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Grassroots Hazards Management in Tornado Alley Ann Patton Speaker biography | Summary | Panel agenda Transcript
Ann Patton:
Thank you, Denise. Good morning! It is such an honor to be here. I know everybody says that, but I want to tell you, it is an honor for me to be here. And the bad news is that I am much more interested in listening to you than I am in talking. But I will go through very quickly, I hope, some examples of what we are doing in Tulsa. First, there is someone in the audience I’d like to introduce. Did she come back in? Arrietta Chakos from Berkeley. Arrietta Chakos, right back there. Wave, wave back, Arrietta. Arrietta is, I think, going to be on one of your panels this afternoon. She is the force behind, probably, the best program in the country of the kind that I am going to describe. We call it Project Impact or maybe it’s called Disaster-Resistant Berkeley now, I am not sure. But anyway, I think you are going to be very encouraged when you hear Arrietta. So, here we are, trying to find the processes that can help us avert panic and fully engage citizens as collaborative partners in the process to plan for and manage and maybe even avert crisis. I am from Tornado Alley—from Tulsa, Oklahoma specifically. So first, I want to tell you a little bit about the place that I am in, a look back at how we came to where we are, a little bit about how we go about nurturing the grassroots, about what I am going to call the Project Impact model and why it works even though we now call it Citizen Corps. It is still the same model. A little bit about why it’s working in our town, how it’s working, some lessons that we’ve learned, most of them the hard way, and a look ahead. Our corner of Tornado Alley is in the northeast corner of Oklahoma in what used to be “Indian territory.” And if you go back about 75 to a 100 years ago, you are going to find that for much of our history, we had pretty much a disaster a year, most of them floods, some of them tornadoes, some of them… actually we had a terrible race riot. But we were pretty much disaster-prone. And, in fact, in 15 years between 1970 and 1985, we were, I am sorry to say, the nation’s leader in flood disasters. We had nine federally-declared flood disasters in just 15 years. Most of you probably think that Tulsa, Oklahoma is like a desert, but actually we have a major river and a lot of network streams that flood into it and a poor history of managing life with the natural environment. We had so many disasters so fast that that—as somebody said this morning—we were in a kind of paralysis. It seemed like it was the way life was supposed to be. But grassroots activism from the citizen level really got us moving. Great things begin with shared visions. This vision was born about 30 years ago after a 1974 flood when Tulsa housewife Carol Williams called her neighbors down off the rooftops, literally, into her flooded living room and said, “We’ve got to do something about this.” Carol’s neighborhood was flooded in 1968, 1970, 1971, three times in 1974, again in 1976, and the last time, thank God, in 1984. I always call Carol the “Rosa Parks of flood-living management” because she would not take it sitting down. She just refused to accept that things had to be that way every time you turned around. We did not have to flood every year. Her group called itself “Tulsans for Better Community” and others drew on to them like almost a centrifugal force and pretty soon they had mobilized a pretty large segment of the community. I might say that it was never as large as people thought. If you’ve done citizen activism, you know that part of it is to try to pretend that you are an army when there are really just three or four of you. Our 1984 flood was so bad. There were 14 people dead overnight and $183 million in damages. 7000 buildings that flooded—that just woke us up. The rest of the community then began to listen to these citizens. We had, I will say, hundreds and, I think, thousands of citizens intricately involved in the planning process for what to do about this problem. Now, we worked very hard since then. Since then, we have not had a negative vote on any kind of flood issue, like a bond issue or sales tax. Since that time....And before then, trust me, nobody could get anything passed. So, since 1992, we’ve had what we think and, I think probably you could document this, is the nation’s leading flood program. So, now we are taking the lessons we learned in that process, and we are applying them toward other issues. So, you start from the grassroots and you build up. And what we developed were a series of programs. In 1998, FEMA gave the city of Tulsa a seed grant to create the Tulsa Project Impact program. Most of what I am going to talk about today, I’ll probably say that the name is Project Impact even though it has been changed because in the year 2000... I am sorry, the year 2002, we got a grant that would create a Citizen Corps program and because of the name confusion, we pretty much shifted to Citizen Corps. But we also created a 501c(3) called Tulsa Partners to mobilize the private sector and private dollars. So, we have three names and it’s confusing. So, what we are just going [to call it] for today is what most people call it, Project Impact. Today we—and I am actually retired, but I still consider it a “we”—we have about 400 partners and 1800 volunteers, and another 1000 in the Medical Reserve Corps. And I want to talk a little bit about that later. The new Administration killed Project Impact as a national program in 2001, but some of us actually never caught on to that and it’s still alive and well in a lot of communities. Right, Arrietta? It’s still alive and well in a number of communities, sometimes in different forms, often with other names. In Tulsa, we are working with the private and public funding sources on a pretty broad slate of programs and projects, all around one central theme, “How do we create a disaster-resistant community?” The key is that everything is done through partnerships, starting at the grassroots level and moving up. The title [for today’s talk] “Grassroots Hazards Managements” actually comes from Monica, but it’s a good one. To me it means what can ordinary citizens do to protect themselves, their families, their businesses, and their communities from a whole smorgasbord—that overwhelmingly frightening array of natural and man-made hazards—from tornadoes to terrorism to bird flu. How can they do this as volunteers and as full-fledged community partners? That’s our mission. We are all working together to build a safer and better community that is sound, safe, and sustainable. Let me tell you a little bit about this model and why I think it works well. I want to describe a few of the features and I’ll say that to me it is based on something that supposedly Mark Twain said. I always thought it was pretty good: “Everybody is smarter than anybody.” [That’s] sort of our base [for what we do]. That’s how we began our thought process. Project Impact was FEMA’s grassroots community mitigation program. It existed—it had a life-span from 1997 to 2001 as a national program. It was working well in 250 communities before it was aborted. And how did it work? They cast somebody around the country, created seedlings, nurtured them, nurtured, nurtured, nurtured them and identified and worked with communities’ spark plugs. They empowered bottom-up management, encouraged program ownership at the local level. Locals absolutely owned this program. It operated more like a jazz band than an orchestra. It would be pretty hard, a lot of times, in a lot of our communities, to find out who is in charge—[it] didn’t matter because everybody was doing sort of their own improvising thing. It inspired a lot of enthusiasm and excitement across the country and linked together those people, like Arrietta and me, who were excited by this program and wanted to figure out how to make it work. Ok, looks like I am almost out of time, so I am going to speed up. A little bit about how it’s working. Public enemy #1 in Tulsa from the citizen’s standpoint is Tulsa Homebuilders. [There was a lot of] bad blood between the builders and the citizens. Project Impact actually brought us together, amazingly enough, because we began to work together on a program to put safe rooms in homes in Tornado Alley. We have one of the worst tornado risks in the world. We have no basements; figure that out! Safe rooms are small, closet-like things anchored and armored to protect you in a tornado, and they can be above ground or below ground. So, since then, actually, thousands have been built around the state. The important thing is that we learned how to attack the problem instead of each other. [Note: Referring to slide image] This is Don Staley. This poor guy lost three homes in five years to tornadoes in More, Oklahoma. By the third one, he had built the safe room and he survived in it. Now, he is selling them. The secret to this community in More, Oklahoma surviving all of these is: one, they have more safe rooms per capita than any place in the world; and two, neighbors take care of neighbors. They literally open their safe rooms, open their shelters, [and] invite people in. A “McReady” program does what I think you all were talking about earlier. Our goal is to take our program to the people. In this case, into McDonalds one month out of the year—170 McDonalds stores, 1000 customers per store, and the message is: “Yes, you can be prepared.” A Millennium House was inspired by Project Impact. This is a house for the poor. It’s about the cost of a Habitat house. It’s disaster-resistant, energy-efficient, [and] utilities are about $100 a year. Citizen-based, OK? The Ecosafe home again [note: referring to slide images]…trying to take our programs to the people where in the process of creating a home to show how to live safely in Tornado Alley, without wrecking the environment. It will be built at the Tulsa Zoo. Why? The Tulsa Zoo has 550,000 visitors a year. We want to be where they are. Human Response Coalition [note: referring to slide images]…: 50 social service agencies, all working with us, amazing programs to try to get to the more vulnerable populations. Other examples....I will just say that there are a number of wonderful examples around the country, I wish I had time to go into more of them. Lessons learned? People will, I think, mobilize around the common vision or against a common enemy. And, in this instance, we’ve been able to use both of those. The enemy is disaster. The common vision is that as we work together, we can actually do something about it. I think [that] I’ll end there. Denise Gray-Felder (Moderator): Thank you very much. [Applause] Proceedings of the May 23, 2006 Summit: Disease, Disaster, & Democracy Transcription by CastingWords |
