Hawaii also faces some threat from near tsunamis generated south and west of its seismically charged Big Island, though not on a subduction-zone scale. But when it comes to distant tsunamis, it sits “in the crosshairs,” at the center of the Pacific Ocean’s “Ring of Fire.” Since 1946, these have arrived from Chile, Japan, mainland Alaska, and the Aleutians. They batter shoreline infrastructure but allow ample time to evacuate the inundation zone; Hawaii doesn’t plan to build vertical evacuation structures.
Nevertheless FEMA accords all Hawaii’s islandwide counties “high” or “very high” tsunami risk ratings. On the West Coast, where the tsunami threat is much deadlier and nearer, only one California county — where a distant tsunami from Alaska killed 11 in 1964 — is even rated “high risk.”
The index doesn’t just crunch data for hailstorms, hurricanes, and 16 other hazard categories. It also calculates how prepared various communities might be to address them. It takes the hazard rating and multiplies it by a “social vulnerability” rating, as defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Social Vulnerability Index, then divides it by “community resilience” (governance, infrastructure, education, and other factors that help communities deal with hazards on their own). The result is a composite risk score for each of the nation’s 84,414 census tracts.
Tracts with the highest scores — those facing the greatest danger with the most social and community vulnerability — qualify for possible designation as “community disaster resilience zones” or CDRZs, “cedars” in the argot. Designation brings big benefits: special technical and planning assistance and, most important, 90 percent funding for disaster preparation and mitigation projects, rather than FEMA’s standard 75 percent match — a 60 percent reduction in the sums struggling communities must come up with.
This reduction “would make the difference between success and failure for many seismic and tsunami mitigation efforts” in the Pacific Northwest, Washington’s Emergency Management Division wrote to FEMA after it released the updated risk index. “Even our highest-risk coastal communities struggle with [the standard] 25 percent local match for [vertical evacuation structure] projects. If the NRI doesn’t represent the tsunami threat realistically, we have no hope.”
The message closed with a stark plea: “Please do not use the NRI as currently developed.”
Washington’s emergency managers are unusually blunt in their concern, but they are not alone. Managers in other states and some national organizations representing them, while they laud FEMA’s goal of proactively identifying and assisting communities at special risk, are puzzled, even alarmed, at the index’s flawed designations and the data gaps and ignorance of on-the-ground conditions that underlie those choices. Some spoke off the record because, as one put it, “we have to apply for grants from FEMA.”
“We definitely have some concerns about the risk index,” says Althea Rizzo, the Oregon Emergency Management Division’s geohazards program coordinator. “It’s about gaps in how the data are collected” — and not just along the Cascadia Subduction Zone.
For instance, a string of at least six volcanos forms a long spine down the center of her state; one nearby Washington volcano, Mount St. Helens, erupted 43 years ago, killing 57 people. But in Oregon, the NRI identifies a high risk from volcanic activity only around iconic Mount Hood and the Portland suburbs exposed to it, and in one small Southern Oregon census tract far from any known volcano. That’s despite the fact that the U.S. Geological Survey’s Volcano Hazards Program, a Smithsonian Institution database, identifies a “very high threat” of eruption from three other Oregon volcanoes — Crater Lake, Newberry Volcano and the Three Sisters, which have erupted five times in the past 4,000 years and “may erupt explosively in the future.” The risk index finds no risk at all to the two counties that the Three Sisters straddle, nor to their nearby main cities, the college town Eugene and the fast-growing vacation mecca Bend.
“The whole Cascades should be red” for high-risk, sighs Rizzo.
This myopia reflects the fact that the risk index relies for its volcano mapping on a broad-brush source, the United Nations’ Global Volcano Model, which includes only Mount Hood. It seems to neglect both the USGS record, which it credits as a source, and the U.N. model’s own spreadsheet record, which shows many eruptions, some within the past few hundred years, by five other Oregon volcanoes.
“The effort is ill conceived,” argues Jim Buck, a retired civil engineer and former state legislator who helps tribes and other Washington coastal communities draft and fund their emergency plans, and who has probably analyzed the risk index more doggedly than anyone outside FEMA. “This tool might be worthwhile if it agreed with conditions on the ground. It shouldn’t be that hard to ground-truth what they’ve done. Come out here and see if it works!”
On Sept. 6, FEMA announced the risk index’s first fruits: America’s “most at-risk and in-need communities,” the first 483 Community Disaster Resilience Zones designated under NRI guidelines.
Some choices were confounding.
One was a tract in rural Mayes County, Oklahoma, that local officials thought had less hazard exposure than its neighbors. “We have some really underserved, high-risk areas in Oklahoma,” says National Hazard Mitigation Association president Annie Vest, formerly Oklahoma’s state hazard mitigation officer. “I was surprised to not see them included.” Johnny Jansen, Mayes County’s emergency management director, told me that “part of the area [designated] is a very large industrial park, and one of its biggest customers is Google. The rest is very sparsely populated, and the people are Amish.” Amish also populate the only other Mayes County tract to be designated.
The apparent logic behind these choices: FEMA defines “risk” as “expected annual loss” (the value of property, infrastructure, agriculture and people lost on average each year, with each fatality and every 10 injuries valued at $11.6 million) multiplied by “social vulnerability” and divided by “community resilience.” That industrial park would greatly boost its tract’s infrastructure value. Famously land-rich and self-reliant, the Amish often have relatively low cash incomes. This, together with their eschewing of modern technology, seems to have tagged them as “socially vulnerable.”
But the truth is “just the opposite,” says Jansen. “They’re the only ones in the county who’ve never called for help. They’re completely self-sufficient.” And so the self-sufficient Amish and a Google server farm qualify for special mitigation funding unavailable to their neighbors.
None of the most tsunami-exposed tracts in Washington, Oregon or California made the cut, but three tracts on Washington’s coast and two on Oregon’s that are partially buffered from tsunamis did. The Cascade volcano belt was likewise excluded, save one tract near Mount St. Helens, one near Salem, Oregon, and one in the Portland suburbs.
But in affluent Seattle, safe from Cascadia tsunamis, the University of Washington’s lakefront campus, which faces no more earthquake risk than neighboring tracts, was designated a CDRZ. FEMA officials say the campus is disadvantaged because of its “workforce development” status. In other words, the NRI sees an elite university as a disadvantaged community meriting special disaster-mitigation aid because its students, who mostly live in well-built dorm buildings and have homes to return to in an emergency, are studying rather than working.
How did these risk ratings and resilience zones stray so far from realities on the ground? And can the NRI and CDRZs still work to protect America’s most vulnerable communities in a time of escalating climate peril? To answer those questions, consider first how and why the index was developed.
The effort began modestly, in 2008, in FEMA’s Denver regional office. What Roy Wright, a former head of FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program and current CEO of the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety, calls “a little skunkworks team” built a tool for comparing risks in the Mountain West and Dakotas. In 2015 FEMA set out to expand it nationwide.