Rural Communities Rise to the Challenge of Dual Disasters

Rural Communities, Climate, and COVID-19 Recovery
Find out more about the briefings in this series below:
June 16	Implementing Energy Efficiency Programs in Rural America
June 17	The Bioeconomy’s Role in COVID-19 Recovery and Climate Solutions
June 18	Rural Communities Rise to the Challenge of Dual Disasters

The Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) held a series of one-hour online briefings about rural communities, climate change, and COVID-19 recovery. The briefings explored the challenges rural communities face, including high energy costs, a struggling agriculture industry, and low investment in resilient infrastructure, as well as the solutions rural communities have developed in the face of these multiple stressors.

Rural communities face unique challenges in preparing for flooding and addressing related infrastructure needs. Local governments with small staffs often do not have the capacity to apply for disaster preparedness funding and can be left out of valuable federal programs. This briefing characterized these issues in the context of COVID-19 and highlighted solutions communities are implementing to meet them. Dr. Richard Norton, Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Michigan (UM), discussed his work with Great Lakes coastal communities, which are mostly small and rural communities, and he used the example of the recent Midland dam floods to highlight governance challenges in repairing critical infrastructure. Steve Samuelson, CFM, National Flood Insurance Program Coordinator for the State of Kansas Department of Agriculture, discussed the issues small towns face when attempting to access federal mapping and flood protection programs, and the programs that are working to build flood resilience in these rural areas.

 

HIGHLIGHTS

 

Dr. Richard Norton, Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Michigan

• Trends toward urbanization and large-scale farming have created challenges for rural communities planning for and responding to natural disasters.
  • It is growing more difficult to survive as a small farmer or forester, and demographic trends of young people moving away from rural communities mean that the average age of farmers is increasing with relatively few young people interested in entering the farming industry.
  • Rural areas, on average, experience higher levels of poverty, unemployment, and disability, fewer educational opportunities, and less diversity than urban areas.
• Challenges for rural planning are typically rooted in scale or politics and culture.
  • Rural populations are more spread out, so the per-capita cost of infrastructure and services is higher than in densely-populated areas. Smaller tax bases also limit rural governments’ administrative, analysis, and planning capacities.
  • Rural residents tend to oppose regulation and value property rights, which often leads to pushback against infrastructure and disaster planning.
• The Midland Flood that affected rural Michigan in May 2020 is a case study of some of the challenges faced by rural communities. The failure of the Edenville Dam required the evacuation of 10,000 people and caused $190 million in losses and $55 million in response and infrastructure costs. Floods continue to be a threat across the state, which has only two dam safety inspectors for its 2,500 dams (of which 1,061 are regulated).
• Solutions to address rural flood challenges should keep rural places rural and keep farming and forestry as viable economic options. Towns should be kept compact, and should be built or moved away from hazard-prone areas. Economies should be locally-focused, and farmers should use sustainable methods and plant diverse crops.
• Rural communities will face new kinds of challenges as they deal with climate change. It can be difficult to see how small, local actions affect larger systems. This disconnect and political polarization often prevent necessary changes and perpetuate underinvestments in government.
• Necessary steps to build rural resilience are to act before disasters happen, promote good governance, fit policies to the landscape they will affect, learn to live with nature instead of fighting it, develop stewardship-based economies, and implement “no-regrets” policies that will strengthen communities even if climate change does not affect them.

• COVID-19 has made pursuing necessary collaborations and policy change more difficult.

 

Steve Samuelson, CFM, National Flood Insurance Program Coordinator for the State of Kansas Department of Agriculture

• Large parts of the country, and many counties in Kansas specifically, are not yet covered by federal flood maps, which limits information accessible to communities and can prevent them from accessing some federal assistance and grant funds. For many people, the lack of information about their vulnerability to a risk makes them think that they are not vulnerable.
• Small, rural towns typically have limited staff with people working multiple roles. In some cases, staff have had to step away from some roles, including flood planning, to respond to COVID-19.
  • When we talk about small towns in Kansas, we can be talking about communities with 50 people as well as communities with 10,000 people. Within this space of “small and rural,” there is still a wide range of communities.
• Kansas experienced heavy flooding in 2019. The town of Strong City flooded three times, and did not receive any response or mitigation assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The town’s small size meant that it did not meet requirements for dollars of damage to qualify for a disaster declaration.
  • Strong City has been denied federal grants to improve infrastructure resilience in the past. To respond to flooding on a section of highway, a team of volunteer firefighters has to be deployed to pump water and protect nearby houses, sometimes in the middle of the night. The city applied for a grant to build a more permanent solution, but it was unable to demonstrate historical damage costs for a required federal cost-benefit analysis because the volunteer firefighters’ response measures had been effective at preventing property damage.
• The Community Rating System (CRS) is a federal program that assists communities with managing flood risks, but towns must be covered by Geographic Information System (GIS) maps, and many rural communities are not. In Kansas, the GIS and flood mapping needs of over 700 communities are being met by a staff of two.
• Kansas is conducting statewide studies by watershed to develop Base Level Engineering (BLE) maps. This will help communities access flood planning grants where BLE maps can be used in the absence of flood plain maps.
• The state of Kansas is also providing technical assistance for communities. As engineers make flood maps, they include models of hypothetical mitigation strategies and provide recommendations to towns.
  • Towns can use these recommendations and data in grant applications. However, many towns that receive grants are still unable to complete projects because grant funds often require a local match, which towns may be unable to provide.
• Kansas has a dam safety program that employs four dam inspectors to work on high-hazard dams, but recent funding cuts reduced the program’s annual transportation budget to $630.
• Small towns do not have enough resources to prepare for disasters on their own. Federal programs that could help are the Cooperating Technical Partners Program that provides flood mapping assistance, the Community Assistance Program, the Community Rating System, dam safety programs, and hazard mitigation grant programs.

 

Q&A

 

What kinds of grants and pre-disaster mitigation programs would be helpful for small rural towns to access more resources and build capacity?

• Samuelson: Growing the economy in rural areas is important. Many towns do not have Internet coverage, which discourages businesses from moving in. Changing farming practices have caused farms to get bigger and populations to get smaller. As populations decrease, towns have a smaller tax base and fewer resources. It would also be useful if language in mitigation grants designated a percentage of funding to go to small rural communities and allow those communities to use funds to hire grant managers.
• Norton: We are underinvesting in all economies, especially rural economies. There needs to be a shift away from the mindset that all government is bad toward one that recognizes that governments need to have resources to serve their communities. To support a diverse rural economy, policies need to cultivate local economies instead of favoring corporate farming. Local officials also need to be able to use new tools and technologies.

 

In terms of workforce development, what kinds of skills and training are needed most?

• Norton: Planners and public administrators need both the technical skill sets to work with Geographic Information Systems, census data, and landscape data, and the interpersonal skills to work with the community.

 

How are local communities engaged in watershed management to mitigate risks from floods and other hazards?

• Samuelson: Communities are doing watershed-wide studies because floods do not stop at city lines. In Kansas, watershed districts are authorized to build dams and work on water supplies.
• Norton: Studies that map watersheds are important to understand the connectivity between areas. Urban flooding begins in rural areas, so poor management upstream causes consequences downstream. Watershed councils like the Huron River Watershed Council are important to connect communities in the same watershed to facilitate collaboration. The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) can cause unintended problems, because it subsidizes insurance for people building in risky areas. Instead, the focus should be on not building in risky places.

 

What kinds of projects are you looking at in your communities to move away from trying to control nature and toward living with nature?

• Norton: In urban settings, there has been a big push for green infrastructure, and we need to move toward more natural landscapes. There may be limits to these kinds of nature-based solutions in rural areas with large flood plains.
• Samuelson: Altering farming practices to build back healthy soil would increase soil water absorption, which is better for crops and reduces erosion and runoff. Cover crops also reduce erosion and add carbon back to the soil.

 

Who determines dam regulation in Michigan and in Kansas?

• Norton: The state regulates dams that meet a certain size of impoundment behind the structure, but it often relies on dam owners to do their own inspections.
• Samuelson: State statutes regulate dams and the dam safety program is overseen by the Kansas Department of Agriculture.

 

What are your main concerns regarding the intersection between natural disasters and the current public health disaster?

• Samuelson: This year, Kansas is not predicted to have a concerning flood risk. If COVID-19 had happened with last year’s flooding, having evacuees going to hotels and interacting with many other people would have been a concern.
• Norton: COVID-19 has drawn attention away from every issue that is not the pandemic, including preparations for a future with more frequent and wetter severe storms as well as more drought.

 

Highlights compiled by Abby Neal