The New Orleans Principles
My interest in resilience was first kindled by work I did with many others in 2005, following Hurricane Katrina. Seeing the devastation wrought on the Gulf Coast by this storm, several chapters of the U.S. Green Building Council, particularly St. Louis and Little Rock, wanted to do what they could to help out. I was invited into the process, and we organized a series of charrettes at the 2005 Greenbuild conference in Altlanta. Some 160 people participated in those charrettes, one-fifth of them from New Orleans and the greater Gulf Coast region. Out of those charrettes emerged several...
Read MoreIntroducing the RDI Advisory Board
I am thrilled to introduce this eminent group of experts that comprise the Resilient Design Institute’s Advisory Board. Not only do I have the good fortune to call these individuals friends, but they are leaders in their fields: architects, engineers, professors, consultants, and environmentalists—people who are making a tremendous difference in the world of resilience and to whom we all owe an incredible debt of gratitude. Though I suspect that some of these faces will be familiar, let me introduce the group. Bob Berkebile, FAIA More than anyone else, Bob is the father of the green building...
Read More2012 Temperatures – One For the Record Books
For those who have made a habit of following temperature records over the past few decades, what’s most surprising with today’s news isn’t that 2012 set a record for U.S. temperatures (that had been expected for months), but rather the extent of that record. If you go back to the beginning of systematic record-keeping for the lower-48 states in 1895 until last year, the difference between the record-low (1917) and the record-high (1998) was 4.2°F. That temperature span jumped a full degree Fahrenheit with the 2012 record temperature. The average temperature in the contiguous U.S. in 2012 was...
Read MoreNew York City Task Force Convened to Respond to Superstorm Sandy
Superstorm Sandy took a major toll on New York City, but if a newly created task force succeeds, the impact of future such events should be lessened. At the request of City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the Urban Green Council (New York City’s chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council) has convened a special Building Resiliency Task Force to take an in-depth look at how to better prepare the city’s buildings for future storms and infrastructure failures. The Task Force is comprised of four committees and three working groups. The committees are Commercial...
Read MoreIt’s Raining in California
California residents love to complain about the weather. When my daughter went to college in Santa Cruz, she found that the least bit of drizzle would inspire a chorus of whining about the weather. Growing up in New England, she just didn’t get it. Northern California residents may be more justified in their complaints this time. Over the past five days, two major storm systems have dumped more than 12 inches of rain in the Shasta Lake area and west slope of the Sierra Nevada mountains, and a third storm is on the way. There has been flooding of the Napa and Russian Rivers, and several...
Read MoreGas Lines Point to a Need for Resilience
By now we’ve all seen the photos of houses buried in sand along the Jersey Shore, burned-out homes in Queens, and submerged subway stations in Manhattan. Those spectacular images were in the first wave of news from Superstorm Sandy this week. The secondary, lingering effects might not be as dramatic, but they are nonetheless very significant. And they demonstrate, ever so clearly, our need for greater resilience. As of yesterday, November 1st, there were still 4.5 million customers without power in New York, New Jersey, and surrounding states, and it appears that many of those outages may...
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