What Can We Do to Prevent Disasters, with Harriet Festing

October 17, 2023

105. What Can We Do to Prevent Disasters with Harriet Festing

Preparing for disasters is a big challenge, especially when the problem you face is outside of your immediate area. Sometimes just fixing your home isn’t enough.  In this episode, you’ll meet Harriet Festing, the co-founder and executive director of Anthropocene Alliance as she talks about the work her organization does to support people navigating this difficult path.   

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Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/anthropocenealliance/

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LinkedIn Personal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harriet-festing/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/anthropocene-alliance/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AnthropoceneAL

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anthropocenealliance/ 

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Here's the link to the trailer for the documentary film I'm making: Built to Last: Buyer Beware.

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Transcript

George Siegal: 0:00

Thank you for joining me on this week's Homeowners Be Aware podcast. Have you done an assessment of your home to understand where your risks are in the event of a disaster? That includes anything from flooding to fire, wind, dangerous chemicals, nearby earthquakes, tornadoes. There may be things you should be concerned about that you haven't even thought of, and my guest today is the co-founder and executive director of Anthropocene Alliance, an organization that helps people who are victims of these type of disasters or have the potential to be victims. You'll be inspired by Harriet Festing and her story of how it's possible to be proactive and avoid being a disaster victim. I'm George Siegal, and this is Homeowners Be Aware, the podcast that teaches you everything you need to know about being a homeowner. Harriet, thank you so much for joining me today.

Harriet Festing: 0:53

Thank you so much, George. I'm delighted to be on this podcast.

George Siegal: 0:57

Now, you're in England right now. How are things over there?

Harriet Festing: 1:01

England is just as you expect England to be raining kind of gently and actually rather fritterly and it's delightful.

George Siegal: 1:11

I've only been there once, but I loved it. We had such a good time, what a great place. So tell me about Anthropocene Alliance, what you guys do. I know that one of the focuses of my podcast, or the main focus, is to wake people up and have them protect their investment, and you guys do a lot to help people that may not be thinking about all this stuff. Tell me about what the organization does.

Harriet Festing: 1:35

Good, Okay. Well, the sort of big picture you know, the spiel we do is that we are an alliance of currently 220 frontline communities fighting for climate and environmental justice. So we are actually the nation's largest alliance, and so what that means in practice is that we work with people who are being directly impacted by climate change but also environmental abuse. So people whose homes are flooding, they're impacted by wildfire, by drought, by heat, but also toxic contamination, the petrochemical industry, mining, logging, superfund sites, hazardous waste sites those are mostly low income. So we you know we work with the jargon is historically marginalized, underserved communities, but actually we span all income groups.

Harriet Festing: 2:38

It's mostly we work with community-based organizations, but it doesn't have to be so, you know. It could be a nonprofit that is set up specifically to help people in a community, or it could be just one person whose home has flooded and reaches out to us for help. What we would say to that one person is find some neighbors and then we'll help you. So we always focus on groups of residents, and that's partly because the impacts are happening. The impacts that are happening outside the home are normally to do with decisions being made higher up by government, and so you need a group of residents to start to advocate for solutions.

George Siegal: 3:22

Absolutely, whenever we see a disaster. You know, a lot of times the news media is right there at the coast. A lot of times there's really nice houses at the beach and you see all the damage that's there. But there's a lot of people that don't get the coverage, whose houses get flooded or get destroyed by a storm, and that can be life altering. In most cases it is for them, isn't it?

Harriet Festing: 3:44

It really is. It really is, yes. So you know it's funny, isn't it, that you just need that little bit of water in your home and then it's. You know it's such a big impact, particularly if you can't afford to make the changes. So we've worked with people who can't sell their home because it's not sellable, can no longer ensure it and can't repair it, so they're completely trapped.

George Siegal: 4:14

Now what do you find with the people that end up being victims? Is it an example of they didn't have the money to have insurance or to fix up their home, or because I don't know, that it's a money problem in a lot of people's cases? Most of us just don't think bad stuff's going to happen to us. Certainly, if you can't afford insurance, that's awful and you have a real problem. But do you think people just don't think disaster is going to find them?

Harriet Festing: 4:36

I think it's a mixture of people don't think disasters are going to find them. I would say honestly, there's a large attempt to make sure that people don't find out about disasters. You know there's a. So I know you had Rob Moore of NRDC earlier on and he probably spoke about flood disclosures. You know there's a big effort to make sure that homeowners don't see their risks, and so that's one thing. The other thing is so many of the residents we work with aren't in a flood zone, so they would be deemed not to be at risk. And then, of course, there's things like heat and wildfire. You know, however much research you do, I mean particularly heat. I mean honestly, right now you could say that everybody's impacted by climate change. It's just the degrees to which they're impacted.

George Siegal: 5:32

You know what's interesting is with flood insurance. For example, if you're not in a flood zone what we've had experts on that have talked about the victims of Hurricane Harvey in Houston could have purchased flood insurance for $300, $300 to $400. And that would have helped them get their life back together after the storm. You think it's important for people to know that flood insurance isn't expensive if you don't live in a flood zone.

Harriet Festing: 5:57

Right, absolutely. Yes, we have flood insurance on our home. We don't live in a flood zone and we don't think it's likely to flood. But it's not a lot of money and it's worth doing. But most of the folks we work with flood insurance isn't Well. So most of the folks we work with are in high risk areas. Unsurprisingly, they're coming to us because they're being directly impacted and flood insurance is just something that is completely unaffordable to them. So they're really just trying to survive every day and they might have their home because it's been passed down. But from generation to generation we also work a lot with people. So, for example, in major cities like Chicago, where I used to live, a lot of the flooding that's occurring is basement flooding and that's not actually covered by the National Flood Insurance Programme. So you could get a private sewer backup with a private insurance company, but most people they just don't know that. They don't know that that's something that they might need to do.

George Siegal: 7:05

You think fortifying homes is also an answer in my documentary film, the Last House Standing, Habitat for Humanity builds houses that tend to survive these disasters really well because of the detail that goes into building them. So it's not an example of well, if you don't have a multimillion-dollar home, you can't survive. Probably more needs to be done to have people understand the risk to their house and the improvements that need to be made.

Harriet Festing: 7:31

Yes, you could most certainly fortify your home. So the other thing that we're working on we're seeing a lot that's happening is that a resident is fairly safe in their home. They're not in the flood plain. They might be in a coastal area or an area where there's increasing heavy rains, but they've not witnessed flooding. Then a development occurs adjacent to them that basically in an area that might have been in a flood-prone area, and then suddenly they become like the fishbowl for all the rain that would have previously gone on that property. So I guess I keep going back to. So, while there are a lot of decisions that homeowners can make and fortifying their homes is one of them, I would also encourage them to look at the decisions being made in their community and make sure that those are robust decisions, particularly around development, absolutely.

George Siegal: 8:33

You really have to be on top of what's going on in local politics, because they do make decisions whether it's when they're where that water might go, building, rebuilding, all those things and if people don't keep an eye on that, you never know what's going to happen. Now you talk about climate change. I know it becomes such a political issue when people are on one side of it or the other. It seems like something we could all just agree on. If there's a problem, let's try to come up with solutions that, in the short term, would make things better for people. So, rather than saying you could solve climate change and we're going to change the world, what are baby steps people can take to make a difference?

Harriet Festing: 9:14

Obviously, they can just move from an area that's not safe. Do you mean in terms of acting on climate change or protecting them in their homes? There's two slightly different sets of decisions.

George Siegal: 9:27

They are, and I would think that, because I hear people get really passionate about climate change and like so every time there's a disaster, you get people arguing going well, that's because of climate change, okay. So if we reverse that now, if everybody did something to improve climate change, I mean, how many years would that take to fix? What I'm talking about are things we can do right away, and what you're saying is right a better awareness of where you live, and maybe you don't live in a dangerous area.

Harriet Festing: 9:53

So, yeah, I don't think you can make those small steps and not get fully engaged on the issue of climate change. It's huge. Millions of homes are going to get displaced. People who might feel that they're safe right now are not going to be safe fairly quickly, and that's both for flooding and heat and wildfire. So people, honestly, they're going to have to get political. This is going to be needed and at the same time, they are going to need to protect their homes. So they're going to need to look at those risks.

Harriet Festing: 10:33

There's a fantastic site risk factor that helps homeowners understand their risks.

Harriet Festing: 10:41

Sometimes I look at that and I look at some of the data and go this is really scary and it's funny just how little it's spoken about.

Harriet Festing: 10:52

So we talk about climate change in what feels maybe more abstract way, or we hear about climate change as it relates to the latest hurricane, but we don't necessarily look at the maps and digest what it might mean for us in our community and look at those risks. So we most definitely encourage people to look at risk factor, not just for flooding and again, it's not about the flood plain necessarily. So there are people who we're working with whose homes aren't flooding and can directly see that there are development that is occurring adjacent to them that will make their homes flood, and it's something that they feel they have no control over. So you have to be political on this, because otherwise you're going to read, you know, I guess. What I mean is there are pretty crazy decision makers, and that's not just a decision of whether or not you think climate change is real or not. It's a decision about what's going on in your community that could have a major impact on your investment.

George Siegal: 11:56

Yeah, I don't know how it is over in England, but I know when the conversation comes up here. You know whether or not you believe in climate change probably depends on what news channel you're watching, because of what each side is feeding you. So it just makes it really difficult to have a true understanding. So people really should do the research. I mean, I've talked to enough experts that believe the climate is changing and affecting things and we need to to do more. What I think those when people see a daunting task of save the climate 100 years from now. I want to save it so my house doesn't blow away tomorrow or my house doesn't burn down and people are gravitating to risky areas. You know we tend to move to places because they're nice places without really thinking about how bad it could go.

Harriet Festing: 12:41

You know with us, because our starting point isn't climate change. Our starting point is there's home in my water. It's always there's water in my home. What can I do about it? The controversy we don't spend the time talking about climate change or whether or not is real or not. We talk about what needs to happen to address it, both within the community and more widely. So you know there have been. There's research that shows there's more homes being built in the floodplain than outside the floodplain. So the very place where FEMA has said this is not safe to be is where the bulk of development is currently occurring and it goes sorry I've said this a few times, but just just as a reminder that doesn't just impact those new homes that are built on the floodplain. That impacts those homes that aren't in the floodplain, but suddenly that flood water is going to be displaced onto your home. So you know, don't think you're safe just because you're outside the floodplain.

George Siegal: 13:41

Absolutely. Now we had in my film we had Henk Ovink on, who is from the Netherlands and he was telling us how and he told this story on 60 Minutes the government will move people if they're in the wrong place, not just physically move them, but they give them incentives to relocate because of the dangers where they are. And in this country we're seeing insurance is becoming unaffordable. A lot of people can't get homeowners insurance. So do you think the market will kind of dictate where people can even afford to live anymore? And this is not just wealthy people. I know people that are just struggling to pay for a small house insurance. That's now gone up to 10, 15, $20,000 a year.

Harriet Festing: 14:20

Right. So I think the market will dictate where poor people live. Right now, with FEMA, So in order for a resident to get insurance, their community needs to be signed up for the FEMA's National Flood Insurance Program and that program kind of regulates what, how development could occur within a community. And I've spoken to many state floodplain managers and it's their job to make sure that communities adhere to those standards and they basically say that they're like that. Those set of standards are essentially incentives to do exactly the wrong thing.

Harriet Festing: 15:05

They are so weak that you know they're encouraging bad development. So as long as those regulations are so poor, I don't think the signals, the market signals, will work the way they need to. Now FEMA is looking at those regulations at the moment and I'm hoping that they will strengthen them because it's you know, it's not just about regulation, it's making sure that existing residents, not just the new ones, are safe. And if that development, if that's bad development, which is the bulk of the development at the moment in coastal areas, then existing people who are safe will become unsafe.

George Siegal: 15:47

Well, that's why I think it's important for each individual to be educated to understand the risks and the kind of stuff you're talking about, because if we're waiting for government, especially in this country, to do it, they're gonna fight over it, cause one side's gonna say, well, I don't want the government telling me what I can do, and the other side's gonna say, well, we need to tell you what to do because you're not capable of doing it yourself. And then nothing gets done and people just continue to get victimized. So if we are educated, I think we have to stop rewarding bad construction. We have to stop rewarding buying a house in a dangerous area and accepting somebody else's risk. I mean, if we wake up, can't we make a difference from the bottom up?

Harriet Festing: 16:23

Absolutely so, you know, let me tell you about one of the first communities that we launched in 2017. And one of the first groups that we started working with was led by a woman called Susan Lyle, and she set up the Citizens Committee for Flood Relief in De Soto, Missouri. Her home actually has never flooded and she's slightly outside the town of De Soto, but the town itself has flooded badly and, in fact, there are hundreds of homes at risk and three people have died as a result of the flooding. The town, city, city's response to that was let's just pretend it didn't happen. You know, let's just, let's just carry on as we're doing.

Harriet Festing: 17:08

And Susan, like many, I would say, you know, most of our members are women and they're just they're, you know, incredibly persistent women who, in Susan's case, she just couldn't bear to see people suffering the way they were, you know, repeatedly having to evacuate from their homes and, you know, and some people drowning as a result, and so she just set up this group and started to push the city to do some action, and I think at that stage, she didn't have quite the knowledge that she's, you know, the knowledge that we had, in order to then know what to do next, and so we were then able to connect her to a group of partners. So, for example, many cities don't know that the Army Corps of Engineers has a fantastic program called Silver Jackets and they will provide pro bono technical assistance to communities to help them understand the flooding, which residents are impacted and the kinds of solutions that were needed. So we got them started and they identified. So I guess one of the things that was kind of scary was that Susan knew the situation was bad but she didn't realize just how bad it was until the Army Corps of Engineers did some new flood maps and showed that most of the main street was in the flood plain and a lot, of, a lot of residents were in severe risk. And then we've been working with her ever since. We've got a connected up to another organization called the thriving earth exchange who will provide pro bono scientists to work with community leaders to help them understand the situation.

Harriet Festing: 18:45

We got in some planning experts to do some plans around what could be done to reduce the flooding. We got in an organization called buy in community planning and they did a survey of residents to better understand which residents were so badly impacted. They just wanted to have their homes brought out and we now have funding proposals in to get some of those homes brought out and I expect to be putting in some funding proposals later this year and early next year to get in some of those nature based solutions that could reduce the flood risks in the city. But really this started with one determined woman and now. So originally, you know, the mail is just kind of can you go away please? And now she's got everybody supportive of her work. It's fantastic and we have so many stories like that.

George Siegal: 19:40

That is awesome because nothing would have happened and she's probably saving a lot of people, because I don't know that people truly understand. You mentioned this towards the beginning of the podcast. If you just get a couple inches of water in your house, how many things are ruined, how it wicks up into the walls, the mold, the floors, the furniture. You could be completely devastated by that. So if there are things you can do to make sure it never happens, you want to do that.

Harriet Festing: 20:10

Right, right, right. And so the problem is you know. So let me give you another example Jackie Jones of Reedsville, Georgia. She was just at that stage where the floodwaters were lapping at the window sill, so the water hasn't yet entered the home. But she knows she's at severe risk.

Harriet Festing: 20:30

But what can you? There's not a lot you can do as a resident when the floodwaters are coming down the hill. Basically she's in the ball and she's in the receiving end of the community's floodwaters, and that's because they have a bad drainage system. But as a homeowner there's nothing she can actually do on her property. And in fact one of the first things we did when we started helping her was to get an engineering firm to go to her home and some of the other residents who were flooding and just say is there anything that could be done within the property to actually reduce the flood risks? And the solution? The answer was no. This is a community-wide problem.

Harriet Festing: 21:12

So we then helped Jackie Jones set up a group. Again, one woman went door to door putting in flyers, organized workshops, hosted the engineering firm and then we helped her write a funding proposal to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. They have a national coastal resilience fund and we were successful with that. So now we have the same engineering firm looking at the set of solutions that would be needed community-wide and we also have the Army Corps of Engineers Silver Jackets Program working with that engineering firm as well, so we're able to get this suite of solutions. Most residents just wouldn't know how to navigate that. You need an organization like ours who understand and most cities honestly wouldn't know. They're just they're not trained in hydrology. So it needs organizations like ours to kind of bring in and help communities navigate those, the potential solutions and the kind of providers that might help them.

George Siegal: 22:16

Well, that's another great story, and I talk all the time about how you should try to get them to disclose to you what the history is of your property. But the kind of stuff you're talking about is history is changing as you own that property. So when you bought it, there might not have been a problem, but 20 years later, with development around you, all of a sudden you might be in a high-risk flood area.

Harriet Festing: 22:37

Exactly, exactly. Yes, yes, yes, yes.

George Siegal: 22:42

So you really have to stay on touch of what's on top of what's going on around where you live just as well. So how can people get in touch with you and get involved with your organization?

Harriet Festing: 22:52

So they can Google Anthropocene Alliance or it's Anthropocene Alliance dot org, and there's a contact us page and they can just fill that in and we'll set up a meeting with them to understand the issues they're facing and then take it from there. Membership's entirely free, and so our job maybe I didn't actually say what it is we do so we basically do three things. We help get free technical assistance to members, and that's across the suite of climate and environmental impacts. So you know we haven't spoken about. You know we work with many residents who are being poisoned out of their homes because of some industry that isn't being properly regulated. So we work a lot on those issues or logging, mining, superfund sites, etc. As well as heat and drought and wildfires. So any of those issues. If people are being impacted, as long as they're willing to work on behalf of their wider community, not just themselves, then we will be delighted to work with them, and so technical assistance will help get them. That includes scientific planning, legal.

Harriet Festing: 24:08

We have a set of partner organizations we work with to get that suite of support. We also help them with communications and media support. We help get the money. So we actually write. We'll do a couple of things. Either we'll write grants on behalf of our members and then distribute that money, and so I mentioned previously the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. Sometimes we submit the grant on behalf of multiple members and then we give them small grants to do work. We also help our members write grants themselves, and then we support them with advocacy. So we just help tell them some of the strategies that they might need in order to build influence in their communities.

Harriet Festing: 24:55

And we work with groups that are in major cities, in remote rural communities in the Pacific Islands, in New York. You know we're keen to work with anyone and everyone.

George Siegal: 25:08

And every year, there's no shortage of disasters that probably make your work even more important. They just keep popping up, don't they?

Harriet Festing: 25:14

Exactly, exactly, and so we help our members in their own community with their advocacy. But our goal really, as we start to build a critical mass of communities, is to do more state and national advocacy and start to put pressure to get some of the kind of solutions that we need, such as the National Flood Insurance Programme, stormwater Standards that I just mentioned. They need to be strengthened and we need a whole load of flood victims and in fact we worked with Rob Moore and NLDC to get many of our members kind of flooding the public hearings that FEMA had in order to make sure that the voices of flood victims were expressed and heard.

George Siegal: 25:59

Yeah, that's a frustrating position to be in for those victims. So that's important work. Harriet, all your information contacts will be in the show notes. I really appreciate you coming on and keep up the good work you guys are doing important work.

Harriet Festing: 26:14

Wonderful. Thank you so much, really appreciate it.

George Siegal: 26:17

If you have a homeowner story, good or bad, I'd love to hear from you. There is a contact form in the show notes. Fill it out and you might end up being a guest on an upcoming podcast. And if you enjoyed what you heard today, please become a subscriber so you don't miss an episode. A new one comes out every Tuesday. Thanks again for listening. See you next time.