Tag

hurricanes

Metropolis Think Tank Looks at Puerto Rico

On
by Deane

It was an honor to be invited to attend and cover the DC edition of Metropolis Magazine’s Think Tank program. Susan Szenasy, who is director of design innovation for Metropolis, led a discussion on architects’ efforts at recovery in the aftermath of the 2017 hurricane season. Speakers included Marilyn Shapley, senior policy adviser, Mercy Corps; Erika Ruiz, director, Enterprise Community Partners; Armando Nazario, senior associate, Perkins+Will; Yanel de Ángel, associate principal, Perkins+Will. An excerpt of Think Tank coverage follows.

How Architects Are Helping Communities in Puerto Rico Rebuild

Panelists at this Metropolis Think Tank event at Perkins+Will’s D.C. office stressed the importance of remembering that there’s no one-size-fits-all fix.

It has been more than a year since Hurricanes Irma and María ravaged Puerto Rico. Even now, accurate estimates of the actual death toll—in excess of 3,000 fatalities, according to the latest available report—remain elusive. The commonwealth’s power grid still lies in ruins.

Simply put, “the island stopped working after the hurricane,” said Armando Nazario, a senior designer at Perkins+Will, at a recent Metropolis Think Tank panel convened at the firm’s Washington, D.C., office. The discussion, moderated by Metropolis director of design innovation Susan S. Szenasy, dwelled on the challenges of delivering aid to Puerto Rico’s unevenly developed and funded urban and rural communities, each with its own pressing needs. “We also don’t have the census data that helps support this [to make] each community self-sufficient,” Nazario explained.

Working with representatives from various international organizations, Nazario and his Perkins+Will colleague Yanel de Ángel, an associate principal, helped spearhead ResilientSEE, which aims to “build a resilient Puerto Rico.” Self-sufficiency, de Ángel affirmed, is key to meeting the group’s goal because “if you’re not feeling empowered, a sense of responsibility cannot be bestowed.”

For municipal rebuilding efforts, the panelists stressed the importance of remembering that there’s no one-size-fits-all fix. For some neighborhoods, residents want centralized community hubs with dedicated solar panels; in others, people are channeling resources into individual household solar systems. Other regions have looked to invest in water filters.

“You have to start that conversation with the community,” said Marilyn Shapley, a senior policy adviser with Mercy Corps, a nongovernmental aid organization. “We have to start with conversations of what that risk is, what their risk tolerance is, how their safety nets are in place, if they have them in place. It does take a village, and it does start with actually talking to every single village.”

Read the full story at Metropolis

Hurricanes in Architectural Record

On
by Deane

Every year between June and November, Atlantic cities brace themselves for hurricane season. In 2017, three major hurricanes struck the U.S. and wreaked extraordinary damage and loss of life. I wrote about the effect of these hurricanes and the subsequent recovery efforts each region has undertaken in the year since for Architectural Record. An excerpt of the article follows. 

To call the 2017 hurricane season “devastating” hardly captures the severity of the toll levied upon lives, homes, and infrastructure over the course of a single month. Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria were responsible for hundreds of deaths—almost 3,000 in Puerto Rico alone, according to the most recent estimates—and approximately $300 billion in damages last year. Each of these storms brought enough destruction to rank in the five costliest since 1980, and their quick succession compounded the carnage; many hurricane victims had barely recovered from one storm before the next arrived.

Recovery efforts began as soon as the winds subsided and the waters receded, yet, a year later, many displaced residents are still rebuilding, and, in some places, power still a problem. In the immediate aftermath of the 2017 season, Architectural Record contacted architects in each affected region and has followed up with many of the same people a year into the recovery efforts. Rising sea levels and climate change are pushing waterfront communities to reevaluate their hurricane preparedness strategies and push for increased resiliency measures, to make communities better able to withstand whatever weather is in future forecasts.

Hurricane Maria
Landfall: Sept. 20, 2017 (Puerto Rico)
Fatalities: 1,427 (latest estimate as of press time)
Damages: $125 billion

The damage dealt to Puerto Rico in the one-two punch of Irma and Maria was so extensive that its government estimates recovery may take another decade, according to a report issued to Congress in August. The island’s aging electrical grid, strained by Irma, was nearly obliterated during Maria, leaving 3.4 million inhabitants in the dark for months; though authorities say power has been restored, the system is considered vulnerable. Also ongoing are efforts to assess with any accuracy exactly how many fatalities Maria caused; long-term flooding, combined with lack of potable water and basic sanitation, are among the lingering detrimental effects that have elevated the number of deaths indirectly caused by Maria, especially among weaker segments of the population. The island’s economy and infrastructure, which were already suffering prior to the hurricanes, will require significant reinvestment just to bring baseline services back online.

One of the biggest challenges in Puerto Rico’s recovery is its geographic position as an island territory; Florida and Texas, by contrast, were able to make use of established interstate routes, networks, and supply chains to begin disaster assistance even before their respective storms hit. “Being on an island, it’s easy to see your borders, and it’s also easy to understand that you’re kind of on your own and there’s no way to get immediate help,” says Jonathan Marvel, one of the cofounders of Resilient Power Puerto Rico (RPPR). His team mobilized in the immediate aftermath of last year’s hurricanes to begin installing solar arrays on the roofs of community centers, to power up critical services, and, long-term, create redundancy with the power grid in the event of future outages. “What we’re trying to do is create a shelter-in-place model, using renewable energy, that could be attractive at a global scale for other places,” he says.

Read the full story at Architectural Record.