 And Chris, if I could just invite you right up to the stage, have a seat. Let's welcome Chris Rodriguez. He is the director of the Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency of the District of Columbia. Before that, he was the director, I'm not an emergency management entity, whatever its many acronyms are, in the state of New Jersey, which should ring some bells. Of course, there was a major event called Sandy and his time there. So he has lots of experience. He also has a PhD from Notre Dame and a bachelor's degree from some small obscure college called Williams College. So yes, I went there too. So we didn't know each other. There's a good decade between us. But I'm just so thrilled to have someone of your expertise here. And that would be a wonderful benefit all in of itself. But the real reason I invited you is because the District of Columbia is, you know, right in the heart of it. It is a high threat, high hazard sort of litmus test for emergency managers in your business. This is it. But you also have a really interesting mix of communities here and a lot of different kinds of communities that may be underserved or vulnerable. So you have to think about that a lot. So talk to us about the District of Columbia as a high threat, high hazard environment and what that means to you as the person who has to worry about it every day. What keeps you up at night? That kind of thing. Absolutely. Thank you, Sharon. Thank you for reaching out and allowing me to participate in this important talk. Thank you, everyone, again, for your participation. The District of Columbia is the nation's capital. It's the capital of the most powerful nation on earth. And in many respects, the world looks to America and the United States as sort of a model for all types of security-related issues. And it is an honor for me to be in this position. It's an honor for me that the Mayor, Muriel Bowser, has asked me to do this important job. I have a great staff that works for me. And certainly the partnerships also around the region, because we are in the national capital region, are very strong and we rely very heavily on them during emergencies. So what keeps me up at night? Look, a lot of people ask me this question and it really comes down to probably three major things. The first is a Boston Marathon Las Vegas-style event in the heart of the nation's capital. That would be a major event that we would have to respond very quickly to. We've actually exercised with the Mayor herself a complex, coordinated attack in different parts of the city, but similar to the Paris attacks that happened a couple years ago where you had multiple teams firing into restaurants and then another team at the stadium in Paris putting a bomb there. And so how would we react in that situation? And that's a big one. The other is a major cyber attack that cripples the district's ability to communicate with its residents, where you have PII, personal identifiable information that's leaked onto the dark web of many of our residents. And how would we react to that situation? How would we mitigate the risk to our residents? And the third is similar to what we saw last summer and we were certainly preparing for Hurricane Florence to come up the Chesapeake as a Category 4 storm. And what would we do in that situation if there was a Category 4, Category 5 storm that hit the heart of the national capital region, evacuation of the district? How would we serve sort of the disabilities and access and functional needs communities, the underrepresented communities? That would be a challenge for the district. And so we've taken a lot of steps along those three sort of major threats to mitigate risk and to try to plan for that. So when you say that you've taken steps to deal with underrepresented or underserved communities, can you define for us what, in the context of the District of Columbia, what a vulnerable community is? Who that is and where they are and how you take care of them? Certainly in some of our wards 5, 7, and 8 along Southeast and parts of Northeast we have economically challenged residents. We also have, as we saw last summer, there was a major fire in Southeast, in the Navy Yard where the Arthur Caper senior apartments went up, it was a three alarm fire. And we had to actually serve a population or a segment of our residents that was uniquely vulnerable in terms of age, mobility, dietary restrictions, medication. And that presented us with a very unique challenge in terms of how are we, we knew that we needed to have a temporary shelter before we started putting these residents back into long-term housing. But again, we had to really think about how are we moving people. If we were requesting buses for their mobility, was there access for wheelchairs? We had a lot of restaurants in Navy Yard that were sending food to the King Greenleaf Recreation Center, which was our temporary shelter. But they were like meats and a lot of carbohydrates, which some of the senior population could not consume. We had some of the medication that they needed that were left in their apartments. How are we working with some other district agencies to make sure that they got their medication? I think in the main, the district, the mayor, the Homeland Security Emergency Management Agency, the Department of Human Services, we really, I think, did a very good job under very difficult circumstances to help that population. And I'm proud to say now that, as of earlier this year, we have placed all of those residents back into long-term housing, and they've been able to recover from a very traumatic event. A good sort of miniature of the bigger problem, it was elderly, mobility challenged, African American, low income, and also other kinds of health challenges. So they're not the only community, I'm sure there's lots of parts of the district where that's a concern. And when you have an event like, for example, Florence possibly coming in and really hitting the district hard, do you know where all those communities are in advance? What do you do with that knowledge, and how do you acquire that knowledge? So again, it's all event dependent, and we have, as HCMA, as the Homeland Security Emergency Management Agency, we have mapped all of our 130 schools as potential shelter sites. Obviously, it's not ideal to use a school as a shelter, because schools are a key part of a community's recovery efforts after an event. We do know that where the hospitals are in terms of how to serve some of those, again, underserved and uniquely vulnerable populations, in the event if we lost power, we can actually tell, we have great relationships with PEPCO and with our utilities, to know which facilities to restore power at. And we also, to get to the point of the technology, I think we have invested, in my tenure in the last 18 months, a lot of personnel time and monetary resources into ensuring that the mayor, the city administrator, and as the director of emergency management, I have a good picture of what our common operating picture is. How many shelters are open? How many people require shelters? Where are commodities stocked? And I want to get to something that you mentioned in your opening remark Sharon, is we have to also understand government can't do this alone. We simply do not have the capacity to do this alone. And we have built relationships, and if I could just mention one here, with Marriott, for example, hotels can be major staging areas for commodity distribution, for temporary shelters. I'm not going to commit Marriott to anything, but we have begun that dialogue and those conversations about how would we go about doing this if we had a major catastrophic event. So that network of relationships in the blue sky time is really important when something happens, basically. Absolutely. Okay. Now, I'm not saying that technology can't enable that. Technology has probably a really important role, and I know we have at least one person here who can talk to us about the ways technology can do that. But that's actually, ultimately, a human and organizational challenge, is that networking. I think that's exactly right. And you mentioned Superstorm Sandy, which came to New Jersey. Yeah, tell us some lessons learned. In 2012, and at the time, the situational awareness tools and technology was obviously not advanced as it is now. But I will tell you, no technology can make up for the human contact that you would have to a population that has been traumatized, lost their home, lost everything in a storm, has nowhere to go. And I remember during that time, Governor Chris Christie going out and hugging people, walking through the debris. I know it's a political angle there, but the governor was very effective at leading sort of the recovery efforts from a public perception standpoint. And really, and I think this is important during disasters and as we all sort of think about what keeps us up at night, simplifying things for the key executive decision makers is really important. I remember sitting in a meeting with the governor and him saying, look, everything else doesn't matter. There are three things we need to do right now, immediately to make sure that this community, that this state recovers. The first is we have to get all our efforts into restoring power. People need power, okay? I don't care where you have to pull from, I don't care what you gotta do. They need power. The second is we need to clear debris from roads. People need to get around, need to be able to get to the supermarket. You can't keep them in their homes, okay? We need to clear major roads, okay? And the third was we have to get children back in school as quickly as possible. And so those three precepts became sort of the guiding principles of all of our combined efforts in the immediate recovery from Superstorm Sandy. And because he believed, and I think he was correct, that those fundamental tasks, those fundamental things needed to be done for a community to recover. People had to get back to a sense of normalcy. And I think as we talk about those things that keep me up at night as well, terrorist attack, a major hurricane. High winds, yes. Getting people back to a sense of normalcy is really important. And Mayor Bowser also, she's been very forward-leaning in terms of when we have. So forget about a major sort of event. Talk about a snowstorm, right? We're gonna get five to ten inches of snow. Which for you out of town is a major event in Washington, D.C. Coming from New Jersey, I remember we had a. We had to drag the Governor Kristi onto phone calls about snow. He's like, it's snow, just plow it, you know? But I think one of the things about here in District Columbia is it does impact. We have, our population nearly doubles every day because of people coming into the district. And so there's a lot of connectivity and interconnectedness with the region. But the mayor is very, I think very forward-leaning in terms of we need to stay open, we need to stay open for business. The district is open for business, government needs to be functioning. And I think that that helps drive our strategy and our orientation towards a lot of these events. Let me, I wanna change direction slightly and say, now you have an unusual amount of lived experience through disasters. One of the things I wonder is when you've seen things like Sandy or many incidents of the fire, other things in the District of Columbia. Do you think about, was there something we could have done in advance that would have made this not so catastrophic? I mean, you can't stop a disaster from being a disaster. But you can stop it from being quite as bad for the people that are especially for these vulnerable communities. And could you talk a little bit about that, about what you've seen that you would do differently and how you would define resilience in that context? There's always, we can always do better in any event. And my office has a standard operating procedure where after every event, no matter how much credit we get or whether we don't do as well as we could, we're always doing after action reports. So one of the things that I've really tried to focus our office on now is building a culture of preparedness. And my predecessor began that, and I think we see it and we've seen it certainly in the last two years in terms of what's coming out of FEMA. They just published a culture of preparedness report, which focuses a lot on individual preparedness. And it gets back to my point about the government can't do this alone. We can have plans that sit on the shelf. We can have playbooks, and we have all those things, right? But at the end of the day, a community will respond and recover from a catastrophic event. If the community itself, if individuals are prepared. And they can take very simple steps. I've heard the FEMA administrator Brock Long, who of course just stepped down. But he's talked about this, and I've had conversations with him because I've asked him, what is the one thing I need to focus on as the new Homeland Security Director in the District of Columbia? He said, Chris, the thing you need to focus on is how would you manage a billion dollar disaster? Because it's coming, and how would you manage? Are you prepared for that? And so the way that we believe we can mitigate risk is by empowering individuals to think about what they would do if a category four hurricane was coming. And a lot of that we pull from FEMA, purchasing insurance. That's a huge thing that a lot of our residents can do, and people can do to recover very quickly. They talk about having a certain amount of savings on hand, cash. That if you don't have your home or you lose access to your credit cards, how are you purchasing things? Now, fortunately, in the district, we have a sizable portion of our population that doesn't have three months of salaries in their savings accounts, okay? A lot of our residents are just trying to get by every day, and so we have to figure out, how are they getting the information they need? Who are they going to call? The Mayor Bowser has established offices in her office of the mayor that are very community focused, that can deploy very quickly to communities and offer those face to face resources for our residents. Very effective during everything from a homicide happening in a specific neighborhood to a snowstorm. We have volunteers who come out and shovel sidewalks for some of our senior citizens. A very effective community based effort. The other thing on technology is how are we, a challenge that I think a lot of emergency management in states and big cities have across the country is tracking, patient tracking. When we open a shelter, how are we tracking shelter ease? How are we doing it? Well, right now, we have invested a lot in technology in order to do that, checking people in as they come into the shelter. But again, it's not just checking people in. It's sometimes in the handoff to other agencies as they're moving through the process, some things get lost. So how do we have a common operating picture across government that's not focused just on HCMA or the Department of Human Services or the Office of the Tenant Advocate, but that everyone can see for that common operating picture. And we're working towards that. And is sort of data acquisition and data sharing a big challenge and building that common operating picture? At times, we have the HIPAA regulations and we want to make sure we're using or we are consuming person identifiable information in a legal and very transparent way. And so that is always a challenge and we need to make sure that we're working with the Department of Health, the Department of Human Services to ensure that data accessibility and integrity is maintained. So again, we are building out those capabilities. It's something that we're really focused on with our interagency partners. Is there anything else that you wish new technologies or outside sort of assistance could do to help you? I've found in my now almost 18 months as director here in the district, I get a lot of benders coming to me, right? Latest and greatest technology and we've got the best thing. We're going to solve all your problems. And I'm sure for those of you who've been in government, you've been on that side of the table as well many times. The thing that I'm really looking for, and I've been on the other side of the table too, so and I understand sort of the back and forth. For me, it's always simplify, simplify, simplify. My boss, the mayor, needs very clear, concise, accurate information to make decisions. And sometimes I feel like a lot of these tools, they try to do too many things. And I find myself, even I've been a victim of this, chasing my tail with all these new things that are coming out and saying, wait, what about that thing? What about that thing? And we lose sort of focus sometimes. And again, I've been a victim of this, so I'm not, you know. And so what I'm trying to do is look for the simplest, cleanest, most interoperable with other sort of tools that are out there. Because I don't want to have to be buying five different tools that do five different things. And so I'm trying to consolidate a lot of those efforts in my office. I guess I know this is an energy word, it's not an emergency management word. But you kind of need to drop in capability. You need something you can just. Yes, but also in steady state. I mean, you know, when we have high winds like yesterday. It was really windy. Yeah, it was really windy. I think the winds got up to about 58 miles per hour here in the district and 60 around the region. We had a lot of trees down. We had about 20 trees down. And of course, the mayor's office wants to know, what are those trees getting cleared? You know, we're getting calls from residents and they can't get to their homes. We need to make sure we're constantly on that. And my office runs our 247, the district's 247 watch center. So those folks that are those dedicated folks are in there are constantly trying to make sure that those resource requests are processed and that the residents are getting the services that they deserve. We have time for a couple of quick questions. If you have a question or a comment, try not to make it a treatise. I might interrupt you. I look nice. I'm not that nice. Just identify yourself and your organization. Yeah, John McMullen, right? She's going to give you a microphone. Sorry, that means the people listening online can hear you. Public-private partnerships, the ability to pre-plan and get these agreements in place, the liability in place, the insurance in place. And I've done all this, tried to do all with FEMA, with varying degrees of success, but I think this is the, and it's not technology-oriented. It could be assisted by technology, but it's the one effort I would say that the government really needs to step out on using the private industry, the private sector as force multipliers. And we at Uber are working hard at becoming value assets during crisis management responses. But I really put the burden on government and it can be solved. You don't have to use your own school buses. You don't have to use your own shelters. You don't, it's all out there, but it just requires a commitment and the ability to take some risk. And you brought all that up, Chris, and I appreciate that. Thanks. Yeah, thanks, John. And I just want to add, and I'll make a commitment to Uber or any private sector partner, potential private sector partner. You have a seat in our Mercy Operations Center. In the District's Mercy Operations Center, for any major event that happens across the district, we do have spaces for our private sector partner. So you get the common situational awareness. It's also a great opportunity for you to meet the FBI liaison, the Secret Service liaison, the White House liaison that sits in our Mercy Operations Center during State of the Union inauguration or any major First Amendment event. So please get in touch with us. We'd love to have you and representatives from the company there when we activate. Okay, let's, you gentlemen in the back? Yes. Hi, Rick Pasarelli, SNC Lavelin. I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about your relationship between the Office of Emergency Management and the Office of Planning and Zoning within the district and how you're thinking about long term risks opposed to just the immediate response. So we have a good relationship with the office. It's the Office of Policy and Planning and you're talking about development in the district. And certainly we can provide some context to that in terms of what we're seeing. And a lot of it is from our Fusion Center, from our Intelligence Fusion Center, which looks and in cooperation with organizations like New America, we can bring sort of that context to the mayor's office as they're making decisions about where to develop. And so that relationship is there and we do it mostly through our Office of Risk Management which looks at sort of the long term vision for the district from an economics, financial, and development standpoint. So we're a part of that conversation. Bernadette? Hi, Bernadette Woods-Placky with Climate Central. Bring you back to New Jersey for a minute, that's where I'm located. And- Whereabouts? Brown Princeton, I'm new in, so. Okay, it's a beautiful area. Our office is in Princeton, yeah, exactly. So post-Sandy, how quickly did the conversations begin? Where did the conversations go with planning for a different climate in the future? Because the seas are getting higher, it's only going to go farther inland. And some communities did not take that into account to the levels that they should, some did, but there was a lot of conversation. So from your perspective, where did some of the conversations go that you can talk to us about? The difficult part about this debate is that it's so hyper-political. And so I, fortunately, I think, we had a governor that whatever you want to say about him, he's outspoken and he has his own opinion about things. And I think with, as they were rebuilding sort of the berms along the ocean, along the coast, and building the new boardwalks, a lot of that was taken into account. And I remember there was a time when the community didn't want to build certain structures to prevent the potential that the seas could come even more into the communities again. And the governor sued the city to make sure that it was built to resist that type of event again. And so that's happening, but it's almost like one-offs and not a coordinated strategy, at least in the state of New Jersey. Of course, the administration has changed now. I haven't kept up on sort of what the Sandy Recovery effort is looking like, because it's still ongoing. I mean, six years after, almost seven years after the event, the recovery is still happening. And so they are building those communities to be resilient. But again, it's not just what government can do. A lot of those communities don't want to invest the time. They don't want to raise property taxes to be able to put the, for their residents to be able to put the protective measures in place to mitigate risk in the future. So it's a hyper-political issue. One of the things we cannot deny, though, and as the Director of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, I try to, and for those of you who have been in government, I try to stay away from the politics of it. But one of the things you can't deny is that these types of events are becoming more frequent. They're becoming more extreme and severe. And so how are we preparing for that? Because when a category four hurricane, or we get two or three category four hurricanes during one hurricane season, which is unprecedented, we have to prepare for that. We have to prepare for the eventual end. That's coming here. Forget about the politics, right? We're talking about life safety measures that have to be taken. So. We're going to talk a lot more about that. Let me get to the gentleman in the back first and then to you. Good morning. My name is Joseph Porcelli. I work for Nextdoor. I'm our public agency lead, and I do a lot of public safety strategy and organizing. This past year, the Maryland Insurance Administration did a poll on Nextdoor for all residents in Maryland, asking if they knew that their homeowners insurance wouldn't necessarily cover flooding. And it turns out 18% of Marylanders did not know that. We know that we need people to make sure they understand their insurance, have cash, so on and so forth. The question I have for you, though, in addition to those three things, if you could wave a magic wand and you would have people do three things to prepare that not only benefited themselves but benefited their neighbors, what would you have them do? It's a great question. And I want a magic wand, too. I'm just saying. I love that magic wand. Actually, I was just at Universal Studios last week with my kids, so we were doing the Harry Potter thing. So you do have a magic wand. I actually literally do have the elder wand at home. There have been rumors. If I could wave a magic wand and say, what can people do? I think for communities, it's really important for them to be able to know how to communicate with their neighbors, whether it's phone calls. And it's just like us in government. You never want to meet someone the first time. I know it's a cliche during an emergency. Well, I think for a community, you want to make sure you're involved in your community. You know your neighbors. You know how to contact them. I think that's really important. The other thing is to, in a major disaster, make sure that you have rendezvous points where you can come, you can meet with your family again just in case something happens. And the other thing I would say to people is make sure you know where to get your information. There's so much information out there right now on the internet, on social media. Go to your, and all disasters are local. And make sure you know where to go for information. If the emergency management agency in your county or your town is having a town hall, just go. Just get the resources that you need to know how to react to a disaster. I mean, we haven't even talked about other types of threats in all hazards, like cybersecurity and protecting yourself online. We're talking about, I think, physical and weather-related threats, but I think no. We'd like you to come back and talk about those other things. But that's what I would say is making sure you know your neighbors, making sure you know how to reunify with your families, and making sure you just know where to get authoritative information. I think in many cases, that's a real challenge for people because there's so much information out there. Now we're at time, but if you can sneak in a quick question. OK, and you have one behind you as well. Can you ask a quick question? All right, then we'll let you do it. Here comes the microphone. That's Elise Campbell, by the way, everybody. She's the floor captain today, so be nice to her or you'll be ejected. My name is Nobu Okumura, a visiting scholar at the George Washington University, originally a journalism professor in Tokyo. And I indeed agree with the importance of the individual preparedness and not to enhance it. What's the role of education and media and what kind of message are you preparing? So what's the role of education and media? I think I'll take education first. My agency is engaged in a long-term process to really engage our schools, high schools in particular, to develop the next generation of emergency management leaders, we call it the Homeland Security Youth Program. We're going to begin developing that over the next year with the District of Columbia Public Schools and the new chancellor. In terms of academia and the higher education community, we want to get into those schools. I know George Washington has the Center for Cyber and Homeland Defense, Georgetown, the University of the District of Columbia, American University. There are these institutions of higher education that can help perpetuate and train the next generation of emergency managers. University of Maryland, too. And the University of Maryland, the next generation of emergency management professionals. So anytime we can come speak or anytime we can do a job fair, which we do, we have an internship program. We're a paid internship program. We bring in college students to come and see what it's like to work in that space. Anything we can do to spread the message. The media here has been, I think, very effective at helping us during events, either like snow or hurricanes or anything that's going on to help get the message out about what our residents can do to mitigate their risk and protect themselves. Well, thank you very much, Chris. That was fantastic. You cover a lot of material in a very quick time. And you set us up right. So really grateful to you for coming. Let's give him a hand, please. Thank you so much for coming. It's great to have you here. You're up. Come on up. I'm going to grab my coffee while you're going to move up. Come here often? Good to see you. And for folks who are staying and who are part of the working groups, we'll find a way to slot you into the tables. You shouldn't have to sit on the sides. So if you sit there now patiently while we're doing this part, we'll make sure that everybody's got a seat at a table. So no one can take mine while I'm up here. Keep it warm, right? Well, Bernadette Woods Plackie, we're delighted to have you here. So on the program, Bernadette was going to have a conversation with Mike Cooperberg, who is the executive director of the US Global Change Research Program, which is the entity that coordinates all global change research in the US government and is responsible for producing the National Climate Assessment. And he sent his regrets. He expected to be with us, but wasn't able to be. And enough said on that. But I had invited a ringer to be the discussant on that, and that's Bernadette, who is the director of Climate Matters at Climate Central and is also the chief meteorologist there. And if any of you are from the Baltimore area and she looks familiar, there's a reason for that. She was also a practicing meteorologist for a decade and an Emmy award-winning one at that. So she is a scientist. She knows what she's talking about. And she's dedicated her life now to communicating on this topic. And I wanted you to come here today to help us set the context. So is it our imaginations or are disasters actually getting more frequent and more severe in this country? They are. They're absolutely getting more frequent and they're getting worse. And I mean, there's many ways we get into data around that. Before I jump in though, thank you for having me here today, everybody. I appreciate it. I'm glad to be part of this discussion because I love when we bring multiple groups together to have a common core discussion to advance the subject matter. So thank you. Really appreciate that. But yes, it is getting worse. And one of the ways I can hit on that is building off what Chris was just saying, the billion-dollar disaster. That seems like this out there thing. How do you prepare for what do you do? Well, those are happening and they're happening a lot. And they're happening more and more. For example, just this past year we had $14 billion disasters. And the year before that, $17 billion disasters. I mean, these are extraordinary numbers. They're way above the average as they continue to climb. And a lot of them are happening simultaneously. So they're really stressing our systems. They're not just costing a lot of money and lives. But how do you respond when three of them are happening at the same time? So another thing to really call out with that is it's not just the tropical weather and the landfalling hurricanes. They are some of the costliest. The wildfires also way up there. But we've had things come to the level of billion-dollar disaster with hail storms in the middle of the country, producing incredible damage. We hear about the tornado side of it, but the hail is producing a lot of the costly damage around this. Another one was wiping out a peach crop in the southeast where it was so warm, so early. And then this cold front came through. Pretty seasonal one, not that extraordinary. And temperatures dropped. But everything that was already growing just wiped out to the level of billion dollars. And that also gets into food security. So these are happening across the country. No one is immune to them. They are on the rise, and they are getting worse. OK. Well, and so it's not your imagination. It actually is getting worse. And I do think that when we talk to people about climate change, that's one of the ways to do it is to talk about where they live, literally. Because people see this, and they live through the changes. So they know that's happening. But let's talk about what's going to happen. So is that trend line going to continue going up? And are we going to see these kinds of impacts increasing? The trend lines are going up. It's not every year gets more. There's going to be bumps on the road. But when you step back in time and space, they are going up. So we may not have 14 this year in 2019. But over the course of the next five years, we anticipate that to continue rising. And it really, as you said, the local aspect of it is where you break it down. At our organization, we try to take this global issue and make it local on many different levels, because you're talking about disasters are local. Even in climate change, how you feel it, how you experience it, what would prompt you to respond to it is what you experience locally. So one of the things we're trying to do at our organization is really advance this conversation from this is it or is it not happening? That was settled decades ago. That's not really the question. But what does it mean to you? What does it mean to your family? What are people doing about it? And that's the conversation we really need to have. And there is debate within that. That's the real rich conversation that needs to happen. And one of the ways that we try to make things local is, I mean, I focus primarily on some of the extreme weather. We bring in other elements of it too. Or even our everyday weather that's affecting people. But we have a really robust sea level rise program that hits the coast, obviously, a lot more than the middle part of the country. But there are various ways to do this. And the program that I particularly work on is Climate Matters, where we work with TV meteorologists and journalists, really to bringing out these stories. And we produce weekly content on various subject matters across the board on ways this is affecting you from the extremes to the everyday. For example, we'll get into billion-dollar disasters. We get into the extreme hurricanes. We do get into all of that. But also, for St. Patrick's Day, we get into how climate change is affecting some of the key ingredients in beer. And how for Valentine's Day, the risks that we're facing with chocolate, I mean, these are just everyday things that connect with people in different ways in some of the extremes. I saw one of your Climate Matters meteorologists on my local Fox affiliate, much to their surprise and dismay, by the way. But it was talking about the Ellicott City floods. And he was bringing in the issue of climate change. So over the coming decades, as the trend lines get worse, and the science, if anything, is maybe underestimating, has historically been underestimating what the effects and impacts are going to be, what kinds of extreme weather events should we expect to see more of? So it is interesting how the underestimation of it, because scientists, by nature, question things and usually go on the conservative side. And then when you see these mass national climate assessments and this assessment of the IPCC, it is usually erring on the more cautious side because it's this complete assessment of the scientific literature that's out there. So they may include some of the, it's also, I should add, usually about two years, I don't want to say dated because, but there's still research continually coming out by the time we get to the point of a national climate assessment or an IPCC. There's already new information that's learning more and raising some of those projections by the time it comes out. So it is one of the most vetted sciences out there, but it's constantly pushing these boundaries of learning more and learning what that means to us. So looking forward in time, some of the things we can expect are more extreme weather and in the form of these heavy rain events, that's a huge one for this part of the country. More intense wildfires, particularly out west, and it doesn't mean climate change actually caused the wildfire, but it sets the stage and really ups the risk for them. And when you have higher temperatures, it just leads to a lot more explosion and of the land just ready to go up in flames. One of the other ways that, and that brings to something you and I had talked about before is both of those connect in different ways though, but to the hydrologic cycle of water, too much, too little. And that is a way that a lot of people are going to experience climate change. Other things too, heat in general, I mean the easiest connection, but it's pushing some serious boundaries. In the winter, parts of the country like this, sometimes people are okay that their winter temperatures may be rising a little bit. Now that does come with separate implications, but it doesn't come in a bubble. It usually shifts toward the summer where we're getting a lot more heat and that's having huge effects on productivity in the Southeast, our farm workers, our food, our food security. It is also leading to even just everyday things of parents having to rearrange schedules because kids camps are rearranged or practice has shifted tonight. So it goes from the extremes to the everyday that we're really going to see this in these forms of weather, but it's not just weather. I mean this is more than a weather story as we know. It is a national security story. It is a food and water security story. It is also a tourism story. It is an infrastructure story. Our roads are getting beat up even more so and they're a mess. I mean so this infiltrates a lot of parts of our lives. And I wonder if one of the problems isn't just that we're going to see more droughts, more floods, more fires, but also the volatility and the unpredictability of it. That's a problem because as you said, those trends aren't a flat line. In some ways as hard as it is to have those events be more frequent and extreme. If you could predict them, at least you could plan for them, but isn't volatility part of the coming changes? Volatility also moving into new spaces really ups the risks because if you're in Oklahoma and you're used to a tornado season coming in the spring, you're prepared for it. You're attuned to it. But when it starts shifting east and when it starts shifting into other months that you're not used to seeing that, when you think it's just an everyday thunderstorm and you've grown up with those, but it's actually producing tornadoes, that really ups the risk. When you get used to a typical kind of allergy where you live, then all of a sudden your allergies are getting worse. It's because they're moving forward up in elevation and new pollens are coming into new areas. So it is the volatility in many aspects, new locations, new things being introduced. And when you're not prepared for them, then it leaves you really at a high risk. I saw that firsthand. My former colleague and I, Emily Gallagher, were doing a story on volatile weather in the United States and we were in Oklahoma. We went to Oklahoma City and to Tulsa, which Tulsa has one of the highest numbers of disasters in the country, Tulsa County, and that's why we were there. We were not there in tornado season. It was August, that's well outside. But the day that we arrived, an F2 tornado hit Tulsa directly and the city also people believed that tornadoes couldn't hit the city directly, but it did. And of course there was no warning because no one was looking for it. They weren't expecting it. So I saw that firsthand that there are out of pattern events happening and it's much harder to anticipate and prepare. But we expect things to get harder in Oklahoma. It's on the dry line. It's where the nation's weather systems come together. It's always had a lot of disasters. But are there parts of the country that are going to experience this less? I mean, who gets hit by climate change in this country? Well, everyone does, just in a different way. And this is where it comes back to the local. If you're a coast, you're going to deal with rising seas. You're going to deal with more intense coastal flooding more frequently and not just with the big storms, but it's creeping up. Anyone who's been to Annapolis recently, you've got a full moon, that water's up there in the middle of the town. So that's along the coast. But in the middle of the country, again, I shouldn't just broad base it because there's so many aspects. For some of our winter-based economies, winter is the fastest-forming season for a lot of the country. You have whole economic structures and tourism based on that. And that's going away, and it's changing. And just anecdotally, in the Poconos and Pennsylvania, I mean, it's not becoming economically feasible to just operate with snow. So they're bringing in these indoor water parks and really pushing toward summer tourism. Adaptation, right? Yes, and out west, building a lot for summer too. And these are different aspects. I mean, snow is a whole complicated story. We've got different patterns in our snowfall. The Northeast, with some of these Nor'easters, is actually getting some more snow right now. Lake effect, some more snow. But out west, where it's drying out, it's becoming less, and we're seeing some of these rain to snow. So each region is different in how it's getting affected by that. But in Minnesota, where you ice fish, you can't just freeze over lakes. Like, you can create snow in some of these other places. And these are also ways of life. So these are being taken away from people and changing. So that's one thing. Also, winter agriculture. This is one I always try to bring up with people because they think, oh, this is great. It's not as cold. Well, bugs are lasting longer and pests are getting involved. They're going farther north or poleward, I should say. And on top of that, our fruit. This is a prime example. Our fruit, different parts of the country, relies on a certain amount of chill to produce the proper kind of fruit for the next season. And when you're not getting that chill, you just don't get that type of fruit again. So these things don't come in a bubble. They're all connected. And for each season, each part of the country, there really are different experiences that people have to focus on. I know storms have been sort of the science of storms. These are such complicated geophysical systems that I know it's hard. But, and there's always been a lot of controversy over are tropical storms getting more frequent? Are they getting more intense? What we saw with Houston is it was more that there was a lot of moisture in that storm and it sat there, right? Is that the kind of effect that we think we're gonna see going forward? Or is there still some debate over just how much these sort of severe storms? I mean, I think there was just a crazy out of sequence, out of season cyclone, right? Tropical cyclone that shouldn't be happening right now. But are we gonna see these events more frequently and more severe, more precipitation in them? Or is it still not clear exactly how that's gonna look going forward? Well, let's take a line from our friend, Dave Titley. Just because you don't know everything doesn't mean we don't know anything. And what we do know with these storms so far and why you hear it's active research is because the hurricane database really confidently only goes back through the satellite era. So you're talking 1978, 79 to today. And we've got these trends that happen in decadal patterns anyway, and those are natural trends. So to tease out the long term, the longer term I should say warming trend with those variations that are natural it just takes a little bit more data to sue some of it. But we do know certain things already. We do know that with higher seas we're getting higher storm surge and it's going farther inland. We also know there is more rain with these storms. They are bringing more rain. And that is happening across the board. Another couple of things we're seeing in the research is, I mean think about it, this is basic physics but warmer water is what really gives a fuel for these storms and we've got warmer oceans so there's more fuel to work with. So it doesn't mean necessarily that we're going to have more storms but the ones that we're getting are getting worse and it's for those reasons. And with the warmer water there's a thing called rapid intensification. It gets into a specific definition of millibar drops per certain amount of hours but the concept is they explode right off the coast before they make landfall and that again really ups risk because you don't have as much time to prepare in order to evacuate and we are seeing that happen already. So these are things we already know but we'll learn more as we go forward in time. Did you want to say a word about what, how climate central is taking those messages and turning them into products and outreach because I know you guys have a whole suite of, you have some wonderful decision support tools and I don't know if they would be of the kind that the people in the room would use but we certainly use some of your coastal flood decision support tools. Yeah, so what we do, we're a nonprofit, we're an NGO, everything we create is free and available so anyone can use any of this. You can find it on our website. It is climatecentral.org but we have a tab that says Media Library which all of the contents that's created for the program Climate Matters which is weekly material localized to 244 cities across the US. I mean, all of that is freely available for you to use. We also have a very, very robust sea level rise tool that I don't even know if the word tool does it justice. I mean, it's its own functioning ecosystem really with the amount of information it has. Amazing amount of data behind it. It is incredible data as all the 2010 census data so it really dissects on the coastal level when you toggle around how much water we're going to see by what year, how many schools will be underwater, how many roads will be underwater and it is a global program. We don't have that much data. We don't have the census data for the whole world but we do have that as a global product too so I've got all that information. You can come see me and I can help connect you if you want any help. I've got some cards too. Plus we're going to have a demo of our tools coming up on March 14th, just a short while here, about two weeks. If you guys want to participate that it's online and it could be you or anyone in your office is come see me or we can connect with Sharon and we can get you the information so we can walk you through some of those tools. They have potential to be great risk management tools. As I said, we use them for our own research so. And we really tried to, one of the core things of Climate Central is trying to sort of be this scientific body but we translate it to the public because we work with TV meteorologists and journalists and decision makers but it's to get to the general public so it really tries to simplify big subject matters. Using a lot of scientific knowledge. So are any questions or comments from the audience? We have a little bit of time. I know we don't have a whole lot of climate scientists in the room so I wasn't sure we would, yes. And make sure you tell us who you are. I'm Jason Buley with Applied Training Solutions. Just had a question. So over time as the populations are shifting more to the coast and as sea level rises occurring what type of reception are you seeing from coastal populations on the data that you're pushing and how that affects the growth of the cities and is it impacting some of the decisions cities are making about how they're zoning and doing things moving forward? So just to be clear from the beginning we are a non-policy group but we have information and people do come to us for that and a lot of coastal communities do and they're living this and they're seeing it and they're coming to us from all states. They really are. They want the information because they want to ground their decisions in information and fact. So we've been working with a wide range of people from people making those decisions to the NAACP does a ton of work with us with some of the underprivileged communities they're having along the coast. So it's really a wide range of people we're communicating with. It's interesting. I think that's one of the places, Chris was talking about how it's a hyper political issue where the politics sort of goes away in the sense that when you're actually dealing in real time with real effects it doesn't matter if you're a Democrat or a Republican you'll do what you have to do. And so I think what we see is all around the country that communities are taking steps to deal with the nuisance flooding it's called sometimes with the risk from coastal storms. Which is such an interesting work because it's way more than a nuisance. But people have really struggled with a good way to describe that. Sunny day flooding, there's many different ways. Which means there's no storm, there's no surge but you still have water coming into areas where people are going about their day to day business. And this is very common in Miami, in Norfolk, Virginia, right down the road here that these things are becoming the rule, right Nenette? Just from the oceanographer of the Navy. It is common in a number of places. So I think a lot of these communities regardless of their political orientations are taking steps to deal with it. You must see that too. Absolutely, I agree. Right. But I think one of the consequences of not having a federal consensus and a national consensus is that everyone should be dealing with it and taking concrete steps. And not everyone is that should be, so. Hi, Joseph from Nextdoor again. I'm wondering if you have any concrete examples and maybe this is for some of the mapping folks in the room too, but are there organizations using mapping to help people visually understand the risks they face from flooding? I live in Annapolis, I know Compromise Street floods all the time, can't get admission barbecue, my daughter's mad. But if we think about where it's not always known, but the danger is high, has that been used and do we know if that's effective? There are a ton of mapping systems out there for sea level rise. And that is our online tool too, is a map. And so you can go down to your street, you can play around with absolute extreme scenarios to just small scenarios so you see where the water goes and how it comes up. And it often goes to the back base first and works its way up. Doesn't always just come from the front. And there's actually a company here today called Floodmap, so yes, people are doing this. And the question is, can it be actionable in real time for emergency managers? Yes. I'm Dolly Kirschbaum from NASA and working with disaster research. NASA has a ton of data, we have a ton of real time data, we have a ton of visualization capabilities and GIS portals, but this kind of question about translation, about how you make it meaningful to the people on the ground to make actionable decisions or for the communities to understand where their risks are, even what their hazard is in the broader sense. I'm curious how you take data that can look at three dimensional storms over the ocean and translate that to people so that they really understand where they're coming from. Oh, Dolly, we're so glad you're here. Hi. Because that's the question, right? And that's why we're here. And this is something that we work through every day, right? I mean, before I was coming in, I was answering these emails because we put out a weekly climate matters and it's often new topics or there's always some new little wrinkle to it and it's this real conversation, this robust one in our office between the communicators and the scientists where you can push and where you can't because everything will be solidly grounded in science that we do, but we wanna break it down as simply as possible. So what you guys have that no one else has is the absolute cool factor that sometimes just grabs people's attention and then you can work from there. I mean, we have to create some cool factors with data sometimes and we do it since we mass produce for local data for all these cities. Sometimes we can't as many bells and whistles and animation as we would like to based on our resources, but you never know with big grants, maybe someday. But what we try to do is meet people where they are and that's why we try to, I mean, my background is science and media. I mean, we're not gonna put something out about heat in January. I mean, we might talk about not as cold of a winter, but that's just not, no one really wants to, it's not gonna connect with people at that time. I mean, there have been many different analyses that we've had ready to go that we polled because it's just, it's not gonna resonate at that point. So we wanna connect with people where they are, whether it's a subject matter or, I mean, we connect with sports all the time too, just things where people are already thinking and we can add that science and bring something out out of it. I mean, with when the polar vortex came through, you know, we switched one of our analyses to the coldest cold temperature. Now again, I'm not going to say minus 20 is not cold in Chicago, it is. But it's really interesting when you look at the coldest cold for all these cities, it's just not as cold as it used to be. Minneapolis, the coldest cold has gone up at 13 to 15 degrees in the past 15 years, 50 years. Chicago has gone up almost 10. So everyone was just plastered across the lake with the shots of it, maybe hitting 23, which would match the all-time low. And it did hit a daily low temperature, but five days later, it hit a warm record temperature and everyone was gone, but that happens all the time. So it's not news right now. So this is like where we try to connect with things that are happening in ways, try to make them come alive with pictures, but also with the subject itself. And it's certainly, our research is more focused on the link between resources and conflict, but we're almost obsessed with that question. Thank you, Denise Ross, of user-centered design and front-ends that are actually actionable for practitioners who need to know that data in order to use it. So we'd love to talk to you more about that, and that is definitely a theme of why we're here. With that, we're ready to transition to our next discussion. So if you would please, join me in thanking Bernadette. Just thrilled to have her here. Thank you. Thank you. Now I get to leave the stage and turn things over to Sarah Thunberg, who is the CEO of Geospisa. Is that how you say it? Okay, I wanted to make sure I was pronouncing it correctly. Sarah's gonna introduce our next speaker, and thank you for taking over. Fantastic, hello. Thanks everybody for having me. So we're gonna transition a little bit from the sort of broader context of emergency management and then climate and talk about people who are historically underrepresented or marginalized or otherwise underserved within our emergency management program and go a little bit more specific and talk about people with disabilities. And we have Linda, are you coming up to join us? Fabulous, come on up. Who is the director of the Office, FEMA's Office of Disability Integration and Inclusion? I did it wrong, she's gonna tell us. Can I scooch that? Well, thank you for joining us. So a little bit of background for the context of our conversation is I come at this from a social work and social justice perspective, and I have a tech company that's really oriented around how we understand community vulnerability and population-based vulnerability in the context of disaster and resilience. And so I'm gonna ask Linda some questions about and have her share with us, her experience within FEMA and what FEMA's doing around inclusion whole broad around resilience because of the new effort and the strategic plan, and then more specifically around engaging and meeting the needs of people with disabilities. So welcome, tell us about you and what your office is working on. Sure, so again my name is Linda Mistandria and I'm the director of the Office of Disability Integration and Coordination at FEMA. I've held that position since Labor Day of 2017, smack in the middle of the biggest hurricane season that we've had in a while. And the office basically works in concert with FEMA's priorities with the strategic initiatives of the organization. When you look at the overall FEMA mission, it's to help people before, during, and after disasters. And the strategic goals that we've set out over the last year or so are building, oh my goodness, now I'm gonna blank on our strategic priorities, goodness, readying the nation for catastrophic disasters, building capacity, and personal preparedness. And well, personal preparedness of course is part of that, and that's part of building capacity. And the third one will come to me, oh my goodness, I'm just drawing this huge blank right now. But anyway, in terms of what my office does to sort of overall fit into the scheme of FEMA's work, is we're overall responsible for ensuring that our programs, policies, and procedures are accessible to and available for people with disabilities across the enterprise. And we do that really in three different ways. There's headquarters initiatives, regional initiatives, and in the field. So at headquarters, what we're really working to do is to embed disability integration competency across all of the programs, the program areas within FEMA to ensure that disability isn't just kind of warehouse over there in that office, but that everyone is thinking about their responsibilities relative to people with disabilities. And so that's kind of the headquarters initiative, and we actually detailed folks to the Office of Equal Rights, to individual assistance and mass care, to individual assistance to work on housing initiatives. And most recently, we've detailed somebody to the Office of Response and Recovery to work with the associate administrator there. And so, and we're finding that in this way, we're better able to get the whole, you know, the organization as a whole to again understand their sort of obligation to unresponsibility for people with disabilities as part of the whole community of people that we're serving relative to disasters, right? So that's kind of at the headquarters level initiative. And in the regions, we have folks who are called regional disability integration specialists. Right now, we have one per federal region. So that's 10 people across the country who are really working on that building capacity piece. So they're engaging emergency managers and disability non-governmental organizations, bringing them to the table together so that, you know, we often hear that, you know, people with disabilities are left behind, they're not planned for, not prepared for, not considered. So the regional disability integration specialist really is charged with bridging those gaps, getting the emergency managers and disability organizations together to the table so that they can plan and prepare and train and exercise and bridge those gaps and ensure that people with disabilities at the local level are being served. And then finally in the field, of course, you know, FEMA is largely dependent on a deployable cadre of folks who serve in active disasters. My office has what are called disability integration advisors who were placed in all the active disasters over the last year and who there do a couple of things. They really serve as senior advisors to field leadership to ensure, again, that as programs and services are implemented at that disaster level, that people with disabilities and the needs in that particular community are being considered and planned for and executed against. What I, one of the things I hear you saying in that is this sort of engagement on a really grassroots level. This having capacity building in the regions and in the local way that's not just, oh, we're other over here and we're worried about ourselves, but let's be really engaged, let's really strategize together this idea that if you meet each other in a disaster it's way too late is now really being incorporated into your office and your plan. Can you talk a little bit about how that looks on the personal preparedness side too? How do we engage disability advocates, disability individuals with disabilities, the organizations that provide services or advocate on their behalf to really engage in meaningful preparedness when in lots of times people with disabilities have low incomes or have fixed incomes that make it hard to do the things like buy insurance or have three months of cash on hand. How do we democratize that and do it in a way that's empowering to people? Yeah, so that's a great question and there's a couple of things really that are going on here as probably everyone in the room knows like most people can't put their hands on four or $500 right in the event of an emergency and people with disabilities are certainly especially impacted by the lack of capacity to have access to meaningful funds to do anything with but part of what is happening really at the regional and local level because that's really where it has to begin, right? We can say all kinds of things at the national and headquarters level but where disaster happens is local, right? So where personal preparedness has to happen is at the local level. And yes, it'd be great if we could say, all right everybody you got a stockpile $500, right? And a lot of people can't do that. We can say you have to buy insurance. Well, okay so I'm gonna pay my rent or I'm gonna buy insurance, right? So we are living in a time where people are making very difficult daily life decisions, right? On how to move forward and best prepare themselves. But part of I think what's being particularly effective right now is that we're seeing a lot of engagement from disability advocacy organizations again at the grassroots local level where they're doing a lot of training and training and education and outreach and really helping FEMA sort of and the emergency management community as a whole sort of get that message out there that preparedness is not only about FEMA showing up after a disaster but it's about everybody taking responsibility for themselves at whatever level you're able, right? If you can't get your hands on $500 maybe it's putting away $5 a week or 10 or whatever and saving a few extra bags or cans of food or that kind of thing, right? But back to the sort of engagement of disability advocacy organizations I think they play a vital role in doing a lot of again the training education and outreach. There's a lot of what are called centers for independent living which are nonprofit organizations found in every state across the nation that have really been at the forefront of a lot of this outreach to reach into their communities and prepare people and doing a lot of engagement and trying to reach out to emergency managers as well and starting to serve as that bridge like I mentioned that are regional disability integration specialists are helping to do and is it a perfect solution? No, but I think the more educated and aware people get and the more they understand that they have a role that emergency responders aren't gonna show up at minute five, right? And that you may have to be on your own for a few days and people really have to sort of take stock of their own situation like me. Would I need extra tires if I was gonna be stuck or if my wheelchair floated down the street? Like, what's my backup plan, right? So we all have to be thinking about those things individually. No one can tell anybody individually how to do that because our circumstances are unique and our needs are unique, right? So, but I think that education and outreach pieces is crucial because it's just making people think about it. It's not giving you the answers, it's giving you the tools to think about what do I need to do to advance myself and the other piece I'd just like to add in terms of the role that disability advocacy organizations can play relative to improving emergency management for people with disabilities, I think the role is really shining a light on some of the gaps, right? And giving emergency managers some awareness on things that they may just not be clued into, right? I don't think that there's ever sort of intentional disregard. I think that people don't know what they don't know, right? And so the advocacy organizations, when they're able to shine a light on issues and open the door to conversation, I think that's where problems can get solved. I think there's a really unique opportunity. We have people from Uber and Nextdoor and all kinds of private sector partners as well as people from government side. What are some of those gaps and how this opportunity to sort of shine a light on it and get people to be thinking about it and talking about it in their own world? What would you say people should be thinking about the gaps? I mean, I think preparedness messaging, I think like early warnings, right? And how messages are communicated when an event is coming, when you've got a no notice event, when you've got a hurricane coming in three to five days, like how are you communicating with people with disabilities in your jurisdictions? And with technology, we have so many ways now. And I think there's just endless room for creativity to include and improve upon how we message and communicate with folks. I think one of the gaps continues to be sort of, around evacuation and sheltering, right? And I think that, again, there's sort of a two-way relationship here, right? So emergency managers need to really get into understanding their community, right? As we said, it happens at the local level. So you can have this sort of high level, oh, we know that 20% of the people in the United States have a disability, which is meaningless when it gets down to the neighborhood level, right? You may have 25 or 30% or 50%, and you have no idea. So I think it's really important to get at what's happening on your streets and in your community so that you can effectively meet the needs. And again, I think that with technology and data collection, I think there's just like wide open possibilities to improve how we serve people. And then again, just going back to where I began with communication and relationship building. So before I came to FEMA, I spent 20-something years as a disability lawyer. And then came to FEMA by way of doing some work on educating emergency managers and their responsibilities under the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act. And in those conversations, I can tell you that universally where things went south was that people didn't know what they didn't know and they didn't know how to communicate with people to sit down at the table and to understand each other's needs. What the emergency manager needed to do and what the disability organizations and people with disabilities needed, right? And so, and that's really at the end of the day what leads to litigation. It's a failure to communicate and understand what each other needs. And so I'm gonna circle it back to the point of the programs and services that we're offering is to bridge those gaps and get people together and get them talking so that we can solve these problems and come up with creative solutions. I think we don't have to be in the old school ways of doing things. There's just so much opportunity when you get creative minds together. And people with disabilities most often are the ones who best know how their needs can be met, right? Which means they absolutely must be at the table. Sure, this brings up for me. I recently was at a meeting where someone presented a new idea of how we define vulnerability around community resilience and this idea that we talk a lot about vulnerable populations, vulnerable communities and we sort of put it on them and they created, I wish I had a slide of it, a diagram that was on one side of a cliff, the community and on the other side, the sort of government services. And vulnerability is the bridge between them and is that bridge, as it gets sort of shakier and more fragmented, vulnerability increases. Do you, that's sort of a weird description. Does that resonate with you a little bit? This idea that the communication piece can reduce the vulnerability and that maybe vulnerability is something that exists in the system rather than in an individual or in a community but that it's the lack of communication and lack of meeting each other's needs. So I think, I mean it does resonate but I'm gonna step it back a little bit because when you look at the term vulnerable, right? It's like you, generally we're looking at people with disabilities, elderly, kids, low income. I mean there's sort of you can tack that onto the access and functional needs definition, right? But step it back again and look at what happens in a disaster. Who's not vulnerable, right? So to me it's a little bit arbitrary when you pull out these definitions and segment a population because everyone in a disaster has needs. Mine are different than yours and then yours and then yours. They're not more or less or worse or better or special. They're just different needs, right? And I would encourage us to get away from thinking about vulnerability altogether because all of us are vulnerable in disasters. And I think if you look at FEMA's approach to kind of looking at that, at how we serve folks in a disaster and you look at sort of the lifelines concept that's been implemented, right? And it recognizes the interdependency of the lifelines, right? From health and medical services and social services and communities and hazards and everything else. And it's sort of the interconnectedness of these lifelines. And I think, and everyone probably has some impact in the context of these lifelines, right? And so to me it's looking at how can we recognize that everyone has individual needs in the context of disaster, but how do we create a framework that in a large enough way that can address those individual needs in a global way? Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. I think another thing that's interesting and something I've read a lot about your work is that we focus a lot in this conversation today has been really focused on response, the sort of very narrow gap in time. But we've seen new research that is for every dollar we spend on mitigation or preparedness, we get $6 to $8 in response and recovery savings. That's like venture backed level savings, huge. Can you talk a little bit about how we can do better for people with disabilities or people with access and functional needs, mostly people with disabilities on that mitigation side? And what's your office doing around not just response, but mitigation and preparedness and doing better to enhance the resilience so people are stronger when the thing happens? That's a great question and it is true that I don't have a statistic in hand to talk about like dollars saved when you invest in people with disabilities, but I'll use the one and six, right? I think that similarly, when you think about resilient communities, to me a resilient community is an accessible community, accessible for everyone who lives there. It's universally designed and equally available for somebody using a wheelchair or a scooter or a parent with a stroller or somebody using a walker or running the gamut. And if we think about as we create our communities, and this is like from brand new or rebuilding after disaster, I think if we look at that whole continuum of people who are gonna live there instead of the way we currently focus, right? We look at building, we build furniture for an average person, right? We build doorways for an average person and plane seats for this average person, right? And we don't fully appreciate and recognize this whole spectrum and continuum of people who use a space and live and interact in a space. And so I think if we can sort of create this mind shift and look at accessibility and universal design as part of a resilient strategy and look at how we are building our communities, right? And again, this is not just post disaster recovery, rebuilding, I'm talking about as urban planners and as designers and as architects, what are we doing with our space right now to ensure that people of across the spectrum can live and play and work in those spaces? And I think if we do that on the front end, then we avoid a lot of the problems on the back end. And if you look at like, for example, one of the biggest expenditures post disaster for people with disabilities is housing, right? They are the people longest in the transitional sheltering, longest staying in the hotels, longest in the MHUs, right? And so, but if people have accessible housing that's built to withstand storms and floods, you know, hurricanes and earthquakes and they can get back into that housing, you cut out that expense on the back end. And does that also then, that feels like we should build more accessible communities and accessible housing full stop from the beginning and then we'll have a greater stock of it. This problem of having, oh, we only have 2% of our housing is fully accessible. Maybe that's a mitigation investment for community resilience. Exactly. Interesting. So since we're talking a lot about technology today to borrow a question from earlier, if you had a technology magic wand and you could have technology, I like this. Yeah, help you in your job or provide some solutions. What would some of those magic wand items be? What would you love to conjure on a Harry Potter? Wow, that's a great question. I don't know that I have any answers, but I think for me some of the things that would make the universe that I live and work in a little bit easier is more development and collaboration with disability organizations to develop better ways to communicate with people who are deaf, with people who are blind. I mean, I've seen lots of things happening like in airports, for example, way-finding apps for people who are blind to navigate an airport. Like, why can't we do that on a larger scale so that if a community is flattened like paradise, you've got some mechanism to help somebody get to a shelter or get to services or, you know. So I think that's one thing. I think, you know, in my technology magic wand universe that we're creating here, I think it would be really great to have, you know, as much smart technology in homes as possible to, again, because you think about enabling people to age in place, to live as independently as possible for as long as possible. If, again, we start from the premise that building excessively and in a universally designed manner, right, that allows that to happen, you look at the technologies that, you know, that with a smart home to enable you to open the door to see who's at the door, to open and close your fridge, to operate your appliances, right? Somebody who has no muscular capacity or dexterity can live independently, you know, in large measure, right? And so I think further refining and developing those tools and making them affordable, that's the key, right? Because it goes back to the issue we talked about where a lot of folks with disabilities, you know, are not on the higher end of the economic spectrum and cannot spend the, you know, $100,000 to retrofit their kitchen and make it usable, right? So thinking about a way to open these opportunities up more to the masses and make them more readily available, I think would be amazing. Sure, sounds like there's a really nice technology accelerator idea there. Let's get some people with some interesting ideas in and really push them forward. Can one of the things that's also coming out of this meeting is an idea around some policy recommendations or some things we should be thinking about and advocating for. So as a disability advocate, a lifelong disability advocate and now someone who's really deeply engaged in emergency management, how do those things come together and what policy changes should we be looking towards or advocating for? That's a great question. And I'll start with one of the things that we actually got accomplished since I've been in office. As probably most of you in the room are aware when a disaster hits and people apply for FEMA assistance, there's what's called a maximum grant eligibility and it's at $34,000 in change right now, right? And so now let's go back to the story of a person with a disability. So let's say I have a house and my house, the roof blows off my house. But in addition to the roof blowing off my house, my $10,000 ramp to my front door is destroyed, right? So now I am eligible for up to that maximum grant of $34,000 in change. If that ramp takes $10,000 to fix or to replace, now I'm stuck with the $20,000 whatever to fix my roof and the inside of my house, in essence, putting me behind what a person without a disability would be able to do, right? In terms of recovery based on my need for accessibility features. So in the Disaster Recovery Reform Act, we got two key provisions inserted, one of which excludes accessibility related repairs and improvements to real property from the max grant cap and the other which excludes personal property like wheelchairs, scooters, durable medical equipment. Durable medical equipment of all kinds, hearing aids, prosthetics, shower chairs, stair lifts, all of that from that $34,000 in change cap. So in essence, we've created what we're calling purchase parity, right? And really leveling the playing field for people with disabilities to be able to recover from disasters. And of course we recognize $34,000 is not gonna repair someone's home or replace it, but this at least gives people with disabilities a small step ahead in terms of recovery and leveling the playing field. So I'm really proud of that accomplishment. I think the devil of course is in the details and how it gets implemented going forward, but there's a working group working on that right now and I'm very excited to see what comes out of it and the real concrete benefits to people with disabilities and their ability to recover. So that is one key thing. And I think going forward as well, again, I think the policy changes that I would like to see are really focused. I think the individual assistance program side of FEMA's house is pretty well in hand in terms of the assistance that's provided. But, and so my office has very much focused over the last year in paying attention to public assistance. And again, accessible rebuilding of communities because I think that's where the biggest bang for the buck if you will is gonna happen. Because if you spend all this money and give somebody a new wheelchair and a ramp to their house and whatever, but you rebuild an entirely flanned community in an inaccessible manner, what have you done? Who have you helped? And so by investing our resources on the public assistance side of the house and really impacting that accessible design and rebuild, I think we can really positively impact not only life for people with disabilities, but society as a whole going forward. Do you think that idea that you're talking about then requires, it's bringing up for me this idea that we need to bring the climate action advocates and the city planners and the sort of more robust, bigger community around how we do these things and engage them in the conversation with disability advocacy. So as we're doing things like figuring out how to build so we're less at risk from high water or all of these other things we see coming from climate change, having a disability advocate at the table to say, hey, from our perspective, here's some things that would make this just better for everyone. And how would you do that? Yeah, I think so I think that is key. I think that, again, I'm gonna go back to one of my first comments and how we're looking at framing my office generally, which is that disability competency needs to be integrated across all program areas. So I think it's vital to have people with disabilities, disability organizations, or people with disability expertise at the table with all of these kinds of individuals that you've mentioned to ensure that those needs are identified and articulated, planned and prepared for. Because again, I'm gonna go back to what I said, people don't know what they don't know, right? And if it's not in your frame of reference, you're not necessarily thinking about it. You know, and I'll use an example, like think about when a coastline is devastated by a hurricane and all the houses are destroyed, right? Or damaged. And what's the first thing they tell people who are rebuilding a house on a hurricane damaged coastline? What do you have to do with it? Elevate it. Elevate it, okay. So I elevate my house 10 feet or 15 feet or whatever. What am I gonna do now, right? And if I get a lift to my house, I can get in my house, but can I get in your house, my neighbor? Or your house, my neighbor? Or the place down the street, right? So this rule that's intended to be useful and beneficial has an unintended consequence of isolating and segregating people with disabilities, right? And so those are the kind of things that we have to be thinking about the larger impact as we're implementing these measures. Well, and I would imagine then there's this cascading consequence effect of we put in a lift or an elevator, then you're dependent on the power grid, then when the power grid goes out, now you're isolated either in your house or out of your house, either of those being a terrible place to be in a hurricane, all of these sort of cascading things where I think it's hard sometimes to have a perspective of, oh, that seems like a great idea without not knowing what you don't know and having all the people at the table. I'm in a time check. Good conversation, so I lost track. All right, we have five minutes left, so let's open it up for some questions. Sean? Linda, thank you so much for being here, first of all. So you mentioned public assistance, which is limited to public agencies rebuilding public infrastructure. Has FEMA given thought, for example, if we wanted to couple with investment from an investor-owned utility to build a microgrid so that the concern that Sarah just raised to ensure you have reliable power if there is a bulk-level power incident, how is FEMA working with the private sector to couple public assistance dollars with private investment to ensure there's this confluence of resilience improvement from the whole community? Right, and that's a great question, and I can speak to the piece of that that I know, which is that we are engaging with a private sector committee of private sector partners to begin to address those solutions. Now, I don't have within my office, per se, a private sector committee, but those are the kind of things that we would bring to that group to start to address and bring these kind of issues and questions and problems to them to start putting resource on. Well, maybe some of us in this room will join your in-office private sector committee. We should have a conversation. Yeah, absolutely. I think that Sean, your idea, Sean and I had a long conversation yesterday about creating sort of resilient community enclaves. Is that your language? And this idea that in doing so, whether it's through microgrids or fully universally accessible construction that's really thoughtful and multi-sourced, we have an opportunity to leverage huge amounts of recovery dollars to make things better and avoid lots of these. So I think that this is a really interesting framework that we can consider for the rest of what we're talking about today and how we use technology in that aspect. So thanks, Sean. Other questions? Yes, sir. I mostly had a comment and Marcus Hendrick's professor of urban studies and planning at the University of Maryland. I just sort of wanted to make a comment about the topic of redefining vulnerability, right? And I wanted to caution us in terms of as we redefine vulnerability to not be dismissive of sort of over 30 years of corroborated evidence that in fact, there are certain individuals and groups that are more vulnerable than others, right? And are at a significant disadvantage. And so as I agree that we are all on some spectrum of vulnerability, the differences between the levels of vulnerability are incredibly significant and meaningful and ought to be taken into consideration in a way that we plan for those highly vulnerable communities, right? And so it was, I just wanna make sure that we again acknowledge those differences as meaningful differences. And also the second point I wanted to make is that I want us to sort of flip the lens in terms of how we think about vulnerability. We usually use these sort of secondary indicators of race gender class. And I think those things sort of work on a high level in terms of being able to identify certain individuals or groups, but in terms of the people in this room or the year in government or private sector, really thinking about what is our role in our agency's role in contributing to vulnerable communities, right? In terms of how we're planning, how we're zoning, what technology and private sector resources are available to support these communities, right? Because I don't think they're inherently vulnerable. In fact, they're the opposite. They're inherently resilient, but through systematic and structural barriers, place these groups in these vulnerable situations and so. I think there's a really interesting piece there that is hard to acknowledge within emergency management, which is that historically, we've been a most for the most field. We come in in that first response phase and we provide the resources that meet the needs of sort of in a standard curve, this bit. Maybe the people who don't even need them that much and then we leave out this bottom, really especially vulnerable, or maybe they're not actually vulnerable, but they're historically marginalized, underrepresented, underserved, that we have those structural barriers, whether it's historic racism and structural racism, gender inequality, incredible amounts of underserving of the disability community. All of those things really come to play. It's uncomfortable and it's awkward to say that's where we talk about vulnerability communities, but really we have systematic inequality and systematic systems that disenfranchise people all the time and then it magnifies hugely in disasters. Sorry. I think that's what you're saying also. Yeah, so thumbs up, I think. On board. I don't know that I have anything. I can top that with, I would agree, I think maybe we would just circle back to the point that I was trying to make in terms of over-categorizing individuals as vulnerable when we have individual needs, right? And then sort of you create a framework that doesn't allow for individual needs by using that terminology, but I absolutely take your point and agree with it. In the back blue suit, yeah. Good morning and so you mentioned, for instance, the Paradise Fire and in my last position, I was actually working in California and one of the things that we found were a lot of those rural areas that were most affected by disasters were not getting rebuilt because at the end of the day, the economics of the situation where places like San Francisco, Sacramento, et cetera had so much economic growth that they were pulling the construction companies and things of that nature to them. That's just where it was better to do business. So having said that, how do you see FEMA playing, making rural communities more resilient and the unique aspects of recovery in the rural areas that are economically so far behind some of these other areas that get rebuilt overnight, almost? And that's a great question and I am certain I don't have a good answer for you. I think I can speak to kind of the work around serving folks with disabilities in rural areas, right? Which is equally as challenging, right? When the infrastructure is gone and transit systems don't exist and healthcare is gone and people can't leave their homes. But I do think that one of the focuses of the administrator has been really leaning on the pre-disaster mitigation, right? And really looking at like, what is it that you need to do to shore up these areas? Like, I mean, if we look at Puerto Rico, right? The areas that are still mostly heavily impacted are those rural areas, right? In the mountains that are sort of on the fringes of the grid, if you will, or even if they were ever on it, right? And so how do you accommodate that? And it's not a problem that I can answer in a 20-second answer. I think that we are definitely aware of it and in terms of people with disabilities living in and wanting to return to rural areas it's something that my office is very much looking at. And I will say that interestingly, even in the farthest flung rural areas, there are centers for independent living, protection and advocacy agencies and some of the organizations that I've talked about who are serving those areas. And so identifying those folks and creating those partnerships and linkages to at least figure out how do you serve, right? And I think going back to what we talked about sort of leveraging who can we partner with and what are the technologies available and what can we, you know, like one of the initiatives that they're looking at in the, with one of my colleagues in Puerto Rico they're really looking at investing in telemedicine, right? To reach some of the folks in the farthest flung areas who don't have a car anymore and they don't maybe still don't have a road, right? To get to a doctor. So then, you know, there's the question of the network and right, what do you do with all of that? But so I think there's a lot of factors to consider but I think, you know, with great minds like those in this room I think that some solutions can come in and, you know, I would love to, you know, encourage folks to get engaged with the private sector groups and the others at FEMA to discuss some of these things more. Absolutely. Yes. I thank you for your comments. My name's Austin Lloyd. I'm an anthropologist at Cornell University. I've done research in Nepal and I worked on one project called Disaster Disability and Difference for UNDP which focused on intersectional issues of disability in the post-earthquake context. I just had a quick question for you, sort of building on what the professor from in the corner of the room's asked. Have you had any, what kind of, I guess, what kind of actions or what kind of conversations or dialogues is FEMA initiating on the international scale? Are you making any efforts to share information or learn from sort of other issues of disability in other contexts? Sort of a similar question I was going to ask for on climate change as well. If communication and awareness and outreach is so important, are there lessons that can be learned from how outreach is being done in other contexts? Thank you. So that's a great question and I will say that my office in particular has not really engaged internationally. FEMA as a body, you know, does engage internationally and have folks coming in. I can tell you that, you know, I have encouraged us that when we bring in international groups that we do look at bringing folks in who are working on disability issues in terms of disaster and response and resilience. But because that is not directly housed in my office and, you know, with an organization of 21,000 people, it's hard to keep all the pieces in play. But I do believe that there, you know, there are a lot of lessons to be learned from folks and in terms of me personally, I, in my volunteer world, I sit on the International Paralympic Committee's Legal and Ethics Committee and get to go to the Paralympic Games which follow the Olympic Games. But anyway, the point in that is one of the things that's become a huge topic of discussion of course is emergency preparedness in the context of large scale, you know, sporting and athletic events and, you know, when you're housing three to 5,000 or 10,000 athletes and in particular with Paralympic Games, housing, you know, that many athletes with disabilities and, you know, increasing the complexity of the situation. And so we were starting to look at that when my term ended, unfortunately, but I think there will be more to come, you know, on that and I would love to talk with you further. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much. Really helpful. Join me in thanking Linda for all of her great perspective. Thanks for having me. Thanks. Simone Rios is a reporter for WBUR Boston and we first met Simone when we were reporting on our Weather Eye project when we were looking at all those billion dollar disasters and where they happen and we found that folks in the Boston area were surprised that that's one of the places it was happening. And we met you then and then we're so impressed with our conversations with you that we gave you a writing award and you wrote a couple of articles that we've promoted through our means. So I was just so thrilled that you could come today, a wonderful reporter and tell great stories about disasters to join us in conversation with Amanda. Is she here? Oh, there you are. I'm looking all around the room with Amanda Ripley. Simone, why don't you go ahead and sit down and Amanda, have a seat and then I'm gonna hand this off to you. So Amanda Ripley, of course, was a New America fellow and that's the most important thing ever, but also is a great writer, is currently a writer for The Atlantic, but wrote a bestseller called The Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got That Way and also a wonderful book called The Unthinkable, which is about disasters and how people react to them. So she's a phenomenal storyteller, a great writer and part of the New America family, whether you like it or not and we're very delighted you could be here. Simone? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. So I'll start with a little anecdote of my own. I was reading part of Amanda's book, The Unthinkable, which deals with how people behave in times of grave crisis and catastrophe. I was reading it on the airplane and as people know, it was very windy day yesterday and it was a little bit disconcerting reading about plane crashes, but I was also able to gain some insight on how I might deal with that through breathing. Yeah, combat breathing. You did it, right? You were like, breathe in, four, hold four, out four, hold. Yeah, that book actually sold really well at airports. I thought it would go the other way. I was sort of surprised, but it's relevant because it has to do with what people fear most, right? People fear plane crashes way out of proportion, obviously, to the risk and so they're interested in plane crash, but I'm glad you got here safely. More to the point. Likewise, but you live here, so. Tell me about, so you are currently at the Atlantic, but you were previously at time and you had a beat on disasters, actually. How did that come about and how did it lead you to write a book? It sort of happened by accident. I was just covering 9-11 and then the anthrax attacks and then the DC sniper and then soon I was like, wow, I'm just covering disaster after disaster after disaster, Hurricane Katrina and Rita and so it wasn't on purpose. I wish it were. I wish there were more disaster beats for journalists because what you start to realize is that we do the same three categories of stories over and over about disasters and they're not particularly helpful or that interesting often. So there are either stories about heroes, individual heroes or stories about victims or stories about perpetrators, right? Like who's to blame for this disaster? This is in reaction to a disaster. So then you start to notice that the survivors of disasters have really interesting, surprising stories to tell you that are actionable, that are not making their way into many emergency plans and the policy conversations. So once you, I mean, I was fortunate in the sense that I sort of could make that connection because I was talking to people from plane crash survivors to terrorism survivors to hurricane evacuees and they all, there was things that they wished they had known, right? And that they wanted to tell you. So we started doing more stories like that which was also just helpful psychologically. Like you can't just keep covering, I couldn't keep covering stories of despair and sorrow and doing justice to those stories. Like you really have to feel those stories I think to write them well and after a while you become numb to it. Like you just can't keep doing that. And so do readers, right? So does the public. So doing it a little bit differently and trying to learn from the survivors was actually much more interesting and also sustainable over time. You realize nobody had actually written a book on that topic and so you decided to go all in? Yeah, most of my books I do in order to stay sane. Like it's a way for me to cope with because like I said I couldn't just keep writing these like tragedy stories. Although we have to write those and those are important. I don't mean to be glib about it but this was a way to say okay, how does the brain actually behave in this situation and what can we learn? And give people some sense of agency which is what's really missing. Yeah, one of the interesting questions that arises is that of denial. How people in certain people in certain situations will pretend or behave as if what's happening all around them like the Twin Towers coming down. They'll behave in a way as if that's not actually happening and you refer to that as sort of a coping mechanism or a survival mechanism. And in the context of this conference your book wasn't about climate change per se but in the context of what we're discussing here. I'm interested to hear how that question of denial relates or doesn't relate to this notion of climate change denial. Yeah, I mean I actually think it's most people who will react with disbelief in a disaster and not just some people. Like I think it's most of us and there are good reasons for that unless you've trained for it, right? So I mean I think there's a lot going on with climate change because it's been politicized obviously in the United States so that kind of tweaks it in a way that distorts it. On the other hand, certainly the way it's been covered I think also encourages us to sort of operate in denial. So I don't mean denying that climate change is real. I mean living day to day and just not thinking about it which is much more common, right? Like most Americans actually do think the US should do more about climate change, Democrats and Republicans. What's more common is like the just like paralysis, right? Not doing very much. So I think the way it's covered just like with other disasters and especially terrorism disempowers people, makes people feel frightened and hopeless and so there's a huge amount of research on how that is a recipe for inaction. Like people will tune out and get frustrated. So I think journalists, many journalists not all have really done a disservice and in their good intentions have actually led to inaction and a feeling of fatalism in the public by the way they're covering it. Yeah, I'll put that on the editors. Yeah, editors are great. Some of it's definitely on the editors, yeah, yeah. So I'd be interested to hear in that context like an example of somebody who actually got it right. Somebody who does the story in a way where it doesn't cause that sense of paralysis. Any examples? So you're saying don't be so fatalistic, Amanda. Like give me an example. No, that's great. So I was actually reading a really good interview with a journalist named Elizabeth Arnold who was from Alaska and she is, I just think really good at articulating this. If you Google her and climate change, you could find it. But she, Elizabeth Arnold was from Alaska and had covered different parts of the climate change story, had also worked for NPR in DC and sort of could see the national coverage and could see it as a local. And about 10 years ago, she wrote a story about a community close to the Arctic Circle that was literally dissolving into the sea and it was very sad and disturbing and important piece. And then over the next decade, she watched all kinds of international and national reporters fly in and do the same story. Like over and over and over. And no one really covered nine miles away across the water. The community was built, the people were building a new community. And people didn't write that story. That wasn't the story they wanted to tell. That's not the story they had pitched to their editors or their editors had told them to write. And so they were missing this really important piece. So it was important, right, that this community was sliding into the sea and schools and houses were literally being lost. But it was also important that people were not just waiting for someone to like miraculously save them. Like people in this community were trying to create a solution and it was hard and there were setbacks and it remains difficult. But that's a much better and more interesting story if you look at both those things at once and gives people a sense that this is not like immutable necessarily. One of the characters that stuck with me in your book is this J.P. Morgan security officer. This kind of bull neck like a Vietnam veteran I believe, born in England. And that he really, when 9-11 happened, right, he, or was it 9-11? Yeah, it was 9-11, the brick or squirrel, yeah. Right, and so there, he was there for the 1993 attack. Right. And then through that and he really took issue with the Port Authority and their safety protocols. And when 9-11 happened, he took charge and apparently saved a lot of people's lives because of his own direction. If we could translate that to the climate discussion. I mean, it's a much broader case, right? We're not talking about one building, we're talking about the whole world. Is it gonna take some kind of charismatic figure or is it more of a solution of curriculum, curricula in the schools? What's it gonna take to really get people to act on this issue? Yeah, I mean, I think that it's a lot like the terrorism threat in the sense that you need to, you need to help people feel like they have agency, right? Like, you know, I used to get really frustrated because every time someone would thwart a terrorist attack, like maybe on a plane, like they passenger would tackle, some would be hapless terrorists. There'd be all this coverage about this heroic guy and he was gonna be amazing and he'd be like on Jimmy Fallon and he'd be like, oh, I don't feel like a hero, whatever. And then you do it again, like six months later. And in fact, the story is that regular people will step up and take action, right? Particularly when they feel empowered. The most disempowering experience in America is going through TSA and getting on a plane, right? Like this is not an empowering experience. So what's interesting is why there are still some people who will stand up and take action. And so the story is, yeah, you can start zoomed in on one individual who's impressive, but then you have to zoom out and that's where I think we could do a better job, right? Is to zoom out and say, you know, all nine times out of 10, it's regular people who take action in all kinds of threats and it's regular people who have creative ideas about solutions and they don't tend to all sit around waiting for someone to save the day or for government to save the day. So I think, you know, people are capable of that, which is what Rick Rascorla understood. So Rick Rascorla, what he did was he realized that Morgan Stanley was like a small village in the clouds. You know, they had 22 floors of tower two. So he realized it was a threat. He realized that they couldn't wait for first responders and he assumed that the towers would be attacked again. So what he did was that he deputized all his people. So all Morgan Stanley employees had to do regular surprise mandatory fire drills in which you had to actually go down some stairs. Now let me just tell you having been working at the Time Warner building, the Timing Building in New York City and Rockefeller Center at that time, we never went down the stairs. We were told to muster by the elevators and wait for instruction, right? And you're still, this is still standard in most places for lots of reasons that we could debate, but like the point is Rick did not listen to that and he empowered his people to go into the stairs. They knew where the stairwells were, which was not true about half the people in the towers in other companies. So when the first tower was hit, he grabbed his bullhorn and his walkie-talkie and his cell phone and he was getting ready to call for an evacuation and the evacuation already self-started. So his people had already left. And the last detail I'll tell you is that he required that all visitors to Morgan Stanley be shown the stairwells on their first day. So that day there were a whole bunch of visitors and training there and they knew where the stairwell was. So what's relevant here I think for other disasters is he had incredible faith in the ability of regular people to respond creatively, proactively, and intrepidly to real threats. And that's what I think we need to also think about with climate change. Not that the solution's all gonna be grassroots, right? Like it has to come at a systems level and a government level as well and a corporate level. But I think making people realize the potential for creative solutions for action even if it's sitting in at a Senate office, that is action, right? And helping people figure out and calibrate which actions are most efficacious. That's what's I think missing from a lot of the, you do see stories about like how you can like compost and whatever, but like there's no calibration. Like what is most impact, give me a force ranking of like what's the most impactful thing I can do, right? Like is it really turning the faucet off when I brush my teeth? That doesn't feel right. Like doesn't feel like enough. Maybe it's calling my member of Congress on this day about this bill. Maybe it's composting, I don't know. But there's not a sense of helping people calibrate what's most effective. Yeah, it seems like such an important point, this notion of pretty much everybody becoming their own sort of response team, every community, every family. And it seemed like government, this book came out 10 years ago, actually in 08. But I'm curious to hear if you feel like government has absorbed some of those lessons, they've read your book, and if things have improved in that regard. I mean I really don't think it's improved on terrorism for sure, but that's a really low level threat. I mean a very unusual threat. So I mean I think it depends, like there are states that are much better at this. Right, and that's partly because they have a lot of experience with disasters and you all probably know this better than I do. But there are communities that do a lot of training of regular people. And there are cities that do a lot of training and a lot of empowering of regular people and assume that their regular people are their first responders. But it's a little bit haphazard, right? It's not every place, it's not, most of all the overriding culture remains the same in my experience and you can tell me if I'm wrong, I hope I am, which is a fear of risk, a fear of liability, a fear of being embarrassed, and a fear that the public will panic. Like there's a very condescending assumption about how the public will respond to threats and that they cannot be trusted and every profession does this, right? Like we all, like journalists are like, oh, you can't let readers decide what we write about, no. And then every profession does see. So there is this natural resistance to hand over control to people. But I think where you see really cool things happening, there's someone who's unafraid of that somewhere in that culture, yeah. Yeah, that's a great point. That would be a great one to open up and hear from some of the other folks on. But I do have a few more things I wanted to talk about. One thing that people outside of journalism seem very interested in is the idea of storytelling. That's what we're here for today. And the power of the anecdote specifically. This is something that in my own reporting is always there. Give me some interesting data and I want to know who the human is with how to really tell the story. Because I almost feel like oftentimes the anecdote is more important than the data. But if you have data to back up the anecdote, it's, you know, it multiplies. But talk about that, like how, you know, the power of the anecdote and how you go about finding the people who will embody the story you're trying to tell. Yeah, I mean, I think Jonathan Haidt, who I'm a big fan of, if you haven't read The Righteous Mind, why good people disagree on politics and religion, I strongly recommend it. It should be, like, required reading at this point for Americans. But anyway, he has this great quote, which is, you know, the human brain is a story processor, not a logic processor. And that's right, right? And I think journalists get that intuitively. Where I feel best about my own work, and this doesn't always happen, is when the data leads me to the story, right? Like, leads me to the person or the community, as opposed to just, like, you know, randomly finding it. And so that's getting easier to do. I just finished a big project for The Atlantic that God willing will come out this week, where we used a lot of data analysis that smarter people than I did, and then it, we knew which town I should go hang out in, as based on the results of this. And then you also are checking it, right, qualitatively, and seeing, does this actually feel true when we're here meeting these people and finding characters? And so I think it's the, I think, and that's what you're saying, I think. I don't know if you feel that way, but it's the interaction of data and story that really gives you the magic. Yeah, I mean, I feel like I need to push back a little bit against, like, this kind of general disparaging of the anecdote, as if anecdotes aren't important, that the only thing that matters is data. I think there's a sort of tendency in our culture to reject that kind of thing, but for me, the anecdote is what gets people to care. It shows you that this is actually real, it's happening, we've checked it out, and it actually generates empathy and attention in people, and thus can, in the most ideal circumstances, drive people to activism and trying to change things. Yeah, like with The Unthinkable Book, one of the things that really, at first, bummed me out is that people would always come to me after they read it, and the things they would most remember were about the plane crash stories, and I was like, oh man, I have this whole thing about risk, and like, did you not read that, and how did I fail you? But you know what they really remembered about that was the breathing techniques that Navy SEALs and other people who work, anyone who works, I mean, anyone, period, has learned to deal with stress. That's like the one way to calm down your automatic stress response. And people do it all the time on planes, right? And at first, I was like, okay, I guess this is like my one impact in the world, I've helped people deal with something that's never gonna happen to them. But then I was like, oh, I get this, what's happened here is you take a highly salient risk, like a threat that feels full of dread, right? Dread is a thing, like a psychological term, and plane crashes, like terrorism, are high in dread. And so it's very important to appreciate that that's the human psychology. We can fight it, we can make fun of it, we can talk down to people about it, but it's much better to just realize it, right? Like, so this is how humans work. So then, if you give them something they can do, like another thing people often remember is counting the rows, like people who respond to plane crashes, they themselves will often count how many rows to the exit while they're waiting for the plane to take off. They know it's unlikely they'll need to know that, but they also, it gives them something to do, it gives you a sense of agency, you have nothing else to do while you're sitting there waiting for the plane to take off, and they know that most plane crashes are survivable and that what you need to do is to get out very quickly and that your brain will resist doing that and that you won't be able to see because of the smoke. So knowing how many rows is very helpful, right? So that's something I do with my kid now on planes, you know, and it gives you a sense of, of like, you have, there's something you can do. Even if in reality there might not be anything you can do, but I think the same is true with climate change. I mean, you don't wanna suggest it's on regular people to solve plane crashes or climate change. At the same time, it's, it's, that's the intersection, like the anecdote plus something you can do. It instills confidence in people so that when God forbid they end up in a situation like that, they're, they're willing to stand up. With that said, I wanted to ask you, you already talked about how it's changed, you know, the way you fly in a plane with your kid, but what's the big takeaway that you can tell people in terms of this big conversation about how we behave in the, in the case of a, of a disaster or a catastrophe? What, what piece of advice do you have for everybody here in the case that something like that should happen to us? I mean, I think it's good to know that there will be a period of disbelief and it happens to all of us. It happens even to people with a lot of training and you can kind of notice it when it happens. Like this has happened to me where I will find myself trying to rationalize cues, you know, like maybe it's a fire alarm or maybe it's smoke. I will find very creative ways to explain that away, but I now will catch myself doing that. And the same is true with other threats that are more slow moving. So I think understanding how your brain works and appreciating that you can override that, particularly through good training is important so that you don't just feel like you're, you know, a victim, Kamut May. Because often people will, will literally freeze like I was talking about before. They'll, you know, the plane will crash and they'll go to get their luggage off or they'll inflate their vest when they're being told not to. Their mind just isn't operating 100% for whatever reason. Is it possible to override that sort of instinct or, because not everybody acts that way, but for people who do, it's impossible to override that. I mean, if they're in an unusual and extreme event, most people will freeze in my, in my research I've seen. Depends on the situation, but that's much more common than panic, right? So the airlines call this negative panic because it's such a problem on plane crashes. So people just sit there. And so this is the big problem, not panic. And so if we were to like work backwards from there, like what would we do differently when it comes to educating the public and designing emergency plans and doing messages, like assuming that people will underreact leads to a very different set of messages, right? So I think that, you know, there's a lot there, but I think that's a big part of it, is assuming people will underreact and that you can, yeah, you can train out of that. People are very responsive to leadership in that situation too. Like if you yell at someone to move, they will move. Yeah, yeah. I think in one case you had a woman who was sort of, one of the towers was coming down on 9-11 and she was just standing there and this woman came out of nowhere. The woman dressed in red and said, let's get out of here. And she did, she followed her. Right, she would have followed her anywhere, she said, yeah. It's amazing. I would love to open it up and specifically on that question about how government has, I don't wanna say learn from your particular book, but this notion about giving agency to people so that in times of crisis, they have a sense of agency, a sense of leadership. If anybody wants to ask a specific question or tell a story about that, that would be great. Two ideas that you just came from. The idea of underreacting and agency and empowerment in this era of climate change. It feels like we have sort of two extremes. One is underreacting and one is like, oh my God, it's so crazy. Very few people seem to be doing that one. But how do we get out of underreacting to a good place of taking agency and empowerment around this really scary thing that is climate change? It's easier for me to speak to the journalism end of that, but obviously there are many different fronts on which you'd need to fight this and you are fighting this. So I think from a journalism point of view, there's something called the Solutions Journalism Network which is a non-profit that supports journalists to do good stories, not like fluff stories, but good stories about people trying to solve problems in their communities. And it's really cool. One of the things that's on their website is called a Story Tracker. So you actually can search by climate change and see, they have thousands and thousands of archived pieces that are good solutions journalism that have been vetted. So you can kind of see what that looks like. You can share those stories. You can support those journalists. You can reach out to those journalists. So there are people out there trying to do this and they need sort of a boost, I think, to amplify their work. What we do know is that people really respond well to this. Like people, if it's done right, it's easy to do badly for sure. But if it's done right, where there's a clear-eyed look at the threat and a look at how people are actually struggling and trying to respond, and sometimes they're succeeding, sometimes there's not. But right now I think a lot of, not all, but a lot of climate change coverage suffers from the same problems as political coverage. So it's a lot about prediction and forecasting and the same sources over and over. Partly because that's easier and more comfortable for us to do. And it has this really devastating effect on the public. People tune out. It feels like there's nothing that can be done. The system is just basically rigged in the case of politics, which may be true, but if you don't ever focus on what people are trying to do differently or the attempts and failures of people trying to do something differently, then your story is just kind of like fade. They just go out and nothing happens. And you just do it over and over. And I think there's that frustration with a lot of climate change reporting. So I would suggest the Solutions Journalism Network is a good resource for example, specific examples of how to do that, how to, people will respond just like in public health. There's been a ton of research on this. If you just scare the crap out of people, they tune out and get very frustrated. I see a lot of journalists, I tell them that and they're like, okay, and then they go scare the crap out of people. They feel like their identity is such that they don't think it's their job to give you hope. Right? Like I've actually been told that. It's not my job to give you hope. So I'm not sure what your job is. I don't think your job is to give people hope, but your job is to help people make informed decisions in a very complex world, right? So part of that is not scaring the crap out of them to the point where they just tune out. So there are differences of opinion about this within journalism, but that would be my take on it. I would just add to that, great comments, but for you folks who are in government and the non-profit sector, private, everywhere, a lot of the onus I think is on you because some of the best stories we do come randomly from somebody who reaches out and they have an idea, but I'll say 99%, 95, 99% of the time, those pitches are exactly what you're criticizing. So I would just say, establish contact with the journalists who are covering things in your relative areas of expertise. That's a good point, I mean, yeah, that's a good point. And pitch them good stories that you think really get to the heart of the matter. Yeah, I mean, and you have to, but the thing is you have to have the courage and comfort to tell the whole story. Like if there's something that you know a community or an office is trying to do, you can't just tell them like how everything is fantastic and awesome. Like you have to show them, reveal to them what's not working or else it's not gonna be a good story, it's not gonna be a true story and they're not gonna wanna do it. So an example of this would be not from climate change, but I did a cover story for The Atlantic a few years ago about Starbucks partnering with Arizona State to try to help their baristas finish college. And they opened, as much as you, more than I would have expected, they showed me what wasn't working, what was disappointing to them, what they'd changed to deal with that, like not many baristas were signing up for college. And it was really important that they do that. Cause otherwise it's just a kind of, it's not true, like it's not a true story and you have to show the challenge, not just this works, isn't it amazing? Write a fluff story, like that's not a good story, so. Hi, I'm Denise Ross and I'm with the Beck Center for Social Impact and Innovation at Georgetown. And I have a personal early notification story. In summer of 2012, I was on maternity leave home with twins, newborn twins. I had two older children in the home. I was caring for my 80-year-old father-in-law. My husband was out of town with the military and a storm was coming in. It was Tropical Storm Isaac and we were in New Orleans and it entered the Gulf and I was following all the news, trying to figure out what I should do. My options were sort of limited. The cost at many levels of evacuating was very high with that menagerie and a friend of mine from the EOC called and she said, Denise, I don't mean to scare you. You know, this storm isn't, it's not gonna like knock over buildings or flood the city but I think it's gonna be a disaster from a utilities perspective and she had been seeing the information that as a member of the public, I wasn't seeing. So she knew that there was gonna be possible saltwater incursion into the Mississippi River and that the water source might be contaminated for the city. She knew that they were expecting wide-scale long-term power outages and so she just said, Denise, I know you've got a lot to handle but you should probably think about evacuating and so I'm curious, do you have any thoughts on how to bring that friend in the EOC to people giving them highly relevant information that they can act on? What did you do? I mean, don't leave us hanging. Oh my gosh. So it was awful. Sounds like a fucking nightmare. So I packed up everybody and I started to drive to my sister's house in Austin, Texas and this was way before anybody was even preparing for the storm on my block and I'll tell you, just haven't lived until you've been looking for shade for a place to nurse your newborns and the only place is the shadow of a topless bar on I-10. So you're hanging out with your father-in-law who's reading the paper, you're like nursing one twin after another. It was 100 degrees outside. It was awful but I was really glad that we weren't there because we didn't have power for 11 days and it would have been miserable. My father-in-law's health would have been at risk. It would have, so I was glad we left. That's a great story. That's a great example of a story bringing something to life and I think to answer the question, Dennis Maledi's done a lot of good research on communications warning and I think people talk to an average of five people before they decide to evacuate. It may be higher now but one of them is the local TV news broadcaster. So if you don't have a relationship with that person before the storm, then it's too late by the time the storm comes, right? But the second thing is like neighbors and friends and aunts and uncles and I think one of the things I always advocated for was like dual use preparation. I'm not sure that's the right word but turning, and this is definitely true for climate change, like making resilience building events like fun so that like you get something out of it either way. So if you're trying to educate people about evacuation in advance of a hurricane, like get them some food for God's sake. Do you know what I'm saying? Like make it a block party, like do something. You know, there's a story about in my book about this little town in about a couple hundred miles north of San Francisco that was doing the first ever tsunami evacuation drill years ago. And you know, there was a local guy there who was trying to figure out what the evacuation routes would even be. So he did something weird and unprecedented which was he decided to ask people who live there and he put the signs for the drill, he put them on wheels so they could move them, you know? And you know, he told everyone we're gonna have this drill and he didn't know if anyone comes like little town, working class town that most people work at a paper mill and 75% of the population came when the siren went off and they all mustered at this hill above sea level and people brought, you know, like their dogs and birds and stuffed animals and one woman pushed her mother in a wheelchair and people got into it and then the most interesting thing was after it ended people wouldn't leave. Like they were like, this is so fun, like let's hang out. And so, you know, that's maybe one example of this one place but my point is when you turn these things into community building events like you're and you give them some information so each person when they got to the top they punched a time clock like this old fashioned so they could see how long it took to evacuate because it often takes longer than you think and that's a really useful data point for them going forward, right? And so they got something useful out of it and it was a good drill and it was like a fun community building event and so I guess my like squishy answer to this would be it's important to deputize everyone and give everyone information so that when they reach out to each other they give you good advice because you're inevitably gonna go through this period of milling, right? Where you reach out to other people so the better advice people have, you know that's always really useful as it was in your case, yeah. Ask the last question and use it to set up what's gonna happen this afternoon which is, you know, this group of people is gonna go into working sessions and look at two difficult things which is populations that are systematically overlooked and the thing is they're not invisible, we know they're there, right? But they're systematically overlooked in risk mitigation and then also this concept of resilience that we do tend to look at response rather than on the prevention side. I don't know if that's American nature or human nature or maybe you can tell us that. So we're gonna have those conversations. How, those are tough stories to tell and these people need to be storytellers too. No matter what piece of it they're involved in you guys do this for a living, you gals and guys and do you have tips that you could share with this group about how you tell a good story? And because I think everybody needs to be able to do that particularly on issues like this that are a little elusive for most people or a little, you know, hard to imagine something that hasn't happened. Sure, I think I touched on it a bit in one of my previous comments but to begin with there's really two types of stories in journalism. One is like the individual case where, you know, it's an anecdote where something is so extreme that it's a one-off, an outlier but it's interesting and it's worth writing about. The other one is sort of the microcosm story where, you know, it's also an important anecdote but it's indicative of a larger trend. And then I think, you know, I can probably speak for most reporters that we're always trying to advance the story, you know, the way you talk about reporters, you know, doing the same story over and over again, that's exactly what I don't think we should be doing. I understand the need to cover things incrementally but the stuff that interests me the most are ways where we can bring nuance into things that we sort of already know. So again, establish contact with your local reporters and bring them stories, not just any old stories but the stories that really help bring light to things that aren't being discussed and help advance stories that are being discussed. Yeah, I mean, I think that's all right and I also find the longer I do this, the more I realize how important it is to make things a mystery. Like everything should be a mystery. Like that is really important to how you frame the story and you can make like a really small mystery and what's really cool and this gets back to how people actually behave as opposed to how we want them to behave. Like if you leave people hanging, if you're like, I do not know why that wallpaper would not stay on the wall, then you can talk for like 500 more words about something else and they will still be like, but why, why didn't it stay on the wall? So, and I often tell us to academics, right, suspense. So like if you did an experiment or a study or maybe it's a messaging study and you really thought one thing was gonna happen but you weren't sure, you see the suspense as opposed to coming to me and being like, here's what we found, you know, it's been peer reviewed, go nuts. So like, or here's this thing where we just didn't understand why we were getting this in the data. Like we still don't understand. You know, you have to kind of open up and trust a little bit which can be hard to do with the media for obvious reasons but you know, I think that's telling the full story including warts and all would be my first piece of advice and finding the suspense, like pitching it in a way where there's suspense. Even if it's small, like a really small mystery, there has to be a mystery. And I would say that's even true for PowerPoint presentations. Not just like national magazine stories but like everything. Like there should be some mystery. Cool advice and thank you both very much for just a terrific conversation. Let's give them a round of applause. Thanks a lot. All right, now comes the part where you all get to work. So a little bit of suspense, there is lunch but you don't know where it is. How's that? Did that work? Actually it's out there. So before you go out and get it, so what comes next is working groups and you're just gonna be in the tables that you're at with one exception, well two exceptions. I don't want anybody sitting on the side, this is a working meeting. So I mean if you are leaving, please make that clear so that someone can come and take your seat. If people are not leaving, let's budge up and make sure that we can accommodate everyone who's on the margins because we need these people to be part of the conversation. I see, you know, Marcus Hendricks for example who I very much wanna be in this conversation. And Joseph, you have a seat somewhere. Which table is it at? There you go, right, you had a reserved seat because Joseph is one of our presenters. So this is what's gonna happen now. You're all gonna go out and get some food and the restrooms are right around the corner if you haven't found them yet. Come back as soon as you can to your tables and what's going to happen is you have, everyone has a facilitator at their table. The facilitator will introduce himself or herself and will have everyone do a round of introductions, any comments you wanna make about this morning. Then you have a technology provider or innovator at your table who's gonna do a very short, very short presentation on what their technology is, how it helps underserved or marginalized populations and then barriers or opportunities that they see. And you're gonna talk about it before you start all of that, someone is going to have volunteered to be the outbriefer. So when it's all done, you're gonna be responsible for representing the conversation in your group in about three or four minutes. So if you don't have that skill set, don't volunteer. If no one volunteers, the facilitators are gonna pick on someone. So they've been sitting with you long enough by now that they know who to pick on. So you'll have the conversation. What we want, the number one thing we wanna know is, is this useful to have this kind of dialogue? Can we come up with concrete actionable recommendations for how to improve the resilience of marginalized populations using new technology tools? And this is, as I said, a yes or no answer to some degree. Yes, we need to do this. No, this was enough. But we also want yes and. What are the things that you see? Is it data? Is it access to data? Is it redefining what a vulnerable population is? You know, that's what we want you to come up with to be specific and concrete. What is it that you think we need to look at? We will gather those results from the presentations and we will publish them. We will submit them to FEMA for their National Preparedness Plan for consideration. There are people from FEMA in the room. We also, both Sean and I and Sarah and others have lots of connections there as well. They're into receiving that. And we do want to make a decision about whether we should continue this kind of dialogue, whether we should have it at a regional level. So we're looking for those insights from all of you. And am I forgetting anything? Is that good? Or we got our directions. So with that, please help yourself to some tacos out there and we'll get to work.