Insights and Commentaries
Community resilience from California to Singapore
By strengthening community bonds, a natural resilience can often follow
For me, natural disaster had always lived in the television and the newspaper. I grew up in the suburban utopia of Santa Rosa, California, and I had no past experience with major environmental hazards. However, fires in California have become worse in frequency and intensity every year, making the risk even more severe. Since 1972, summer fires in California have become eight times more likely and five times more severe.[1] On October 8th, 2017, the Tubbs fire tore through Santa Rosa in the middle of the night and burned 149 square km of land. At the time, the Tubbs fire was the most destructive fire in California’s history. While almost every aspect of my hometown was deeply impacted by the fire, I would like to focus on one aspect that is often overlooked: community resilience. The popular hashtag #santarosastrong is emblematic of my community’s transformation and adaptation following the fire. Through the concept of community resilience, I would like to bridge Santa Rosa and Singapore, giving insights on how a community can gain agency and empower themselves when facing disaster risk.
While there is no consensus on the definition of community resilience, there are several common themes that academics keep returning to. Within academic discourse, essential concepts relating to community resilience are adaptability, social learning, community relations, and social capital. For Cutter et al. 2008, resilience is a system’s ability to respond and recover from a natural disaster, allowing the system to learn and adapt to threats.[2] Other academics such as Khalili et al. 2015 and Aldrich and Meyer 2014 heavily emphasize the reflexive aspect of resilience following a disaster event in which resilient systems can recover or improve the previous status quo in a dynamic process.[3][4] In the context of Santa Rosa, resilience is an iterative process, which takes place both in the short-term following the Tubbs fire and in the long-term in recovering and preparing for the next hazard. For Singapore, community resilience can come from a long-term process of community building and preparation for quickly changing climates and extreme weather. Alternatively, Buikstra et al. 2010 and Mcdermott et al. 2016 highlight the social learning after facing hazard impacts so that the community will return to a better state than the previous status quo.[5][6] The social learning that Buikstra et al. and Mcdermott et al. mention has also been crucial for Santa Rosa as the city attempts to better policies that made the city vulnerable to disaster previously. From the Tubbs fire, Californians and Singaporeans should realize that they can take ownership over their own resilience and disaster preparedness, because nothing in these definitions requires state action to propagate community resilience.
Measuring community resilience can also be a useful tool for both policymakers and communities when considering ways to improve resilience and evaluate disaster risks. However, quantifying resilience has its challenges. Cutter et al. 2008 emphasizes that resilience can be both an outcome and a process depending on how the concept is being framed.[7] Quantifying an iterative process is an obstacle academics must overcome. Additionally, community sizes can vary, and within those communities, the rate of recovery will also vary. Creating indicators to measure these variabilities and observing a particular moment in time would be optimal, because of the particularities of each community across space and time. By measuring community resilience, both policy makers and community members can be more informed on the vulnerabilities and gaps in their current state from preparations to coping responses. Such information can promote the inclusion of community members in remaking their community when policymakers are considering certain developments or decisions. Through this information, community members can have agency in their own disaster preparedness which benefits both the community and the government.
Oftentimes, the role of the community and individuals during natural disasters are overlooked, because news outlets report on government responses and large-scale infrastructure needs. While there is no doubt that the state capacity in Singapore to respond to natural disasters is competent and organized, Singaporean communities can also take disaster preparedness into their own hands. By looking at two stories of how Santa Rosa communities during the Tubbs fire responded, learned and adapted, I will emphasize the importance of community resilience and how this can be applied in Singapore.
Before October 2017, Santa Rosa had no natural disasters in its collective memory, and so the response pathways to crisis had not developed. Similarly, Singapore has not dealt with a severe natural disaster recently due to its relatively low risk and favorable geography in Southeast Asia. In some cases, having no past experience with natural disasters allows space for vulnerabilities to go unnoticed. In this first case, a senior residential facility in Santa Rosa was grossly unprepared in case of an emergency. During the October 2017 fires, staff at a senior residential facility allegedly abandoned elderly residents to fend for themselves.[8] The elderly relied on family, nearby neighbors and each other to evacuate the premises before it burned down. The elderly residents have brought a lawsuit against the institution and its staff for breaking emergency procedures. This non-example of community resilience reveals two types of vulnerabilities: one in the antecedent conditions which has an isolated, elderly populations and another in the coping response which resulted in failed emergency procedure implementation. Singaporeans can learn from this experience by questioning the implications of vulnerable populations (i.e. the elderly, minority, disabled or low-income) during crisis and the ways in which disaster will leave them in worse positions. Communities can act preemptively to prevent large disaster impacts by addressing weaknesses within vulnerable procedures and populations.
In the second case, my neighborhood was able to employ agency in disaster preparedness and resilience, even without past disaster experience. In my neighborhood during the fires, a community leader on our street woke everyone up and got everyone’s car packed and turned toward the street in case of a quick evacuation. Our neighborhood knew everyone’s contact information, names, and family well, and so everyone was able to be accounted for without government help. In the hours of crisis during the fire, the government was not the main support system that people relied on to respond and evacuate in neighborhoods. The neighborhood was never in direct harm’s way, and became a shelter area for the rest of the city with the national guard stationed next to my house. In this story, there was an ideal amount of preparedness and familiarity stemming from within the community. This type of preparation happens outside of the government’s responsibilities. In Singaporean communities, community members should familiarize themselves with their neighbors and their community leaders by knowing their contact information and their family situations. Community resilience in action can be as simple as knocking on your neighbors’ doors and introducing yourself. Community members should also know or create emergency procedures, and find trust-worthy information sources. All of this precautionary actions can be done outside of the government’s scope, and can empower communities by allowing them to discover their own agency and create a space that is better for everyone in general.
When discussing disaster preparedness, people often point toward the government to enact response infrastructure and procedures, instead of empowering themselves and their community to be prepared. Community resilience relies particularly on adaptability and a familiarity within and beyond the community. By strengthening community bonds and creating spaces where neighbors can be more comfortable with each other, a natural resilience can often follow. For Santa Rosa, the community feels much more united after going through hardship, and community spaces, such as the farmers market on Wednesday nights, are more lively. However, inefficient land zoning, insufficient insurance coverage, and backlogged lawsuits still prolong recovery efforts. Nearly two years after the event, the government has put an emphasis on returning to the status quo rather than improving and adapting it. In the face of slow bureaucracy, community members have taken the responsibility upon themselves to raise awareness, contribute to charities, and introduce new emergency procedures in workplaces. So in the face of climate change and more extreme weather risk, Singaporeans should begin to ask themselves what stake they have in their disaster preparedness and the ways in which they can improve their own resilience. As community members in Santa Rosa have realized, the quintessence of community resilience is found in the community and themselves.
This article was written by Cassidy Childs, Intern at the Lloyd’s Register Foundation Institute for the Public Understanding of Risk.
[1] Vandette, “New Evidence Links Climate Change to California’s Worsening Wildfire Seasons” Earth.com, 16 July 2019.
[2] Cutter, “A Place-Based Model for Understanding Community Resilience to Natural Disasters,” 2008. pp. 599.
[3] Aldrich and Meyers, “Social Capital and Community Resilience,” 2014, pp. 2.
[4] Khalili, “A Temporal Framework of Social Resilience Indicators of Communities to Flood, Case Studies,” 2015, pp.249.
[5] Buikstra, “The Components of Resilience- Perceptions of an Australian Rural Community,” 2010, pp. 976.
[6] McDermott, “A Human-Focused, Holistic Model of Community Resilience,” 2016, pp. 2.
[7] Cutter, “A Place-Based Model,” 2008. pp. 600.
[8] Rossmann, Randi. “Trial Date Set for Villa Capri Fire Lawsuit.” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, 12 May 2018.
Aldrich, Daniel P., and Michelle A. Meyers. “Social Capital and Community Resilience.” American Behavioral Scientist, vol. 1, no. 16, 2014. pp. 1-16.
Buikstra, Elizabeth, et al. “The Components of Resilience- Perceptions of an Australian Rural Community.” Journal of Community Psychology, vol. 38, no. 8, 2010, pp. 975–999.
Cutter, Susan L., et al. “A Place-Based Model for Understanding Community Resilience to Natural Disasters.” Global Environmental Change, vol. 18, 2008. pp. 598-606.
Khalili, Sanaz, et al. “A Temporal Framework of Social Resilience Indicators of Communities to Flood, Case Studies: Wagga Wagga and Kempsey, NSW, Australia.” International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 2015, pp. 248-254.
McDermott, Tom, et al. “A Human-Focused, Holistic Model of Community Resilience.” OR Insights, vol. 19, no. 4, 2016, pp. 66–69.
Rossmann, Randi. “Trial Date Set for Villa Capri Fire Lawsuit.” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, 12 May 2018,www.pressdemocrat.com/news/8159905-181/santa-rosa-senior-home- lawsuit?sba=AAS.
Vandette, Kay. “New Evidence Links Climate Change to California’s Worsening Wildfire Seasons” Earth.com, 16 July 2019, www.earth.com/news/climate-change-californias-wildfire-seasons.
