40 VOLUME 107 NUMBER 3 2014/15

MEMORIAL PRESENTSTHE 37TH IN A SERIES DEVELOPED FROM PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT INITIATIVES SPONSORED BY THE LESLIE HARRIS CENTRE OF REGIONAL POLICY AND DEVELOPMENT.

BOUNCING BACK EVEN BETTERRESILIENCE THINKING AND HURRICANE IGOR

BY STEPHANIE SODERO ALL PHOTOGRAPHS BY BRIAN RICKS

“We went down to Random Island and it hit us. Total destruction over there … [It] wasn’t gaps–there were just roads just sort of gone, right? My thoughts were, “My God, we’re going to be years putting this place back together.”

– Research participant

Hurricane Igor 2010Igor was a record breaker. Measuring almost 1,500km in diameter, it was the largest recorded storm in the Atlantic Basin until Hurricane Sandy (2012). It was the third wettest hurricane in Canadian history, deluging the Bonavista and Burin Peninsulas. Combine this with Newfoundland’s thin soil and steeply sloping rivers, and we were quickly out of our depth. States of emergency were declared in 22 communities, roads and bridges were breached isolating more than 100 communities, and approximately $200 million in infrastructure and property damage was incurred. One life was lost.

The failure of the road system resulted in the blockage of diverse flows of people and goods. From the utility crews reconnecting electrical services to flows of oxygen to people with personal ventilations systems, from people commuting to work and school to patients travelling for medical care such as dialysis, the transport of even basic goods such as food, water, and fuel became a challenge. Igor tested our resilience.

Heavy traffic and heavy weatherResilience is a core concept in disaster response and climate change adaptation. These fields extend the commonly understood definition of resilience–bouncing back–by asking: how can we bounce back even better? Renewal, innovation, and continual learning are core characteristics of resilience thinking. What does resilience look like in the face of two intersecting trends that help define our age: the increase in severe weather events and the rise of mobility in our daily lives? How do we bounce back even better when heavy weather meets heavy traffic?

Movement is central to our society. Like oxygen, we both rely upon it and take it for granted. Whether commuting to work or shipping freight, attending destination weddings or academic conferences, driving school buses or ambulances, mobility punctuates the story of our lives, and the social implications of such movement range from Newfoundland workers who commute to Alberta to temporary foreign workers who travel from the Philippines to the local Tim Hortons.

The rise of mobility also has environmental implications. Approximately 95 per cent of transport energy comes from fossil fuels such as oil and gas. When we burn fossil fuels they release greenhouse gases that warm the atmosphere. Picture down feathers pluming from your car exhaust or billowing in airplane contrails. Each feather–or molecule of greenhouse gases–traps heat. Warming the atmosphere triggers a cascade of climatic changes: rising sea levels, acidifying oceans, and increasingly extreme and unpredictable weather.

The United Nations reports a doubling of severe weather events in the past two decades, from about 200 in the 1990s to about 400 in the 2010s. Such global trends are mirrored by local experience, with severe flooding occurring almost every year in Newfoundland since 2001, from tropical storms like Gabrielle (2001) and Chantal (2007) to the Stephenville floods (2005) and the Northern Peninsula storm surge (2007). Due to a lack of historical data, it is difficult to determine how climate change impacts hurricane frequency and severity, but it is a safe bet to brace for stormy weather ahead.

To explore the intersection of severe weather events

41NEWFOUNDLAND QUARTERLY

and mobility I conducted a comparative case study of Hurricane Igor and Hurricane Juan, which hit Nova Scotia in 2003. I interviewed transport providers and governmental and non-governmental representatives, and analyzed print media articles and House of Assembly transcripts. Three types of resilience emerged in the context of Newfoundland and Labrador.

‘The resilient Newfoundlander’The concept of the ‘resilient Newfoundlander’ was used by politicians and other public figures in media coverage of Igor. For example, Prime Minister Stephen Harper stated that Newfoundlanders and Labradorians “are facing the aftermath of the storm with their characteristic resilience and determination,” while former Premier Danny Williams observed that “Newfoundlanders and Labradorians have a reputation for being some of the kindest and most resilient people in the world, and this past week was certainly a testament to this claim.” Williams reflected on one scene: “there were at least 20 people on their knees in the mud, cleaning up so these elderly people could get back in their home ... You know, we turned this around. We turned this around because we’re resilient, we’re tough.”

Such praise is deserved. But it risks focusing attention on the experience of individuals and their homes, and directing attention away from the House of Assembly. This is reflected in the House of Assembly records. The first

sitting of the House of Assembly was in December, more than two months after Igor. Igor was mentioned in half of the House sittings the following year, for example acknowledging the role of volunteers and discussing the closure of Port Union fish processing plant, damaged by the hurricane. By comparison, Nova Scotia’s Legislature met two days after Hurricane Juan, and Juan was discussed in three-quarters of the sessions. The discussions were also more substantive in Nova Scotia, including links with climate change, impacts on workers and landowners, and the status of emergency preparedness. The lack of discussion in NL’s House of Assembly about big picture issues such the integrity of road infrastructure, disaster preparedness, and climate change implies the perception of an unproblematic status quo despite the experience of Igor.

Engineering resilienceEngineering resilience is defined as getting things back to normal as quickly as possible, and it characterized the governmental response to Igor. In terms of reconnecting the road network, the province excelled at returning to normal. A prominent theme that emerged in the dataset was a ‘ten day’ narrative. For example, one participant stated, “so over the next few days (and it was ten days really), we had our goals set. We wanted to make sure that we connected every community in as short a possible

42 VOLUME 107 NUMBER 3 2014/15

WEATHER EVENTS IN NEWFOUNDLAND AND LABRADOR THAT HAVE TRIGGERED THE FEDERAL DISASTER FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE ARRANGEMENT PROGRAM, 2001-2010(Fire and Emergency Services-Newfoundland and Labrador)

YEAR EVENT FEDERAL ASSISTANCE ($M)

2001 Tropical Storm Gabrielle 6.12003 Badger Flood 8.22003 West Coast Flood 9.62005 Stephenville Flood 28.32006 North East Coast Flood 4.62006 Burin Flood 1.32007 Northern Peninsula Storm Surge 2.92007 Daniel’s Harbour Landslides 2.72007 Tropical Storm Chantal 24.52008 North East Coast Flood 1.82010 Hurricane Igor 95.0

TOTAL $185M

time. And everybody stepped up. I mean we had our workers working 18-20 hours a day.” Another participant reflected, “the estimation was weeks, if not months, to put it all back together, and we did it in ten days. Now, I mean, let’s face it, it’s three years later before we got it all straightened out.” In the span of ten days, some form of physical connection was made with the more than 100 communities that were isolated by road and bridge washouts. Over the course of the following years, permanent measures replaced the temporary repairs.

However, the theme of ‘getting things back to normal as quickly as possible’ is in tension with another dominant discourse that emerged in the dataset: ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’ This conceptual gap is mirrored by the literal gaps that Igor caused in the road network.

An editorial in the Clarenville Packet newspaper read, “in this province, we’re used to being at the mercy of the weather, but rarely has the weather been so merciless.” Likewise, a participant stated, “I’d never seen anything like it that severe … I realized how forceful nature could be, but I’d never seen it.” Another participant noted “we’ve been through wind and rain … but nothing like this … we didn’t anticipate the seriousness of it because we’d never seen anything like this before.”

There is a sense that we are entering new territory. The case of Igor begs for consideration. Given a changing climate, what is the prospect of returning to normal? As one participant stated, “It’s like we are having a 100 year storm every two months.” Storms like Igor–and Juan and Sandy and Katrina– are surpassing engineering design limits. Do we continue as is and rebuild if needed? Do we build to a higher design standard in communities already experiencing infrastructure deficits? Do we question our societal reliance on mobility?

Social-ecological resilienceWhen asked about the relationship between society and ‘Mother Nature,’ participants uniformly replied that Mother Nature is boss. How do we incorporate more environmental sensitivity into our daily practices, policies, and designs given that fossil-fueled transport is integral to our society? If getting back to normal is unwise, how do we transition to something new?

The central premise of social-ecological resilience is that the human and the ecological are intertwined–changes in one necessarily affect the other. Relative to Nova Scotia, the concept of social-ecological resilience was more peripheral in the Newfoundland dataset compared to individual and engineering resilience. It was expressed as ‘we need to change the way we do things.’

43NEWFOUNDLAND QUARTERLY

44 VOLUME 107 NUMBER 3 2014/15

Here are just a couple of ways that social-ecological resilience proposes we can do things differently:

Manage slow variables and feedbacksThe global atmosphere has warmed by almost one degree Celsius since the Industrial Revolution. The United Nations has identified a two-degree increase as a dangerous climatic tipping point, though changes are already being observed. Such warming triggers feedback effects. For example, warming melts sea ice, which increases the amount of dark water surface that in turn absorbs more heat and melts more ice.

Efforts are being made in Newfoundland and Labrador to mitigate, and adapt to, climate change including: raising public awareness via the Turn Back the Tide campaign, producing projections to give decision makers a sense of local climate impacts, creating a community adaption assessment toolkit, and encouraging a green economy via measures such as renewable energy and energy efficiency. But these activities are happening in the shadow of an oil industry that accounts for approximately one-third of provincial revenue.

Interestingly, while there was consensus amongst participants that the climate is changing, in NL’s case there was a lack of consensus that human activity is

contributing to this change. If this is not understood at the individual level, it is going to be all the more difficult to garner political will for bouncing back differently from events like Igor.

Maintain diversity and redundancyIn terms of transport, redundancy can be defined as having more than one way to get there. This province does not boast an overly redundant transport network. There are limited transport options and limited routes. As one participant noted, “one of the problems we faced was the fact that some places there was no other route: the Trans Canada, for instance. There’s ways that you just can’t get around the Burin Peninsula Highway.”

Igor hit us where it hurt, devastating the road network. However, the response to the failure of the road system was remarkable with both alternate modes and routes leveraged. One participant states, “people were cut off, but we started immediately to look at how can we get to them by sea. Could we use our provincial ferry system? Our helicopters?” Ferries, ships, helicopters, and quads filled the gaps left by cars and trucks–though notably these modes are all fossil-fueled. Different pathways were also used. One participant recalled, “we used some alternate routes