, you have greater efficiency over there on the far left of the graph, you have greater resilience over there on the far right of the graph, and there's that window of viability where you have a good balance. Now corporations obviously understand this agriculture, it's particularly well understood, even in physical training. If you push yourself too far, if you're trying to produce as many crops as possible, you're stressing the system and you're placing that system at a greater chance of more catastrophic collapse. Or in the case of personal training, you're just placing yourself at the greater risk of injury. So this can be applied to a number of different industries. And so the role of government is to try and step in and ensure that a given system doesn't skew too far towards efficiency in the short term, increasing the risk of collapse in the medium to long term. And this is where we get into a couple of recommendations. Now frankly, most of the policies that are going to impact resilience of the built environment take place at the local level, but there's a lot that the federal government can do to set the table to help communities make good decisions in the long term. One of the things that I'm particularly fond of is reforming infrastructure planning and finance, encouraging the use of scenario development. This is a new, well relatively new practice in community planning where it's a democratic process. It looks at different scenarios over the long term. You can see an example from Salt Lake City up there. They have an auto-oriented scenario. They have a transit-oriented scenario, not pictured or two scenarios that are kind of in between. And you look at the entire transportation system, but not just the transportation system that you might want to build out, but how that system is going to impact land use, how that system is going to impact air quality, how that system is going to impact average travel times, and then of course how much that system is going to cost over the next several decades. And you can put precise amounts to each of those values. And Denver, a cool thing that they did was they actually had a little software piece that you could kind of go in and as an individual citizen, play with all these different dials and you could rate something as more important or something as less important and see which of the four scenarios that they had created in the Denver Metro region met your particular values, your particular criteria, and then go to public meetings and advocate for that scenario over the long term. This is something that you can find if you look up sections 134 and 135 of map 21. Scenario planning's kind of mentioned, but it's certainly not encouraged. And as you start taking up the highway bill, as it's commonly known, or the transportation bill, as I prefer to call it, you can definitely look at different provisions that might change that. Infrastructure banks, we talked about, Jake talked about specifically, inviting in private capital to do some of those performance-based retrofits. A lot of the infrastructure bank proposals that are out there, certainly Senator Carey's old infrastructure bank bill, had an eligible purpose where you could do retrofits of buildings, not just for energy, but holistic, deep retrofits of buildings to increase the resilience, to decrease the water use, to decrease the energy use, to improve the indoor air quality of existing buildings. And so when you think about infrastructure banks, it's not just about terrific regional infrastructure, projects of multi-state importance. There are a lot of small, bore, eligibility provisions in a lot of those proposals that I would encourage everyone to look at. The Safe Building Codes and Cinevac, which you'll hear probably a little bit more about in the next couple of presentations, would encourage the adoption of statewide building codes, certainly not mandated, but encourage model building codes, because as I said before, they're really not adopted widely across the country. This gets back to a little bit more of that on-bill payback stuff too, the deep retrofits that Jake mentioned. But in addition to the bill that he mentioned, PACE is a great proposal, green mortgages. There's so many proposals out there, we couldn't possibly cover them all today, but they really encourage building stewardship over just ownership. And finally, of course, there's pre-disaster mitigation grant programs, hazard mitigation programs that FEMA offers that aren't really well thought of outside of the, or within the general infrastructure debate. Lastly, learn from the past disaster. This is actually a report that comes from our AI New York chapter. It's the work of several hundred architects, engineers, and planners. You can find that on the internet. It has more recommendations. It's a long report that I would encourage everyone to take a look at. So thank you very much, and I look forward to taking some questions at the end. Thank you so much, Cooper. I especially appreciated the slide on the different standards and how they relate to codes. And I think that's one thing that can be confusing. There's so many different programs, but one thing that we do like to stress at EESI is the need to both sort of raise the floor and raise the ceiling. So to at least adopt for states to adopt model codes and these model codes, as Cooper said, are developed in this national consensus process, open process, but then it's up to states to adopt them and that doesn't always happen. And then even after that, local jurisdictions need to enforce them. And there are issues with having adequate resources to do that, so it's a big challenge. But that is something that's available right now that can enhance resiliency to some degree. And then beyond that, as Cooper said, there are these other measures. And Deborah, our next speaker, will talk about going beyond code in these ways. In different ways. Deborah Ballin joined the Institute, the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety in 2008 as General Counsel and Senior Vice President of Public Policy. And in this capacity, she's responsible for all legal matters and concerning the policy efforts. Prior to IBHS, Deborah was Executive Vice President of Public Policy Management for the American Insurance Association, another AIA, in Washington where she developed and implemented federal and state public policy issues. And she was also served on the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the High-Level Advisory Board on Financial Management of large-scale catastrophes, which includes a heavy emphasis on mitigation measures. So with that and also your degrees from Harvard and Princeton, I think you're very qualified to talk about risk management and thank you for being here. Thank you, thank you very much. That was just to make sure everyone was still awake. I'm qualified with your help to run the little machine here. So we're doing good here. But thank you, thank you very much. IBHS, the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety, we are a 501c3 organization supported by the property insurance industry and we work to identify through research ways to reduce property losses from natural disasters, as well as more mundane causes of loss. We say if your home is destroyed, it's a disaster, whether it's part of a regional disaster or whether it's just your home. So we do focus on both of those things. And equally important as you can see from sort of things like that video, we focus on communications to try to get people to pay attention, to change their minds and to begin to demand that ways the society do a better job than we've been doing with respect to, with respect to strength and resilience. So we look at the whole building performance chain, really like that design element working with the AIA as far as that goes. This is a slide we've had for a while. And as I was preparing for this, I looked at a report that was done by the World Economic Forum on resiliency and they sort of had this explanation much more complicated, a lot more words and technical concepts than on the slide, but about sort of how do you build for resilience? And when I realized they just had all that same stuff. So you can look at it with a few different colors and it's all really gotta happen ultimately to get to that point. And we can talk about that a little bit as I'm speaking and then if people have questions about that. To help us to achieve that goal, we built about four years ago a brand new research center in a little town called Richburg, South Carolina. Probably no one has, well, I know you've heard of it because you've been there Cooper, but the point of it was that we were far away from any coast because we didn't want our facility to be blown down by a hurricane. But that said, we didn't anticipate what happens during winter weather in Richburg, South Carolina when the whole place really shuts down. But that said, but also convenient to Charlotte which is the major airport and we're really trying to bring the world to this research center and better understand vulnerability and how to reduce vulnerability and as well taking the research center and going out as I said through these videos and other things. At the research center, we have a large test chamber which I'm gonna take you into in a moment. It's capable of wind up to a category three hurricane but equally important, wind is the driver of a lot of the natural catastrophes that we talk about. Wildfire, it's not fire, it's the embers that are brought on by wind. Hail is also part of a windstorm, oftentimes associated with tornado as well and rain often is associated with, there's enough wind to say take off a roof cover and then all of a sudden you have issues with the rain. So wind really is the unifying force of an awful lot of weather issues and therefore a lot of the testing that we did. The first test that we did when we first opened up was wind only. We looked at two homes. One was built to the local building code in Bloomington, Illinois. Illinois actually does not have a statewide code. And then the second home was built to a standard that we have developed and we're gonna be talking about called fortified for safer living. Someone said state farm and the state farms in Bloomington, they're one of our, they're our largest member. They had actually built this fortified home which is why we were able to make this comparison. The homes, the test was designed to replicate a Midwest style storm. It was not like a coastal storm that we sort of superimposed on Midwestern style building. It was actually replicas of real wind storms that had happened in the Midwest and you're gonna see what happens. The one with the red square was built to the code and the one on the right hand side was not. Now that's really not a place you'd wanna be during a major wind storm and the house that this blew down. There was, we actually ran this test a few different times so we had different audiences come in to watch it and you can see that the, and there's our fortified logo. You see we got smart. You know that the one with the fortified logo is one of the later tests we did because we realized the video footage looked really good when you had the logo up and you could see that the fortified home withstood all these wind things. But what we're really here to sort of talk about Cooper used the term sustainability and resilience. We started talking about this going green and building strong was sort of the phrase that we put together but clearly there's lots of discussion going on about this important topic. Some call it adaptation mitigation. I've also seen lower environmental impacts and lower the impacts of the environment. Again, all these concepts of going green and building strong and it works, what we're trying to do is make those two things compliment each other, work together. There are some areas where we are concerned sometimes and I think that was sort of the slide that you referenced where if you go too far in the energy efficiency side we do have some concerns that you may undermine strength and easily understandable example to people is the concept of the green roof is very good but if you're in a wildfire prone area and the green roof becomes the fuel source I guess it would be a brown roof in that instance that is not a good situation. And similarly some of the work that we're doing we're testing photovoltaics to make sure that they do not become missiles that destroy buildings. We're testing some of the insulation to make sure that it is adequate in the face of wind. But these are, as I said, complementary concepts. We were thinking about this, clearly the climate change debate has caused this sort of confluence of all these people talking in forums like this about all these great things. We just sort of started saying why do you want to go strong? Why is strong related to green? And so the first thing, we had all these disasters and then all these landfills and I think that was an interesting statistic that you had, I think you said 50% of our landfills is building waste. What we say is if it's in a landfill instead of working it's not a green building. So that was sort of why we first started bringing those things together even separate and apart from the climate change debate. Similarly building that's on fire and you need to use a lot of chemicals to put it out. That's another example of how having the strength is certainly consistent with a lot of green concepts, climate change and otherwise. We also think about the community benefits of both strength and sustainability and I think most people are aware of these issues keeping communities intact, protecting vulnerable populations, the healthcare system, jobs and post disaster dollars. I sometimes use a slide where we talk about the public policy issues. It sort of has these little levers that work together and sort of on the one hand are sort of the concepts that appeal generally to the Republican side and on the other side are the concepts that appeal generally to the Democratic side. Every single one of them is true and then you sort of bring in sort of long term health and welfare of communities and who's against that? Everyone agrees with that and it certainly is a bipartisan issue to bring us all together. Another thing that we tend to focus on is that communities are made of homes and businesses and so we have done some testing of commercial structures and what you're gonna see, guess which one is the one that's gonna do better, common or stronger? All right, I'll show you. This was a series of different wind pressures that we put on you, just seeing the end of it. We had actually cut out the windows on both sides to be fair and there was not adequate reinforcement on the side. It happened to that where the stronger side, that's just actually a little slomo version of that. The difference in the costs on that were about 10 to one. I think it was about $6,400 versus $64,000 in terms of the costs that were associated with the common versus the stronger building. So again, we try to talk about what are the long term costs. I'm sure those are issues that you talk about also, whether it's the energy side or whatever, don't try to save a short term dollar and lose over the long term by in this case, not only having your building blow down, but also losing your livelihood if it is your business. I know we're gonna be talking a lot, Ryan, about codes. We care deeply about building codes. We tend to focus on the IRC and the IBC. Those are the two main safety codes. A lot of technical stuff about building codes. We do have engineers who spend a lot of time on that, but one of the projects that we did and we updated it a little bit last year and we're doing a full update to come out next January is we did a rating the states report of the coastal states between Texas and Maine to look at three things. One, whether they had a mandatory and modern statewide building code in effect. Two, whether it was enforced. I think you mentioned, Ellen, the importance of enforcement. And three, whether the contractors and the subcontractors that are actually supposed to make sure that that code makes its way into your home or licensed and disciplined and so forth. And you can see that the results range from a low of four in Mississippi to a high of 95 in Florida and Virginia. And what we have found is that there's still a lot of, you talk about a building code to somebody and their eyes sort of glaze over a little bit and you say, you had a four in your state and then they say, I want to do better. And in fact, there is legislation right now in Mississippi that has the best chance of passing of any building code bill we've seen in Mississippi that would improve their code, although it is certainly not a done deal. And here you can see the states that when we look beyond the coast and actually Connecticut, which does not do well in this map, has I think as of tomorrow, we'll have an updated code. So just calling some attention to some of this sometimes is a good way to get people to focus. We talked about communities a little bit and here's just a slide from Wildfire, which is also important. And again, it shows the couple of things and one is that communities are made of homes and that when communities work together, in this case to have fire adapted communities, they really do survive natural disasters much better. And here's another example. These are actually our fortified for safer living homes on the Boulevard Peninsula. This was prior to Hurricane Ike. A lot of people laughed at these homes because they were up so high, they called them the bird cages. And then we found out that the Hurricane Ike was going right for this community and I guess we said yay or maybe we said yikes. But we waited till the wind blew and then we came back and these actually were the only houses that was standing. There's been some pictures of the last house standing in Galveston. But in fact, that house was so water saturated with mold that that actually had to be taken down. So, but this is not a community either. And the point that we make is it's great to have a resilient home, but if everything around you is gone and the power sources are gone, you're not part of a resilient community. Which gets us to the IBHS fortified standards. Someone mentioned them already. They are Code Plus, I'm running out of time, but it's a voluntary standard. We can certainly talk about that further. And the most exciting development on that is that we are partnering with DHS on a pilot program for Resilience Star. This would be a designation. It's actually, the standard at this point is identical to our fortified standard. There are a series of stars depending on exactly how far up the grade that you go on that. But I loved his comment about the tenant star thinking that there'd be interest in that. And that's exactly what we're trying to test out with our pilot is how much interest in it. We have fortified. Fortified's been around for a while, but you add to it that sort of government-sponsored resilience, it's the star. Everyone, again, everyone wants to be a star. And that's exactly what we're testing in the pilot and hoping that it will be successful and we can really help to scale up the program that way. Another very important piece of legislation that I think Cooper mentioned also is the Safe Building Code Incentive Act. Again, like Resilience Star, not mandatory, but provide incentives, provide a little bit of pizzazz associated with doing the right thing and in this case also some financial incentives in the event of a disaster. And we are hoping that the community level and the individual level, we will begin to move. And I'm out of time, but we can talk further about that. There's another piece of legislation I want to mention. I don't have a slide on. It would reauthorize the NWRP program. It's the National Windstorm Impact Reduction Program. It's a research program. I think it would provide about $20 million of funding, mostly in the university settings for windstorm scientific research about windstorms. And I think they are gonna mark that up in the science committee. Hopefully tomorrow I had heard. So they had a hearing about that last year and really, again, some very compelling stories that were told about the importance of this research. And again, that ultimately will bring us all to where we need to be in terms of knowing what to do and then finding the capabilities of doing it. I think people are probably pretty familiar with the president's most recent executive order with respect to adaptation. And these are actually very consistent with a lot of the things that have been said. The goals here are not top-down management, but really providing opportunities and incentives. A lot of times are for private sector investment. So I'm at a time and I'm at a slides, which is a really good place to be. And thank you all very much. I'm looking forward to what Ryan has to say a little bit more deeply about building codes and standards. And then I know we all want to answer your questions. Thank you. Debra, thank you so much. And especially for those videos, I think we all enjoyed those, they're scary, but entertaining. So that was wonderful. I noticed, well, maybe it was Cooper who had a slide about passive house and I appreciated Debra's point about being careful we don't go too far. I think one of the things that we'll probably talk about in Q&A or perhaps Ryan is looking for these synergies and really being mindful that there are multiple performance goals. And so designing for these planning and designing for these goals are so critical. I was thinking in our house, we live in a 1950s brick house in Virginia. And when it was really cold, it was cold in there. We don't have insulation, we have done sort of some things to retrofit. And I was thinking if we were in a passive house, designed house, we would be toasty warm right now even if it was cold outside. But we have to think of cost and all those things. So our next panelists will talk about these and other issues in terms of codes and energy and sometimes non-energy benefits of high performance building. Ryan Meers is with the Institute for Market Transformation. Ryan is Code Compliance Specialist and I am delighted to welcome you to the podium. Good afternoon. So I'll try not to put you to sleep talking about building codes as boring as they are. I'm not gonna dive too deep but I'm gonna take a little deeper dive than Cooper and Debra did in talking about building codes and the impact that they have on resilience. But before I do that, the Institute for Market Transformation is a DC based nonprofit and we focus on energy efficiency in buildings and my capacity there is running our work on energy codes. Often energy codes get overlooked when you think about resilience because it's kind of misunderstood that it's kind of viewed that they don't have a direct impact on health and life safety. But one impact that they do have is when you have a house that is well insulated and well sealed, when you have a power outage or extreme weather event, you're gonna be able to maintain comfort for a much longer period of time in that house compared to Ellen's. So I'm gonna briefly touch on development and adoption kind of at a high level and then I'll dive into enforcement and what role enforcement plays in ensuring that our homes and businesses are built to current codes so that the very basic levels of resiliency that are kind of baked into all the codes actually get met. I'll talk about some of the barriers and also some survey results. So the development of building codes is they're considered national model codes. It's done on a consensus based process. The most common is the ICODE family which is developed by the International Code Council and those are done on a three year code cycle and the ultimate and final vote of what goes into those codes is determined by local building officials. So one way to improve resilience is to begin to incorporate more principles into these codes. So the research that Deborah's doing be very helpful to take those findings and see how they can be implemented into a code. As you can see across the bottom there's a whole family of codes that address all different aspects of construction. So then when it comes to adoption this is really a state level activity and there are a few exceptions where local governments are actually the ones who are adopting codes because as Deborah mentioned there are some states that do not have a statewide code. So this particular map is actually energy codes and there's 11 states, the ones in gray on here that either have no statewide code or they have a code that predates the 2006 energy code. So it's a very outdated energy code. Enforcement comes down to very much a local level activity. This is your cities and counties, local building departments. They are reviewing construction documents and they're looking at doing onsite inspections to verify compliance. And where the issue of education and outreach that comes in as a quick example here in New York state has 62 counties and Orange County where I grew up has 44 cities and towns. Most of those cities and towns have some type of building department and they do some type of building code enforcement. When you broaden that out to the US you're looking at 30,000 jurisdictions that are enforcing or in some way enforcing a building code. So why enforcement? Why focus on this? This article here about the more Oklahoma tornadoes, this came out just last week and it's in advance of a report that is gonna be put out that reveals that there was construction flaws and code violations that cost lives when the two schools basically were destroyed in that tornado. So this is the reason. Consistent enforcement with the codes is crucial to maintaining a very basic level of resilience. So you probably ask, well, you know, why? Why isn't this being done? Why aren't building departments out there doing this? So and they are. They're very much under resourced and there's also a lack of knowledge but more so than a lack of knowledge, there's not a really adequate training infrastructure for building officials. So that's really something that is critical to improving compliance rates. It's getting education out there to building officials and also to industry. So working with AIA to educate architects on resilience principles, on the building codes, you know, the architects that are designing them, we want their designs to be in compliance with the code when they're submitted and that way the building official, if even if he misses something, that building has been designed to meet the code. So the building official is really that kind of last level of enforcement whereas we want the industry that's doing the work, doing the designs, doing the construction, we want them to be the ones who are complying with the code. So there's also a lack of political will and working so much with the energy codes, I think that lack of political will definitely applies to the energy code more so than the other codes but it definitely creeps in. Oftentimes elected officials hear how much the new codes are gonna increase construction costs and they will reduce code requirements or they will basically tell their building department that they shouldn't be enforcing certain provisions so politics plays into it as well. And then the last one is just not knowing what compliance issues exist. A lot of building departments don't really have a quality assurance procedure. They don't have, they haven't really done an assessment to see how well they're enforcing the code. So they don't really know what that baseline is to know how well they're doing and where they need to improve. In a couple of years ago, IMT did a study that found that for energy codes to improve compliance with energy codes, $810 million was needed nationally on an annual basis to bring compliance rates up to 90% or better. That was based on some best practice jurisdictions who were providing specific resources for energy code enforcement and then scaling that model up across the US. So the good news is that there's many ways to improve energy code compliance that don't involve just throwing money at it. You can improve efficiencies within building departments, many of which are operating the same way they did in the 50s and 60s and 70s. With a lack of resources, it's difficult for them to take advantage of the newest technologies and faster ways of doing plan review and inspections. So education is definitely critical in getting training to building officials. So I wanna round out my presentation with some results from the Build Strong Coalition, did a survey of 44 insurance and disaster response professionals, industry and government professionals and had some very interesting findings. So the first question was about the, what's the most significant barrier to improving a community's disaster resilience? And you'll see here about 36% said a lack of comprehensive and enforced codes and standards, but not far behind, it was a lack of understanding within the community of the actual costs of the disasters. And I think that these two are actually very related without an understanding and an outreach on what the cost of a disaster would be within your community, there's kind of a, there's a lack of real urgency in getting a really good and enforced code. So again, the need for education and resources for better enforcement is critical to improving resilience. And then the second question, what are the barriers you see to code adoption enforcement? And then 63% said a fear of increased building costs and then 38% an unclear cost benefit information. Again, these two are very related, not having a clear understanding of the cost and benefit means you say, why am I gonna pay for it? Why am I gonna pay for a better building when I really don't know what the benefit is to me? And then return on investment. So what strategy that has a return on investment could be implemented in order to improve hazard mitigation. And this one was actually pretty clear. 82% said building codes and regulations that actively reflect local risk and mitigation measures that also address those risks. So what we're talking about is there's a need for local action, there's a need to reflect local risks within communities because resilience is very much something that's done at the local level but at the national level and at state levels it's where you really need to improve the education and the resources that get down so that the local jurisdictions have what they need to make the decisions. So brief conclusions, building codes can definitely improve resilience. They raise the floor and they offer, they're ready made, they're out there now getting states to adopt the current codes is really critical so that they have the most advanced codes that offer the most resilience but also local and regional specific strategies are important and then a better understanding of what the cost benefit analysis is when it comes to mitigation options. Education and outreach and then definitely improved compliance because even if you've adopted the current code, if your compliance if your enforcement infrastructure is poor it's not gonna get the requirements of the code they're often not gonna get met. So over the last several years my work is focused on energy codes and I feel that there's a lot of lessons that we've learned in improving energy codes over the last 10 years that definitely apply to resilience and improving resiliency as well. So things like coordinated efforts on development and adoption, bringing together broad coalitions to develop energy efficiency standards and improve codes, the energy codes themselves was very crucial to being effective in improving the energy efficiency of energy codes and then having some consistent methodology to do the cost benefit analysis that was very critical in being able to evaluate what proposals would save the most energy and what the payback on that would be. So and then financing mechanism you talk about existing buildings a huge issue on energy but also gonna be a huge issue on resilience. We need to be able to improve our existing building stock both it's both the energy efficiency of it and the resilience of it and financing mechanisms to do that are a critical way to improving existing building infrastructure. And then voluntary programs like Deborah mentioned that really pull the market forward. They get new technologies out there they get these things tested and those best practices feed back into the code eventually and raise the floor and bring it to market scale. And direct engagement with cities we've really found that you've got to when it comes to improving compliance with energy codes and with building codes you've got to go to the source and that is directly working with cities and counties to help them understand what the issues are with compliance within their jurisdiction and then how they can improve them. So that's it, thanks. Thank you Ryan, that was terrific. And I think all of these different aspects show both how big this issue is but also how many smart people are working on it and how many good initiatives are underway to make some inroads. So I thank the panel for your presentations and for the work that you're doing. And I want to open it up for questions from you and your comments and further discussion at this time for any of the panelists. Fred. Give us a specific example of a cost-benefit analysis that demonstrates the value of either resilience-oriented or energy-oriented codes. From an energy code perspective, so the Department of Energy developed a criteria for doing cost-benefit analysis. And in the case of energy codes it's through energy code modeling to see what, to really compare different measures, different levels of insulation, how much energy they're gonna use with an R-15 insulation compared to an R-21 or something like that. And then how long would it take a homeowner to recoup that investment after they occupy the home? So what the energy savings would be from instituting that measure? Question also for Ryan. With regards to uniform building codes, when they get local, to what extent are adopted codes reflective of the particular risks in those states where they're adopted in those municipalities or counties where they're endorsed? The reason I'm asking is, for example, San Diego, you might be particularly concerned about a fire risk, maybe flood to some extent. Florida, heaven knows, you know, Carl Heisen has had some fun over time talking about the rigor of building code and compliance in Florida, made quite a joke of it. But I understand that's gotten better. They get a 95, right? So the question is, how flexible is that? Is that a problem? Is that a level of investment for those localities or states that is just beyond their capability as I explained, one of the reasons why some of the states aren't adopting codes? Yeah, it's a good point you raised. As I mentioned early on on my slide on development, the International Code Council develops the I Code, family of codes. And there are codes within there that if you were in San Diego and concerned about fire, you would adopt certain code as opposed to others. But when it comes to the state level of adoption, the revisions to the code vary. Some states will just tear it apart and basically put their own name on it so that it reflects the construction practices within that state, having come from running the adoption process for the state of Georgia, very familiar with how codes can get, the codes at the national level are often not reflective of regional construction practices. So frequently they will be revised at the state level. And then sometimes local jurisdictions will decide that certain provisions do not meet their needs. And so they'll change things at the local level. If I could comment on that from an IBHS perspective, we support mandatory statewide codes and do not have real concerns about local jurisdictions coming in. And I guess we could say you could strengthen them but don't weaken them because oftentimes it's a political process. That said, certainly in the case of wind, which is where a lot of the attention has gone and a lot of the money goes, is that superimposed on the statewide building code are engineering maps that tell you what the likely wind speeds are. And there are certain requirements, coastal areas where you're in a higher wind speed area, the model codes themselves do impose in some cases additional strength requirements. We had an issue in Maryland last year and Garrett County is not going to have the same wind requirements that Ocean City, Maryland would have. Another issue that comes up is agricultural buildings. And depending on the tenor of a state, there have been concerns about applying building code standards to agricultural buildings. Some states have exempted those at the statewide level. But the big thing I think is wind speed with respect to wildfire, I believe California is the only state in the country that actually has a wildfire code. So that's not an issue other places, although wildfire risk does exist, I think in 38 states and more states should absolutely. But at this point in time, that's more of a theoretical discussion than a real one. David. Yeah, hi. You all to some degree talked a bit about education and the need for better education going forward. I was wondering if any of you had ideas for actual concrete measures to improve education, especially since a lot of this is happening at the local level, that can be like logistically challenging. So measures for improving education of, I guess the population and as well, building officers and some of the agencies, I guess, and people like that. I can start from our perspective at the American Institute of Architects, just being a member requires you to obtain a certain number of continuing education credits to maintain your membership and most states require it to maintain your license. So we have what are called health safety and welfare courses that are offered by providers all over the country. Right now, we're working on devising a curriculum that's gonna be specifically for architects that'll sort of include 101, 201, 301 levels of resilient design information. There's also a lot of stuff that's already out there that we just need to collect. For instance, the National Disaster Preparedness and Training Center out of the University of Hawaii at Minoa has a new course that's just coming online called HeriPlan, which is hurricane resilient design. It's intended for architects, particularly architects who work in the public sector, who work with cities, who work with counties. And we're working on pushing that out around the country through our component network. Beyond that, we work with a lot of organizations that are basically public information campaigns. Flash, the Federal Alliance for Safe Homes. IBHS does have a considerable amount of public outreach. The insurance industry is always trying to reach their clients and customers with a little bit more information and architects help provide that. So there's a lot of different things that we try to do. Obviously, there's always more that we would like to be able to do, particularly for the construction industry because we hear a lot from practitioners, guys who are out there doing the insulation installation, guys who are out there doing the roof installation. Their crews are working six or seven days a week and they refuse to take free training that's being offered to them. I recently heard an instance of this happening in Minnesota where a manufacturer had been trying to offer free training for nine months to someone who was installing their product and they couldn't get a day to just train their staff on how to actually use this product. They don't know if it's being installed correctly. And so that's a huge challenge within the construction industry at large is the appropriate installation of the designs that are made by architects. I agree with all those things. Our focus, as Cooper indicated, is more on public education. We have a website that's got all sorts of information by peril for homeowners and for small businesses. That, of course, requires you to go into the website. So like other organizations, we're trying to use social media more and more to try to really put out lots of short messages on things that your average person can do to make their home stronger, whether that's a longer term issue. We have a publication, for example, called Roofing the Right Way. That's intended at the time of re-roofing if we can get that out to people. And one of our vehicles for getting it out to people actually is insurance claims examiners because the insurance industry is actually the largest consumer of roofs in this country indirectly through claims of roofs that have been destroyed or homes that have been destroyed because the roof has failed. So we are trying to get that information out. It is a challenge to work with the roofing industry. As Cooper said, we have a number of outreach programs with them. And one of them that could yield some fruit although people have to pay attention to it is a partnership or we're a member of an organization called RECOWI. That's the Roofing Industry Committee on Weather Issues, I think it stands for. And through that group, they are putting together a series of best practices guides for different types of roofing materials. So again, if you can sort of get those filtered down through those sectors to their members, that will help. But I'll tell you, it's a challenge. I got a new roof about a year ago and had my roofing the right way, broke sure out and told the roof for all the things I wanted. And of course, he looked at me right through the husband and said, little lady, you don't need that stuff. Don't believe everything you read on the internet. So it's a challenge. Little did they know what they were, who they were talking to. No, they didn't. And that roof was not selected. Ryan, did you wanna add anything on there? Just briefly on that, to build on something that Cooper mentioned about training the trades, we're finding that bilingual training is actually a very needed resource to build up our trades so that they can really understand how things are supposed to be installed properly. That's all I'll say on training. Well, I just think that, obviously that's a very good question. So we have the technical training and then you have public education, so critical. There's a lot going on, but there's so much more that we need to do. I would just add to that that the Department of Energy has a building energy codes program and we all try to figure out, well, what's the state role? What's the local? What's the federal? That is a federal issue because it is something that is proposed in the budget and goes through the appropriations process. And then that, the panel can provide details if you're interested, but that is to help in this whole code development process to provide the modeling and to make sure that the codes are developed to actually save energy. I'm talking about the energy codes, obviously, but then also to help with training to some degree. So that's critical. Yeah, I would build onto that a little bit and the building energy codes program at the Department of Energy has done a great job of developing materials based on the national model energy codes, the international energy conservation code. They have a site called Building Energy Codes University where they provide all these training materials. What's really lacking is that last step in getting someone to take those materials, adapt it to a state code or local code and get a training out there to be able to reach code officials and professionals in trades. I have a question for Ryan, actually two questions. You talked about the importance of enforcement and the fact that local governments are financially constrained more and more. There is a growing trend in the United States and actually in the world of third party code enforcement and I'm wondering if you could comment on that. And my second question has to do with the fact that most of the codes address new construction which is probably about two to 3% of the buildings out there. And you mentioned existing buildings on one of your slides but it was not in connection with codes, it was in connection with incentives. Could you say a few words on how the codes address existing buildings? So on the first question of third party enforcement, I've written actually several case studies on utilizing third parties. There's various ways to utilize third parties when it comes to enforcing building codes. And one of them is to use third parties where building departments don't have the resources to do things. So when it comes to the energy code, it's things like building envelope leakage testing and duct leakage testing, very specialized test procedures that building departments just don't have the resources to go do, they can take several hours. So basically approving a third party so that a builder can just contract with them as someone who's approved by the building department to perform those tests and then do them and report back on their findings is one way to use third parties. There's other ways, there are entire companies that will come in and the local government will just contract with them and they will run the operations of the building department. And they have very high standards generally for their employees, for continuing education. And so they tend to do a very good job of enforcement. But they also, because they're larger companies, they can shift resources from, if they have contracts with several jurisdictions and as building volumes and permit volumes change, they can shift resources around to where they need them. And they're not constrained to just one jurisdiction. So I think that's on the third party enforcement, all those case studies are on our website, imt.org. For existing buildings, you make a good point and there is an existing building code, one of the international codes is called the International Existing Building Code. There's also provisions within the International Building Code that address existing buildings, chapter 34. And in terms of the energy codes application to existing buildings, there was actually just, when you talk about code development, there was a successful proposal that was adopted, just this last cycle that will be included in the 2015 codes that will basically add a new chapter that specifically looks at how the energy code applies to existing buildings. It's a very important issue and getting the codes to acknowledge them is one thing. Then you have to also recognize that there's, at the local level, there's permitting structures where if the jurisdiction doesn't require a permit for, say, a roof replacement, then what mechanisms do they have for enforcing the code on that? They didn't require a permit to do it anyway. So that's... Thank you and that's another critical issue. I think there are so many related issues that would be important to cover in subsequent briefings such as financing. And I think all of you mentioned it or showed it in slides. And EESI has done some work on utility on-bill financing. You've mentioned PACE, green mortgages. Our institutions, our housing policies, many of these things are just not designed to recognize and to take into account and to encourage better performance, better quality buildings and looking at that cost of ownership. So stay tuned. Any other questions? I also wanted to, if I may, just put a couple of points out in case the panel wanted to address those. And that is schools. I know we all care about schools and it's an important building type for all the obvious reasons. But another one is that schools are often places of refuge for a community in times of disaster. And I think there's a lot of reason to be looking at school buildings for higher levels of performance, not only to improve the learning environment for kids in a better environment for teaching, but if you do have sort of this last place of refuge, what a great idea to make sure that it has, for example, renewable energy systems that can continue, keep the building functional during a power outage, that it can continue to purify water systems or whatever it might be. So that's an important thing as well. And hospitals. And hospitals. And hospitals and healthcare. Exactly. Did you want us to comment on that? If you would like to, you are absolutely welcome to. Yeah, in my presentation, I talked a lot about just generic buildings, buildings were at large, but certainly public facilities, schools, hospitals, any government building, whether it's a VA building, a city hall, I think all of those, and I think that I can safely say that this is the position of the Institute. All of those should meet higher minimum codes than a typical building. In any disaster situation, if you can't send kids back to school, then nobody's going back to work. That was actually one of the primary problems post earthquake in Haiti is that no one had anywhere to send the kids back to schools and so it delayed by months the recovery that otherwise could have been taking place on top of any number of other problems you choose to list. So certainly being able to shelter in place in schools, being able to use those schools as places of refuge. In Hurricane Sandy, I know that there were schools in Connecticut that people sought out that weren't places of refuge. They were never intended to be places of refuge. People went there anyway because you just assume as a member of the community that that's going to be someplace that you can go. And now the mayor had to take a look at that and take a look at the entire school district on how to retrofit those schools to potentially serve as places of refuge in the future. Again, this is a cost that could have been absorbed during the initial construction phase and now you have to retrofit an entire suite of buildings just to get it up to where we would argue that it should have been in the first place. Thank you. Anyone else? I guess I would leave you all with this one thought and that is, again, someone mentioned this. You know, it's what society codes and the way we build our buildings, design and build our buildings. In some ways, it's reflective of what we expect and demand as a society. Another reason why education is so critical, public education. Consumers Union did a survey a couple of years ago and found an overwhelming majority of respondents just assumed that their homes met the latest code, which isn't always the case as we've learned. And they absolutely wanted that because they felt that that would be cost effective over the long term. So again, some of those financing issues to start to recognize investment versus cost. How do you prepare and save money over the long term? And I think looking at the multiple benefits of better buildings and how those, we really need a better way of doing this cost-benefit analysis and some things we just don't factor in right now. We don't factor in the cost of pollution, the fact the cost of cleaning up landfills, the cost of not being prepared for disasters. And I think we're starting to do that, obviously. And we have so many other issues to cover. The electric grid, the other aspects of communities and we're hopeful that we can tackle some of these other issues as well on resilience and sustainability. So I wanna thank the panel very much for your presentations and all of you for being here and your good questions. And I think our materials will be posted on our website in the near future and look forward to seeing you in the future. Thank you so much.