By Flooding of FDR Drive in Lower Manhattan on October 30. 2012. Photo: Beth Carey, Wikimedia Commons While most of us in the Northeast were making last-minute preparations for the massive storm on Monday, I was sitting in Hartford’s Bradley Airport, about to catch one of the last flights out before
By Resilient design trend? Modern floodgates appear in vulnerable areas.
Walking along Flat Street in Brattleboro, Vermont this morning before businesses opened, I saw a sign that an important lesson about resilience had been learned over the past year. The floodgates were up in numerous doorways. Flat Street, as some readers may recall, lies in the floodplain of the
Sea-level Rise, Storm Surges, and Delaware’s Resilience Challenge (with a Sandy update)
Update Note, October 30, 2012 With Post-tropical Cyclone Sandy still whirling around somewhere to my west, the article below feels prescient. It wasn’t of course – there was no advance knowledge of this particular storm – but what just happened with Sandy is well in line with climate change trends.
Hand Pumps: An Option for Back-Up Water Pumping
Last month Jerelyn and I enjoyed a four-day vacation in Maine—a combined trip to visit family, explore Acadia National Park, and go to the Common Ground Fair—my first visit there in two or three decades! The highlight of the Common Ground fair for me was coming across a little company,
Gasoline Shortages in Southern California
Gasoline prices in San Diego. Photo: Glenn Batuyong, Creative Commons license A series of disruptions in petroleum refineries in Southern California has resulted in surging gasoline prices in recent days and spot shortages. A New York Times article Saturday morning (10/6/12) described makeshift signs at gas stations that had run
Fundamentals of Resilient Design #10: Local and Regional Food Systems
In this final installment of my ten-part series on the fundamentals of resilient design, I’m taking a look at where our food comes from and how we can achieve more resilient food systems. The average salad in the U.S. is transported roughly 1,400 miles from farm to table, and here
By Changing the Climate Change Conversation
If I go to one more meeting about climate change where the audience is lectured about how urgent, enormous and unprecedented the challenge before us is, I am going to scream. That’s because these meetings are largely attended by people who already understand that the climate is changing, are
Fundamentals of Resilient Design #9: Building Strong Communities
In this ninth installment of my ten-part series on resilient design fundamentals, I’m focusing beyond individual buildings to the community scale. Following a natural disaster or other problem that results in widespread power outages or interruptions in vehicle access or fuel supplies, people need to work together. We saw that
Resilience and Sustainability in the Food System
For example, resilience is the ability to bounce back quickly from an extreme weather event by re-establishing food production and distribution, hopefully with improvements so that such events will do less harm in the future, while sustainability is the long term challenge to slow the rate of climate change so
Fundamentals of Resilient Design #8: Water in a Drought-Prone Era
Periodic drought is something that a significant portion of the U.S. will have to get used to in the coming decades. Climate scientists tell us that while precipitation will increase overall with climate change, certain regions, including the American West, will see increased frequency of drought. I certainly saw that
New York City’s (Lack of) Resilience
There’s a great article in today’s New York Times, “New York is Lagging as Seas and Risks Rise.” In a nutshell, with 520 miles of shoreline, New York City is highly vulnerable to rising sea level and storm surges, and the City isn’t doing enough to address its vulnerabilities. The
Fundamentals of Resilient Design #7: Renewable Energy Systems for Emergency Use
House location and design are the starting points in achieving resilience—with such considerations as where the house located, how well it can weather storms and flooding, and how effectively it retains heat and utilizes passive solar for heating and daylighting. Beyond that, we should look to renewable energy systems for
Fundamentals of Resilient Design #6: Natural Cooling
A blog on cooling? In September? What gives? In my recent series of blogs, I’ve been laying out some of the basics of resilient design—which will become all the more important in this age of climate change. Achieving resilience in homes not only involves keeping them comfortable in the winter
Fundamentals of Resilient Design #5: Passive Solar Heating
When combined with a highly insulated building envelope, passive solar is the best way to ensure that a home will maintain livable conditions in the event of loss of power or heating fuel. As I discussed in my previous blog, a resilient home is extremely well-insulated, so that it can
Fundamentals of Resilient Design #4: Dramatically Better Building Envelopes
When most people think about resilience—resilience during a storm, for example—they think only about resilience during the event. How effectively will the building withstand strong winds or flooding? Equally important, if not more important, is resilience in the aftermath of that event. Hurricanes, ice storms, blizzards, wildfires, tornadoes, and other
