Maryland taking sea level rise seriously
On December 28, 2012, Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley signed an executive order that will boost Maryland’s resilience. The executive order, “Climate Change and Coast Smart Construction,” requires sea level rise, flooding, and extreme weather to be taken into account in the construction or reconstruction of all state buildings and facilities. O’Malley is one of the nation’s more responsive governors on the issue of climate change. In 2009 he signed legislation that calls for a 25% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in the state by 2020, compared to...
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...
Read MoreHurricane Sandy and the Case for Resilient Design
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 the airport closed down. Ironically, I was on my way to sunny Florida to give a long-planned keynote presentation on resilient design at the Sustainable Communities Workshop in Sarasota. Despite my pangs of guilt for leaving home and not being there to pull out my chainsaw should the need arise, getting the word out on resilient design remains a top priority for me, and I stuck with my plans. It...
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