024 Brock Long and Ashley Ward on Response and Resilience

On this episode of Find Your Sustain Ability, host Laura England sits down with Dr. Ashley Ward, director of the Heat Policy Innovation Hub at Duke University and Brock Long, former FEMA administrator and executive chairman of Hagerty Consulting, for a deep dive into the meaning and practice of community resilience. Drawing from their extensive experience in climate policy, emergency management and public health, the conversation explores how communities can prepare for and adapt to increasingly frequent and complex climate-related challenges—from extreme heat to infrastructure vulnerabilities. The discussion emphasizes the importance of trust, collaboration and policy reform while also highlighting practical strategies that empower individuals, institutions and governments to build stronger, more resilient communities. Set against the backdrop of Appalachian State University’s Climate Resilience Forum and recent local disasters, the episode brings a grounded, urgent and hopeful lens to the future of sustainable development.

 

 

Transcript

Laura:

Welcome everyone to the Find Your Sustain Ability podcast. I'm your host, Laura England from the Department of Sustainable Development, and I'm currently working full-time on App State's five-year climate literacy initiative called Pathways to Resilience. Today's episode focuses on climate resilience. I'll introduce our expert guests with an abbreviated version of their bios and then we'll get to know them more, get to know about their work as we go.

Dr. Ashley Ward, welcome to the studio. Dr. Ward is the director of the Heat Policy Innovation Hub at Duke University's Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment and Sustainability. And her work focuses on the health impacts of climate extremes as well as community resilience. She works with communities, public agencies, scientists, and decision makers to create effective policy solutions to climate challenges. Ashley's expertise and skill set are in high demand these days. She participated in the White House Extreme Heat Summit last fall, and through Duke's Heat Policy Innovation Hub, she's worked with United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, the World Meteorological Organization and the World Health Organization.

Also with us is Brock Long, executive chairman of Hagerty Consulting and former administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. While serving as FEMA administrator, Brock coordinated the federal government's response to over 144 presidentially declared disasters and 112 wildfires, including three of the nation's most devastating hurricanes and five of the worst wildfires ever experienced.

While at FEMA, Brock also led major initiatives like Community Lifelines, which will have long-lasting impacts on the emergency management community. This leader in the field of emergency management is also a two-time App State alum. He completed a bachelor's degree here in '97 and a Master's of Public Administration in '99. Brock and Ashley, thank you so much for joining me in the studio today. I'm excited to learn more about your work.

Ashley:

Thanks for having me.

Brock:

Yeah, great to be here.

Laura:

And also want to note and acknowledge for our listeners that Ashley and Brock just spoke to a room full of students, faculty, staff, and community members at our Climate Resilience Forum. And it was just fascinating to learn about your expertise, your area of work, and the work that we all have to do as a town here in Boone, as a broader community, a state nation world. We have a lot of work to do to achieve climate resilience, don't we?

Brock:

Yeah, absolutely. I think it was great to see almost 300 people show up today.

Ashley:

It was packed.

Brock:

It was a packed house. So I think that the Pathways to Resilience program at App got some real influence to make some changes in maybe the way that we go forward in the future to talk about resilience.

Laura:

Thanks. It's great to hear that. And the student participation has been so wonderful so far, and they're learning so much, especially when we bring in experts like the two of you. We have an audience with wide-ranging backgrounds. So I thought we'd start with a foundational question about resilience, climate resilience, community resilience. Can you share a little bit of your thoughts? I know people define it differently, but share a little bit of your thoughts on what do we mean by community resilience and climate resilience?

Ashley:

I think officially the common definition is the ability to bounce back after something happens. That's what resilience is. I think it would be nice if people thought really holistically about the ecosystem in which they live when they think about resilience. So what I've heard Brock talk about a lot is do you know your neighbors? Your neighbors are often the ones that are going to be there for you when something happens. What kind of skill sets do you bring to the table that can help you in the aftermath of some kind of big event?

So it's more than just about storing water, which is important or storing up food, but I think it's also about building a network, a community network directly around you, not that you have to drive 30 minutes to get to, so that when something does happen, that you have the security of working together with the people that are there with you at that moment.

Laura:

That really resonates with my Helene experience. Thanks for that, Ashley.

Brock:

Yeah, I think resilience lies in the eye of the beholder. It's really hard. I mean, to put it in a box, it means so many different things. For me personally, we were joking earlier, but honestly, I mean, I want to be able to have tangible skills within my family to where we reduce our dependence on any outside government when it comes to things like retirement or just our ability to live in Hickory, North Carolina.

Part of my platform at FEMA was financial resilience, helping people understand how to break negative cycles with money, maybe escape poverty, but also being properly insured and making sure that you're insuring the greatest chunk of wealth that you have attached to you and your family, like your homes, those types of things. But then when I think about resilience for a community, I always ask the question of what's got to be working in your community that if it's not working, people are dying or life routine is disrupted? And once you identify that, then how do we shore that up and mitigate those elements or what we call community lifelines?

Laura:

Yeah, talk about those community lifelines. The students in our forum did a nice job of identifying them with you, but for our listeners-

Brock:

They did, yeah.

Laura:

... what are some of those key lifelines?

Brock:

So I can even back up and tell you how we even arrived at lifelines. When I went into office, I had two months to understand where we were with FEMA, to be briefed fully on FEMA's mission, which is much larger than most people or the nation's news media would tell you. And I had two months to come up to speed on where we are versus where I thought we needed to be and understanding the real vulnerabilities in this country. And then Harvey, Irma, Maria, the California wildfires happen.

One of the things that happened during Hurricane Maria into Puerto Rico was when the whole island is wiped out and you've got a reduced capacity at the local level of government, the Commonwealth as a result of rotting infrastructure or just the ability that they've been impacted from the storm, you start to think of things like what's the first thing that needs to go into this island?

And the nation's news media was wrapped around the axle when it came to food and water, food and water. We need food and water. We need food and water. And honestly, it really wasn't that. There was a thirty-day food supply on the island that had never been pre-planned into response plans. And, you know, we don't look at what's already in our community that we could use before the federal government has to come to town.

And I was getting frustrated because I thought that we were just going through our checklist, our response checklist, and we were sending... We ended up getting $2 billion of food and water to Puerto Rico when there was a thirty-day food supply on the island already. That didn't make sense. But I started thinking of who are we keeping off the island because of the bandwidth to get into the ports or the airport. There was only one airport that we got open. The United States Marines opened up the San Juan Airport, and I was told you could fly one cargo jet in every 30 minutes. So what do you put on that plane?

Ask yourself that question, if you're head of FEMA and you hear what the news media is saying and they're not always getting it right. And we started asking the question of who are we kicking off those planes? And honestly, it boiled down to a failure in communications, which is the biggest lesson learned after every disaster. A failure to communicate is the biggest lesson learned after 9/11, after Katrina and Maria. It's hard to communicate in North Carolina what the situational awareness is from a Hurricane Helene. And here we go again. I learned that lesson again and it was on my watch.

So I started asking that question, what's got to be working? Then if it's not working, then life routine is disrupted or people are dying. And we started recalibrating our focus on are we solving the real problems and understanding situational awareness? And that's where the community lifelines came about.

So with Puerto Rico, we were kicking the telecommunications people or holding them back when we should have been sending them first so that they could get the systems up and running so that we could communicate to people where to go get the food rather than getting into these national news arguments over there's not enough food and water on the island, which was totally false.

And so we stepped back, everything's blowing up. There was a day I briefed eight different governors from Tinian and Saipan to the US Virgin Islands at one point. And it was, "Hold on, let's go back to the bare basics of what's got to be working." We never lost safety and security. You have to have safety and security within your community for it to be a viable community that grows. A sustainable community has to be safe and secure. You're not going to be sustainable if you're not safe and secure, right? We never lost safety and security in Puerto Rico or the US Virgin Islands, so we made sure that that didn't happen.

The next thing is bulk water systems, farm to table food systems, the grocery stores. How do you get the grocery stores back up and running, the logistics that's there. What's needed to get them back up and running so that people can go to their neighborhood market rather than being dependent on FEMA? Energy, power and fuel. You fix the energy, you solve problems across the other infrastructure because it's all interdependent and most of it's based on energy and fuel. Hospital systems, transportation systems.

And so when we started to get the governors to rethink in Community Lifelines format to tell us where they were having the greatest difficulty of getting those lifelines turned back on so that we could focus the limited federal support that we had to eight different states at any given time over facing wildfires, hurricanes, or whatever, so that we could really fine tune where we were putting our stuff. So the question is now to build a sustainable community is if we could identify those things, then what are we doing about it to make sure that one, who owns it, are they taking care of it? Two, should we be mitigating those things to make sure that when they go down they're not down for long and that there are response plans in place to help whether it's publicly or privately owned, infrastructure come back up very quickly.

Ashley:

And I think, can I add one thing to that, which is are the policies that we have in place, policies that support those actions? In many cases, we have policies in place that make it difficult to actually implement the things that we need to build resilience.

One good example is we think about people exposed, workers exposed to heat. Well, I mean, there's lots of people who've talked about the ability to alter work schedules, to have people work earlier in the day or later in the day. But many cities have noise ordinances. So even if an organization wanted to do that, they would be breaking the law to do it. So there's many examples of things.

We talked earlier today about the tax in Puerto Rico on inventory. So it's almost impossible in that situation for stores, for example, the retail space to store long-term supplies, critical supplies because they're going to be taxed so heavily on them when they do. And so I think alongside when we think about what are the things that need to function in our community, what are the policy structures that we have in place that also impede that type of resilience and mitigation practice?

Brock:

And the other thing too, Ashley, Laura, is that we're stuck in this response mode. We're constantly responding. I mean, over 200 and some disasters when I was in office in two years, that's one every three days roughly. We're not taking time to digest what happened and make meaningful changes to the way we respond and mitigate.

We've been talking offline about COVID a little bit, but like what you just said, when it comes to storing capability or redundant contracts to service hospitals, nothing's changed as a result of going through this. The impacts on our public health system, yes, there's been some after-action system reports and different things, but no real change from Congress has been coming out on how do we provide hospital systems more capability to store additional supplies, or as a country, how much personal protective equipment should we actually be making domestically versus what we bring in without interrupting foreign capital markets, those types of things.

Or where's the digital warehouse of all the instructions to build anything, any durable medical equipment that goes into a hospital or within our hospital systems, where's the instruction so that when we implement the Defense Production Act and we ask Ford Motor Company to go build ventilators or a textile mill in North Carolina to build N95 masks, where do you go to rapidly get the instruction and the standard to build it? These are the things, but what we want to manually do is, well, we should rethink the strategic national stockpile system. No, we shouldn't. We should rethink the system in its entirety and not be so dependent on China and Malaysia for vaccine ingredients or supplies that go into hospitals. But yet we haven't solved that problem.

And so part of the issue against sustainable communities is that we're not stopping and focusing on the root cause of the problems, and there are many, from climate to bad business models, building in areas we shouldn't be building or lack of insurance. Who knows? There are so many different systemic problems, but we're not methodically sitting there and thinking about what are the root cause problems we can stop or start to mitigate to reduce the impacts in a greater manner going down the road.

Ashley:

And sometimes the barrier, it's not very exciting, but many state agencies, public agencies at every level, not just the state level and private organizations have archaic procurement practices that make it very difficult to move contracts through to what Brock was talking about or even modernize their data systems, things that we rely upon to be able to plan and prepare for the things that Brock was just talking about.

I've worked considerably with the water policy program on a project called The Internet of Water. And the purpose of that was to help public agencies modernize their water data infrastructure so they could better manage water resources. And so many cases, which is not exciting to say, "Oh, I can't wait. I'm going to go study these procurement practices." But I mean that's what we need to do, we need to think about the organizational structures that underlie some of these problems and whether they are contributing to the problem or are they helping us solve the problem?

Laura:

Kind of gets to Brock's point about being very methodical and systematic about all of the systems that have to be functioning and with a proactive approach working towards the resilience. You mentioned heat earlier, and that's your primary focus these days, although you've worked on a lot of community resilience topics in the past. Can you for our audience, talk about why we should be so concerned about heat? It seems to me that we don't worry about heat in the same way that we worry about flooding and hurricanes and these big extreme events. So talk to us a little bit about heat.

Ashley:

Well, I think one of the challenges is that heat doesn't capture our imagination in the same way. I mean, when you look out the window and it's 80 degrees, pretty much looks the same as it would if it was 102 degrees, right? When a tornado comes through or a hurricane comes through, there's no doubt in anybody's mind what just happened. For that reason, I think it's hard to capture people's imagination around heat. And there's a huge misperception of the risk that it poses.

And you've probably heard the statistic, I've said it many times that heat kills more people than any other weather-related disaster. And I think that's likely a pretty significant undercount. But we often only think about heat and human health outcomes. I mean, that's important. People dying, people getting sick, all of that's very important. But research is showing us that heat will have considerable impacts to our economy as well.

And the fact that it damages infrastructure, it buckles railways, it grounds planes, it makes it to draw bridges, the joints swell shut, the locks and they won't close again. It changes our work patterns when we can work, our productivity and labor productivity. So if you're a person whose wages rely upon you working in a high-exposure industry, then how are you going to feed your family when it's not safe for you to work outside anymore? So there are many. It increases our household expenses. It costs money to cool your house, the hotter it gets. It costs money to cool public buildings. I think the government accountability office in 2023 estimated that 33,000 public schools in the US lack adequate HVAC. We know and research shows that learning outcomes decline when indoor temperatures exceed above 75 degrees.

So I would love to say that all of those public schools are in Vermont and it's going to be fine, but the fact is many of those public schools are south of the Sun Belt. And my link earlier with policy, to give you an idea, is one thing people might say is, "Oh, I have an idea. Let's require universal air conditioning in all of our public school systems." Now, that might feel really good if you're a policymaker to be able to say you did that, but that's a policy that's almost impossible to implement because who pays for those infrastructure upgrades? The local school district does.

And so to Brock's point earlier about sort of community resilience, if those communities had the dollars to upgrade that school infrastructure and provide adequate HVAC, they would've done it, but they don't have it. And most of the communities who don't have that also don't have the credit rating to go to the municipal bond market to get the loans they need to do it. And so how are we thinking about buying down risk, making it possible for these school districts to then have adequate HVACs in their schools? And once those schools are to that point, they become a community asset then too. It's not just air conditioning for students when they're there, but it also becomes a place where emergency management can look to for all kinds of resources.

Laura:

It's a cooling center.

Ashley:

Yeah, I mean, and I think there's a lot of debate about how effective cooling centers are, but I certainly think when we look across the spectrum about what has been effective for that strategy and what hasn't been... A place that people don't normally go as a cooling center does not seem, as far as I'm reading right now, to be the most effective way to do that. Schools are where people go. Churches are where people go. Informal cooling centers like Walmarts or other places, these are where people regularly will go. And so maybe that's the way we think about that practice.

But my point about heat is that it touches almost every aspect of our lives. It is certainly important to think about the health outcomes for people who are the most vulnerable to it on certain prescription drugs, have chronic illnesses, who are pregnant, aged, whatever. But we need to think a little bit more holistically about the impact that heat has on our communities and thinking about well-being and how it affects our lives and how we can afford to live.

Brock:

Problem is it's really hard to quantify the damages with heat, as you were saying so it doesn't fit conveniently into the current Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief Act, disaster declaration framework. So you visibly can't see or quantify the damages from heat like you can a flood or tornado or wildfire. I mean, it's very clear to see what damages are there and what needs to be repaired. And that's not the same with heat.

It's the same with cyber attacks and all of these new emerging threats that we're seeing. It's hard to quantify them and they don't fit neatly into this box that we try to fit it into to get disaster declarations and support from the federal government either.

Ashley:

And I think one thing to remember is that it's often a contributor to other major events, like drought and wildfires. Heat often contributes to those events. I mean, I think it was last year the Mississippi River, trade down the Mississippi River stopped because of a drought that had come after prolonged heat as well. And so we often don't appreciate its contribution to other more visible events. In many cases, they have a heat signal to them as well.

Laura:

Yeah. Earlier in the forum, you both kind of signaled the importance of working with communities. And Ashley, you particularly spoke to, there's not a one size fits all set of policy solutions around heat. And Brock, probably you'd say the same about other kinds of climate hazards. So talk about the importance of engaging community in conversations around what are the resilience strategies and activities and policy solutions that are going to be effective in our community.

Brock:

Disaster response, preparedness response and recovery is a team sport. There's so much focus on FEMA right now. It's not so much FEMA that needs to be reformed as much as it is our approach to preparing and responding and recovering from disasters as a nation. That's a whole nother conversation. But again, I go back to the fact that it's a team sport. It ranges from how well are you the citizen prepared to sustain your life as much as possible based on where you live and the hazards that are associated with your geographical location all the way up to the federal government.

And I always would equate it to a chair model where it looks like a chair of four legs. That seat is your community. That's Boone, North Carolina. That first leg is a culture of preparedness within our citizenry. I mean, unfortunately, I think we need to go back to scouting principles and creating Eagle Scouts and, hey, you know how to produce clean water. You know how to produce heat or cool off or you have the tangible skills to do things when the infrastructure's not working, from CPR to investing a dollar in the stock market towards your retirement and understanding how to be properly insured, break negative cycles with money, those types of things. We need that because you, the citizen are the true first responder. And if I were to fall over and break my ankle, you two right now are the true first responder. You are the ones that I would be counting on to help or call 911 until the official first responder can arrive.

And so we have to instill that into our citizenry that you, the citizen are the true first responder. Second leg is a strong state and local government. Some states like Texas take emergency management. It is highly important, most robust state capability probably in the country. Florida is right there with them. Florida has a very robust capability. California has a very robust state capability in emergency management. The local communities, they'll follow up underneath that model and they'll be strong too. There are plenty of communities where county commissions and local officials don't really get to know their emergency manager until it hits the fan. Everything's broken and then they're upset, right?

And so strong state and local government is the second leg. The third leg is the private sector owns the majority of the infrastructure we depend on, those community lifelines. They own the banking systems, they own the communication systems. Who owns all the bottles of water in Watauga County, it's probably Pepsi. So it's not the government. And who owns the farm to table logistics, those types of things.

And we have to work with them and they need to inform government and communities on how do we help you become more mitigated and resilient to make sure that your businesses and what you provide can be sustained regardless of what we face from a ship losing its steering and knocking out a bridge in Baltimore to Russia attacking the colonial pipeline to whatever.

Fourth leg is the firepower of the federal emergency management agency, federal government working down through a governor ultimately to the local level to service the disaster victim within your communities. And when all four of those legs are attached, things go pretty well. But those legs need to be attached in the blue sky day preparedness and mitigation planning efforts, like as a result of going through Helene, don't waste a good disaster, the opportunity that comes about in a good disaster. And I'm not making light of the situation, but you are now going to come into so much post-disaster mitigation money. Why is Winklers Creek still going to flow through Boone in five years from now? If that's the happening, then shame on all of us if the mall parking lot still does.

Laura:

We have a chance to finally fix that.

Brock:

You've got a chance to fix it. And so you can't just declare victory and move on and my life is good, or whatever, after the disaster. You have to continuously check on the people who lost everything from businesses to homes that were uninsured. But you also have to rethink how do we rebuild these roadway systems? How do we rebuild or reroute Winklers Creek to where it's environmentally friendly, it doesn't interrupt the ecosystem, but it also doesn't flood the mall parking lot?

So there's a great opportunity after disasters. All the bad ideas are blown up or washed out, and all the good ideas are the ones that can come from those four legs of the chair working together to design the way forward. But sadly, what happens is that we go about our lives and people want their power working without burying the power lines, or they want things even temporarily fixed so that their life can go back to normal very quickly. And we don't have the patience to do things right.

Laura:

I kind of wonder what is the moment post-disaster that's most appropriate to really dig in with the community to make those gains? Because for sure, there's post-traumatic stress. I mean, I see it throughout the community, for sure, people who've lost everything or have lost significantly, but just a lot of people. And there must be a point in time where enough processing of what we went through has happened, where we really could be productive together and planning for a more resilient stormwater system and the more resilient... All of the systems, more resilient.

Brock:

I think the time is now. I mean at this point, obviously the life safety, life sustaining mission is incredibly huge and really important. But don't let too much time go before city and county leaders sit down to try to understand what are they entitled to from the federal government as a result of going through this. How to sequence all the money that comes from 30 different federal government agencies to fund 90 different recovery programs. It's overwhelming.

Small communities in North Carolina look like a deer in headlights, and rightfully so because the federal government has made this system so complex that there needs to be a reduce the complexity campaign when we start to reform, quote, "FEMA" or let's just say the disaster system in this country, how do we get it down to simplistic grants that empowers a mayor and counties like Watauga to be able to do the things they know that need to be done. They know their community far better than the federal government, Congress and FEMA, but how does FEMA set up or Congress set up the mechanisms for the counties to have a lot of discretion on how to use that funding to repair the problems that constantly happen and do it in a manner that is sustainable?

Laura:

I think a lot of local governments around here would say yes to that. Ashley, you want to talk about... You've worked a lot directly with communities and particularly in North Carolina. What is the community engagement process like for you?

Ashley:

Well, I mean, one of the things I like to say is rule number one is you move at the speed of trust whenever you're working in communities. And people who are the closest to the problem often have some of the most innovative solutions, what they lack is the capacity to implement those solutions. And I think the imperative is on whether it's experts from outside the community who come in to give guidance or even their local representatives in government, but to listen to them.

And I think that is probably one of the best things initially that you can do is listen to people because they're going to tell you whether they mean to or not. They're going to tell you what their experience was like. You're going to learn from them where the failures in the system happened based on their own narratives. A lot of times, people will then offer up, even they're not seeing it as a solution, but in that communication with them, in that listening, they offer up some pretty innovative solutions that after it gets out into the universe and everybody else is starting to think about it, it can become a really, really great thing.

But this is also how you build trust with the community so that when you come back to the community and say, "It's time for us to rework some things and it means that we're going to have to be patient, and that the rebuilding of this is going to take longer than it normally would, we need to bury the power lines," you have their trust at that point. And so perhaps they're willing to work with you on that.

And I think when it comes to all of this, which is what Brock has already talked about, is there is no one sector that owns the responsibility on any of these issues. It's not fair to think that the public sector can come in and solve every issue, whether it's the federal government or your state and local government, especially because the private sector plays such a critical role. And because of all of that, and because it takes time to build trust and because that's the long game, you don't wait until the disaster happens to start building those relationships.

One of the things, to Brock's point, never let a good disaster go to waste, one thing that should happen out of this disaster in addition to some very concrete changes, is the relationships that are built out of this disaster from people working together who maybe haven't before, maintain those relationships. Because you know what? This is not your last disaster.

You've got another one coming. And so in order to be able to do everything that needs to happen from now until whenever that is, so that you are more resilient when the next one comes, it's important that you maintain those relationships. And I personally think that community engagement, whether... And we can think about what community engagement means.

One thing that I'm really clear about when I work with my colleagues is sometimes individuals that are living in a community that are just trying to put food on the table and pay their bills and take care of their kids, they may not have the time to attend a meeting every month or so on and so forth. So what do you do? My advice is to engage with what I call boundary organizations, nonprofits and NGOs that are closely working with those members in the community. And they will have a great perspective, community-wide perspective on things that doesn't overburden individuals in the community. So if you're a person that's saying, "Oh, I'd love to do some community engagement around this question about how we do X, Y, Z," and then you're frustrated that you can't get people to attend meetings or do things, well, maybe you're asking too much of the people who are just trying to live. Maybe think about who else is in this community who works closely with those same groups of people who could give you that same perspective.

So build those coalitions, feed those coalitions. It takes care and feeding. That's going to be who you rely upon. And that's private sector folks, the public sector, community organizations, civil society, community members themselves, faith-based organizations. If you want to find out what's going on in a community, you ask your clergy. They are very close, especially in rural communities, they are very close to their community. They know what's going on. And faith-based organizations, churches are wonderful assets in a community post-disaster.

Laura:

We definitely saw that here in Helene. And speaking of keeping the relationships going, I just want to shout out to the way that App State served as our campus became the gathering place. We were talking earlier about people won't go places that they're not used to going or don't feel welcome. And gosh, our campus became such a welcoming place for our community. Our campus dining served something like 85,000 meals for free to anyone in the community who showed up for lunch and dinner. And there are lots of other examples.

But I hear your point about keeping the relationships going. And I'm not in those rooms, but hopefully that is happening because I think the relationships are stronger than they've been in a really long time between our university and our town, our community, because of what we went through together and because of what, from the perspective that I had, seemed to be pretty extraordinary cooperation, collaboration.

Brock:

Yeah. One thing that resonates with me with what you said, Ashley, is what are you asking people to do or be a part of? In some cases I think that our public awareness campaigns have been woefully falling short of actually creating a prepared and resilient culture within our societies. I mean, we've been asking people to do the same things for 25, 30 years, and it doesn't seem to be working.

For example, I kind of quip that I asked today all the students, "How many people starved to death after Hurricane Helene?" None. I'm all for tangible skills, but we've been asking people for 25, 30 years to buy supplies for five days or generators, all this stuff. One, that's probably a financial unrealistic ask in most households across America. When you look at the checklist of what people tell you to buy and be ready, it's not being done. People aren't doing it. Like Ashley said, a lot of them are just trying to get through the day and get through.

But I will say, we do need to change our campaigns to ask people to do low to no cost things to be prepared, like checking on your neighbor, but understanding how do we get more access to first aid CPR? If you are the true first responders in this world, how do you increase access to programs to give them tangible skills?

One of the things that I've often, when I start to look at how you measure resiliency of a community, I've often thought that the credit score, the average credit score of a community is a huge indicator of whether or not a community is going to be resilient or not. And sadly, when people register with FEMA, a lot of times they're uninsured. They've lost everything. They're uninsured.

A lot of people, when we started looking at the data, 70% of American households live in what's known as asset poverty, not income poverty, if I don't make enough money to make life work. Poverty is one thing. Trying to help people break cycles of poverty is another thing. But a lot of what goes on in America is that we've had too many generations of kids raised that do not understand how to budget money, just simple budgeting, how to grow a dollar through compound interest in investing, those types of things. And I really think that we've got to get that back because what happens is is that as Americans in some cases may have a negative relationship with money, and 70% of households don't have three months' worth of savings to their name. The question is, is that an inflation? Is that a combination of inflation and I don't know how, or I'm way outspending my budget on a regular basis?

But when that happens, what we see is a negative impact on the levels of insurance in a community. So if you're trying to maintain your lifestyle, you're looking for areas to cut back... And this is tough. This is a tough conversation. It's not a fun one to have, but you do not want to save money on insurance. Go save money on that Tesla or that brand new car that you want to drive and don't save money on the insurance piece. Now, I also, the whole insurance debate on people pulling out, that's a whole nother podcast.

But how do we start to look at the health of a community? I think one thing is maybe we're not looking at the right data sets. So when you go back to the credit score, something's really interesting to me is there was a study done by the Urban Institute called Adding Insult to Injury. And it talked about the people who lose their home that are uninsured or underinsured, they never financially recover. And it just becomes a death spiral from a financial standpoint. How do we help them overcome that? How do we help communities increase sales tax revenue?

Like FEMA knows nothing about rebuilding your economy after a disaster. That's not what they're qualified to do. Who is that in the federal government? How do we get commerce and labor and big business in here to help rebuild an economy around Western North Carolina, once it's been lost... But more importantly if the comprehensive credit score of Watauga County, for example, is declining, then a whole host of issues are popping up.

You have any eroding tax base, more demand for government services with an eroding tax base, most likely. I mean, the statistics would say that. Maybe your school systems are going into the tank. Maybe the roadway systems are starting to go into the tank. Maybe high-end grocery stores are starting to move out, food deserts start to form. There's this cascading impact of that. There's less homeownership and there's more rentership. Renters aren't bad, but a lack of homeownership is not good for sustainability and resilience, in my opinion, because the more ownership there is, then the less crime you're going to have. There's more, "You're not coming into my neighborhood. We're going to take care of these problems," those types of things.

So if the credit score is declining over a five-year period, how does Appalachian State work with community leaders to get it going in the opposite direction? What if you could get the credit scores to a certain point where you're eradicating things like civil disturbances and riots, you're increasing insurance in force, your community is becoming resilient more on its own than outside federal government support and grants and help? Maybe that's a far-fetched idea, but I think that we have to start looking at the financial education as really a foundation to resilience. Insurance is a foundational piece of resilience in the household too. But I know that that's a pie in the sky thing and there's a lot of nuances to what I'm saying.

Ashley:

I mean, I think I want to pick up a little bit on what you said about our messaging around things around how people can be prepared or what they can do. So I have a public health background, and so they teach you in public health that you don't warn people without giving them an action. And it's always interesting to me that when I read what people say about heat, for example, the first thing they say, "Seek out air conditioning." I mean, come on. It's not like people are standing around wondering if air condition is going to cool them off. We pretty much understand that that's one of the solutions, a very effective solution.

And so if someone is not going to air conditioning, that means that either they're in a location where it's not available to them, that they don't have easy access to go inside a building, they're outside whatever, they don't have adequate air conditioning in their house, or they can't afford to run the air conditioner they have. And research has done an awful lot of really great work, science helping us understand what are some things that you can do to lower your core body temperature that doesn't rely on air conditioning.

Laura:

What are some of those things?

Brock:

Yeah, fill me in here.

Ashley:

Oh yeah, you want to know? Okay. So for example, foot immersion was for a long time the thing that people would say, "You put your feet over your ankles in cool water, it actually lowers your core body temperature." So the US military saw that, the US army actually and said, "Okay, well, how are we going to make this work in a context where we have soldiers and we're training them, and how are we going to actually do that? We don't want to them take their boots off."

So they did all this work at the Army Medical Research Center, and the stuff is discovered that if you immerse your arms over your elbows in cool water, it actually has the same effect. So this is very inexpensive. It takes cool water. You can put cool water in a cooler, and if you're got a workforce that works outside, this is not an expensive thing to do. And if you do it every hour, so in other words, your workers circle through, your student athletes circle through. This is what they do in the military, Google arm immersion US Army, and you will see millions of pictures. This is how they do it. And it's so incredibly effective.

But there's a way to translate that to homes, right, too. If you come in and you've been working outside, mowing your grass, think about water outside your body as much as you think about water inside your body. Take a cool shower, immerse your arms in your kitchen sink over your elbows in cool water. It works great for people who are... The foot immersion works great for people who are elderly or disabled because their caregiver can put their feet in it.

So if you can't adequately run your air conditioner, use fans. Oftentimes I hear people in this region, they'll say, "Oh, what about swamp coolers? Or, yeah, that's a terrible idea here because we already have a problem with humidity and you're just about to make it worse." So if you're in Michigan, great do that. But if you're not in Michigan, think about other things, use of fans.

And if you do have access to air conditioning, but it's limited, so you only can afford to have one air window unit, for example, put it in your bedroom. Cool your bedroom first, make that cool space. You're going to spend eight hours sleeping there that night. But it's also a lot smaller and a lot cheaper to cool. A lot of people will try and put their air conditioning in their family room so that everybody's in there, and that's not the right approach to that.

So I think all of that information that I just gave you is what most people I think have never heard, absolutely effective, backed by science. We know the thresholds at which those interventions stop working. Ollie Jay out of University of Sydney who runs the heat health incubator has quantified all of it.

Laura:

Oh, wow.

Ashley:

And it's on my program's website. We made it for a US audience, so we converted to Fahrenheit so people understand and we also have it-

Laura:

That's important.

Ashley:

Yeah. We also have it in Spanish. So the idea is when we know that it's getting hot outside, and if you're working public health or you work in any organization, if you're an occupational health nurse, tell the people when they leave work that day, "Don't go home and drink a beer, go home and take a cool shower, then you can drink a beer," right? That's going to help you lower your core body temperature and probably save your life. These are life-saving things that most people have never heard of, because the only thing we hear about heat is seek out air conditioning. And it is probably one of the most frustrating things every time I see it.

Brock:

It goes back to what we just witnessed in Hurricane Helene. Any house can flood. Stop worrying about a FEMA flood map, but you've got a whole army of realtors who across this country are like, "Oh, this house doesn't require FEMA flood insurance," as if it's a good thing. But yet, as we all know, the FEMA flood maps cannot keep up with the newly built environment, which changes constantly, or storm drainage systems may not be well-maintained, which changes the flood areas. But then what we saw in here in North Carolina was landslides, mudslides that wouldn't have been incorporated into a FEMA flood map either. And so it's the simple change of any house can flood, you ought to consider flood insurance, earthquake insurance, those types of things. Simple changes.

Laura:

There were even small creeks forming on the sides of hills that had not been there prior. Just the drainage from all that 20 something inches of rain in some places. So the point any house can flood, you don't have to be down low to flood when that much rain is falling from the sky.

Ashley:

Well, speaking of messaging, right, and what just happened here, if you were to have asked people in this area, "What does 20 inches of rain look like?" They don't know. And so when we communicate about something like a flood event, when we say things like, "We're forecasting 20 inches of rain," I mean, that's almost meaningless to people because if you then say, "We're expecting rain..." From now on, if you were to say, "We're expecting rainfall about like Helene," everybody here is going to know what that means. And so I think when we start to communicate about these issues, it's the same way we talk about...

Brock:

Recurrence intervals?

Ashley:

Yes, most people do not understand what the heck that is, but if you say, "You have the probability of your house flooding at least once in your thirty-year mortgage, or even often-"

Brock:

A 500-year flood, or 100-year flood.

Ashley:

Yes. No one knows what that means. And so I think we need to stop talking about things in those ways. I mean, I'm a scientist myself, but that's the work of scientists communicating. That's not the work of a communications person communicating. So we need to get together with folks who know how to do good science communication and rethink how we're communicating to the public about these issues.

Brock:

But we can't rebuild an entire system of disaster response or resilience or sustainability around one event.

Ashley:

Right. True. True.

Brock:

So the way that the North Carolina mountains have been attacked has been different. Hurricane Ivan back in 2004 was somewhat of a flood event, but Hugo in '89 was totally different. So Hugo didn't come through the Gulf, it came through the Atlantic where the forward speed of the storm is typically much higher on the Atlantic side than a system coming out of the Gulf. Typically, the Gulf Bay storms are slow moving, large rain dropping storms that expand, and the rain bands and the wind bands far exceed the center of circulation, which is what we saw in Helene. So the impact started well in advance, three days in advance of the worst of it passing through. Hugo was different. Hugo was moving at like 27 miles an hour forward speed, which was purely a wind event. I mean, trees down everywhere and the wind's 110 mile an hour winds in Watauga County or coming up through Hickory, North Carolina. Totally different event.

So when we designed a system, it's got to be designed on something that's sustainable for all hazards or all threats. And now we're moving into this man-made or human-caused technological event world with cyber security, state actors' response, acts of terrorism, eco-terrorism, whatever it may be. We have to design a system of sustainability and disaster resilience that encompasses everything.

And so one of the things that bothers me around here is when you start to look at wildfire potential. Is wildfire potential growing in this area as we continue to populate in the middle of this valley, like here in Boone or in some of these areas, we continue to populate? The next question is, who owns the forest around here? Who actually owns it? Most of it's privately owned. And then, well, sometimes the federal government may own the most amount of forest space in the state of North Carolina or in a state. Then second is the homeowner or the landowner, the farm owners, they own most of the land too. And then the third owner is the state. So how do you get the federal government, the state and the private homeowner to mitigate the forest? The downed timber as a result of Helene, I mean, that's going to become fire starter five years, three, four, five years from now.

Laura:

Yeah. People are definitely thinking and worrying about that around here.

Brock:

So instead of waiting until it happens, what are we doing right now to start discussing that discussion with our congressmen and FEMA? What are the mitigation tactics? But then again, who owns the land?

Laura:

Yeah.

Ashley:

Well, that's where there's big coalitions come in, right? I mean, that's where you have to get the landowners to the table with the private sector to the table, with the public sector to the table, first of all, and try and figure out where the resistance is. I mean, people will tell you why they don't want to clear out the undergrowth, right? Figure out what the problem is.

Brock:

Or they can't afford it.

Ashley:

Or they can't afford it. And if it's-

Laura:

Or they're overwhelmed by how many trees are down. We have at least 100 down.

Brock:

Yeah.

Laura:

We've cleared some, but it's going to be-

Ashley:

So then what are the solutions?

Brock:

Your timber is worthless. You're not going to get any money for it. There's nothing you can do with it after a certain amount of time.

Laura:

Yeah.

Brock:

Yeah.

Laura:

It's a lot. And we could talk all day. The two of you have so many stories and your experience is really immense. I'm grateful that you came to campus and shared it with us in multiple ways. And I want to end with the same question that we ended on in the forum. How do you think about resilience and career paths? Because our students are thinking about this. Our students want to do meaningful work, they want to be contributing to positive actions. So for students out there listening, how can they think about resilience and their future career path?

Brock:

Listen, I think it's an exciting world out there. I mean, there are so many jobs in the resilience space on the public side, private side. Where I am as executive chairman of Hagerty Consulting, I mean, we help both public and private clients prepare for, respond to and recover from disasters, helping them understand what money they're entitled to or what techniques they need to do to reduce their vulnerability to hazards.

And then we're just one entity, one consulting firm. But the federal government's put a lot of money towards energy resilience, towards water resilience and water sustainability, food safety and security, transportation. So those big industries, it's not particularly if you're interested in the disaster arena, it's not so much like, "I want to go work for FEMA. How do I do that?" What is the industry that needs disaster resilience?

The big buckets of infrastructure, like the energy world, the fuel worlds, the water worlds and the food worlds, how do we do these things when there's a whole host of new threats popping up? And so largely, it's like I told my son who's a freshman here, energy, transportation, food safety, security in water are where a lot of jobs are going to be over the next 10, 15 years. Go get a business degree and try to get into one of those sectors or public health degree and try to get a job in one of those sectors. Who knows? There's a lot of opportunity.

Ashley:

And I guess I would say, I think we just finished talking about how no one sector owns a solution, so that there needs to be work across different sectors. And what I usually encourage students to do is think about where your passion is, where your skill set is, and wherever you work, integrate resilience into that space. We need leaders to bring this conversation even to industry and organizations where it isn't currently happening.

And it could be that you're working for a manufacturing firm, and then you want to think about not just sustainability of that firm, but their role in the community in which their locations are the people that work for them. How can you help them contribute? If you want to work in the finance sector, how can you help them think about how we finance resilience? In the insurance sector, that's obvious. To Brock's point, there are going to be many sectors in which that touch this.

Truthfully, we're talking about disasters that touch every part of our lives and every industry. So almost anything you do, what I would encourage young people to do is keep talking about resilience. Find ways to integrate that into the organization in which you work. Make that part of what you do wherever you are, wherever your passion drives you. Because I think if you can do that, then it's going to give you the energy that you need to sustain that work.

It's hard to maintain a career at a certain pace for a long period of time. It can be very exhausting. And if you're doing that in a space in which you don't really care, you're not really passionate about what you're doing, it's going to be a long career for you. So I usually say, keep going. If you want to be a school teacher or you want to be a nurse or those kinds of things, or you want to work in finance or any of those other things, yes, do that and figure out how you can interject resilience into the organization you're working in because we need people to be leaders in that space everywhere.

Laura:

Well said. And that resonates with what folks are saying around climate and jobs. Every job is going to have a climate component. Every job's going to have a resilience component. Appreciate both of you all. You're a inspiration for students around resilience at the individual level, community level and beyond. And we hope to have you back to App State sometime. Thanks so much for joining me in the studio today.

Ashley:

Thanks so much.

Brock:

Take care. Thanks, Laura. Thanks so much.