Welcome to the New Reality: Resilience Lessons From the Recent Winter Storms and Atmospheric Rivers

It has been a busy few weeks for emergency response crews nationwide. And there are some important resilience lessons in what’s going on with the weather.

In the Buffalo area of western New York in late-December, more than four feet of snow and 70 mile-per-hour winds created conditions in which even emergency response vehicles got stuck, hundreds of people were trapped in vehicles—some for days—and more than 40 people died—even more than in the once-in-a-century blizzard of January 1977.

*Temperature anomalies on December 19-24, 2022. Image: NOAA Climate Prediction Center*

Buffalo wasn’t the only area affected by major storm systems as 2022 came to a close. From December 21^st through 26^th, an extratropical cyclone weather system affected much of the U.S., causing blizzard and bomb cyclone conditions. On December 22nd, the vast majority of the U.S. was under some form of weather watch, warning, or advisory—all but the yellow area of the map below.

*NOAA Weather Watches, Warnings, and Advisories on December 22, 2022.* *Image: NOAA National Weather Service*

The system brought freezing conditions into the deep south and spawned bizarre events like nighttime tornadoes and thundersnow—a snowstorm accompanied by thunder and lightning. At least 95 people died in these weather events (including those noted above in the Buffalo area), more than 18,000 flights were cancelled, and more than 6.3 million customers in the U.S. lost power during portions of this period, plus another 1.2 million in Canada.

*A satellite image from January 4, 2023 showing the large weather system that has brought atmospheric rivers to much of California in early January 2023. Photo: NOAA Earth Observatory*

And now California, following years of extreme drought, is dealing with atmospheric river conditions that is dumping well over a dozen inches of rain over a several-week period in some areas. In a December 2012 RDI article It’s Raining in California, I wrote about similar conditions that occurred in the early 1860s, when nearly 40 inches of rain fell in San Francisco during a 43-day period, putting the newly founded city of Sacramento under ten feet of water and merging the San Joaquin and Sacramento Rivers into an inland sea 300 miles long and 20 miles wide. A remarkable 35 inches of rain fell in Los Angeles, and flooding extended all the way north to Washington State.

That 1860s flooding was caused by the same large-scale weather pattern that’s currently affecting California. This feature is termed an atmospheric river because of the huge amount of water carried from the tropics north in fairly narrow bands—or rivers. This weather pattern is fairly common in the winter months—and is sometimes called the Pineapple Express—but on rare occasions it can cause catastrophic flooding.

A five-day precipitation forecast *from January 8-13*, *showing heavier precipitation in darker shades of purple. Image: NOAA and the New York Times 1/10/23*

Some experts believe that, with climate change, these weather systems will become more common or more damaging, because air currents will hold more moisture and warmer conditions may cause more precipitation to fall as rain, rather than snow in higher elevations.

A secondary impact of heavy rains in California are the landslides and debris flows that will occur in many areas. Damage to vegetation and soil structure from years of drought and numerous wildfires will almost certainly exacerbate landslides. On January 10^th, mandatory evacuation orders were issued for much of the town of Montecito, due to risk of flooding and landslides—this order was exactly five years after mudslides killed 23 people in the town.

Resilience lessons from these events

There are a lot of resilience lessons we can learn from the winter storms in December 2022 and the California flooding of January 2023. At the top of the list should be preparation. When the threat is from flooding or landslides, we should be ready to evacuate at a moment’s notice. We should keep a go-bag packed with critical papers, insurance information, medicines, clothing, flashlights, and other necessities, and we should make sure that our cell phones are set up to notify us of weather alerts and evacuation orders, including the Reverse 9-1-1 feature.

Santa Barbara County issued a mandatory evacuation order for most of the Montecito and Summerland communities on Monday evening, January 9, 2023, due to flooding and risk of mudslides, and numerous roads in the area are closed. *Source: Santa Barbara County and ArcGIS.*

When not in immediate jeopardy from hazards like flooding and landslides, we need to be ready to shelter in place in our homes and apartments during multi-day power outages, closed roads, and areas cut off from key services. In Buffalo, a ban on driving extended five-and-a-half days in December, forcing residents to stay home—some without power.

This means keeping plenty of food on hand, especially non-perishable foods like canned goods, dry beans, and rice. I recommend enough to feed your family for at least three weeks and, ideally, six weeks. That’s sounds really hard, but we’re not talking about shopping carts full of groceries. Emergency food can consist of a few gallon jars of shelf-stable rice and dry beans.

*Power outages by county on the morning of January 10, 2023, when 230,000 customers in California were without power. Source: PowerOutage.us*

Being prepared also means storing potable water on-site in case municipal water interruptions occur or those of us not on municipal water systems can’t pump water from our wells. In rural Vermont, where I live, the most challenging aspect of a power outage tends to be access to potable water, since most of us rely on deep-well submersible pumps drawing water from drilled wells.

We also should make sure we have enough stored fuel to operate our heating systems or firewood for at least emergency use in wood stoves or fireplaces. Making sure our vehicles are fueled up in advance of a major storm can also be a good idea.

And some form of backup power can be important. When an approaching weather system approaches that could result in a power outage, I bring my portable battery system down to our house from my cabin and charge it up—so that we’re have light and an ability to charge our cell phones during an extended outage.

*Flooding in downtown Santa Barbara in January 2023. Photo: Santa Barbara Fire Department*

Addressing resilience in our building standards and building codes

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has developed a wealth of best management practices regarding resilience to floods, high winds, wildfire, and other hazards that are likely to become more extreme with climate change. But most designers and builders aren’t incorporating state-of-the-art resilience features into their buildings.

We need to do a better job in our architecture schools to teach resilient design, we need to incorporate resilience practices into our vocational schools, and we need to improve our building codes to provide municipalities with the tools they need to ensure that new buildings will be safer and more durable.

Passive survivability

Enhancing resilience should also involve ensuring that our homes and apartments will keep us safer in they lose power or there are interruptions in heating fuel. This is the idea of passive survivability that RDI has long promoted.

Houses and apartments buildings built with extremely high insulation levels, high-performance windows, passive solar design, smart orientation, natural ventilation, vegetative shading, and daylighting will do a much better job at keeping their occupants safe during extended power outages and interruptions in heating fuel.

Indeed, energy design that achieves a reasonable level of passive survivability should be incorporated into life-safety building codes, just as is done with our fire and seismic codes.

The fact that upwards of a quarter-million California electricity customers are without power this week and 7.5 million customers in the U.S. and Canada lost power in the extreme winter storms a few weeks ago should be a wake-up call for building-code-setting bodies and the municipalities that adopt those codes. Yes, we have a lot of work to address our existing buildings, but we should at least be building new buildings that achieve significant resilience.

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Along with founding the Resilient Design Institute in 2012, Alex is founder of BuildingGreen, Inc. To keep up with his latest articles and musings, you can sign up for his Twitter feed. To receive e-mail notices of new blogs, sign up at the top of the page.

David W. Orr, Ph.D

David W. Orr is Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies & Politics, Emeritus. He also served as “Counselor to the President” of Oberlin College for ten years. He is the author of eight books, including Dangerous Years: Climate Change and the Long Emergency (Yale, 2016) and Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse (Oxford, 2009) and co-editor of three others. He has authored over 220 articles, reviews, book chapters, and professional publications. In the past twenty-five years he has served as a board member or adviser to ten foundations and on the Boards of many organizations including the Rocky Mountain Institute, Bioneers, and the Aldo Leopold Foundation.

He is currently a Trustee of the Alliance for Sustainable Colorado, Children and Nature Network, and the WorldWatch Institute. He has been awarded nine honorary degrees and a dozen other awards including a Lyndhurst Prize, a National Achievement Award from the National Wildlife Federation, leadership awards from the U.S. Green Building Council (2014) and from Second Nature (2012), and a lifetime achievement award from Green Energy Ohio and the North American Association for Environmental Education. He has lectured at hundreds of colleges and universities throughout the U.S., Europe, Latin America, and Asia. He headed the effort to design, fund, and build the Adam Joseph Lewis Center, which was named by an AIA panel in 2010 as “the most important green building of the past thirty years,” as “one of thirty milestone buildings of the twentieth century” by the U.S. Department of Energy, and as one of “52 game-changing buildings of the past 170 years” by the editors of Building Design +Construction in January, 2016. He was instrumental in the design and funding of the Peter B. Lewis Gateway Center. He is the founder of the Oberlin Project and a founder of the journal Solutions. His current work is on the state of American democracy.