Disaster Subcommittee Works To Reduce Damage
The Subcommittee on Disaster Reduction - part of the National Science and Technology Council - has members and scientists from all areas of the federal government.
Jul 28, 2009
By Jim Dawson
Inside Science News Service
WASHINGTON -- They meet once a month, a small and nearly anonymous subcommittee of federal employees known to few people outside of government.
"Nobody outside of government needs to know about the subcommittee," its former chair said. "Ideally, we're invisible."
The group's anonymity comes not from the need for secrecy, but because its job seems at first glance to be mind-numbing bureaucracy -- cross-agency coordination and planning to improve efficiencies. But the group's name -- the Subcommittee on Disaster Reduction (SDR) --reveals that the paper shuffling, coordination and planning are done with the serious purpose of saving lives and of lessening the devastation caused by everything from hurricanes and tornadoes to floods and volcanoes.
The subcommittee, part of the National Science and Technology Council, has existed for more than a decade and is made up of scientists and others from throughout the federal government. The federal government puts the costs of natural disasters in the United States at an estimated $51 billion per year.
SDR's mission is to coordinate efforts using science and technology to "break the cycle of destruction and recovery by enhancing disaster resilience."
"The only way you have a chance [to lessen the impact of a natural disaster] is through a complex partnership of responsible agencies," said former SDR chair Helen Wood, a senior scientist with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Wood oversaw the development of SDR's 2005 "Grand Challenges" document, which details what the federal government should do to make natural disasters a little less disastrous.
There are 14 types of disasters in the SDR portfolio, and for each one the group has developed a plan that tries to ensure the coordination of disaster-related research that is conducted by a score of agencies throughout the federal government.
"So much is going on related to natural hazards and most of it is going on across agencies," said the committee’s chair David Applegate, who leads the earthquake and geological hazards program at the U.S. Geological Services Agency (USGS). "In so many issues in government, one of the biggest challenges is to make sure there is coordination."
Wood said that the government's review of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami demonstrated just how complicated efforts to coordinate planning for natural disasters can be. SDR, working with the technology council, developed a "framework for action" to ensure that the West Coast is better equipped to respond to a tsunami. This plan called for studies to determine the threat, develop preparedness plans, create warning systems, mitigate the damage, communicate the threat to the public and understand how tsunamis occur. The report noted that at least seven federal agencies would need to be involved.
"If you say an earthquake triggers a tsunami, then you look to the National Science Foundation because the NSF funds earthquake research,” Wood said. “Most of the monitoring stations are funded by their grants."
But, Wood also noted that the USGS is the organization that actually monitors and classifies earthquake patterns, using readings from NSF-funded stations. And the California state government also has earthquake monitors, data that helps scientists trying to track earthquake patterns that might trigger a tsunami.
"If your tsunami is triggered by an earthquake that causes an underwater landslide, NOAA has the responsibility," Wood said. "But [NOAA] can't afford to put in all of those [underwater] sensors, so we’ve put buoys into the water."
The data from the buoys [measuring waves in the ocean] must then be fed into computer models that contain the latest earthquake data from several other sources, including satellite data measuring ocean wave heights.
"Tsunamis are low-probability, high-loss events, so how can we draw on all of our resources at the right time to be useful," Wood asked. "We have to be having that dialogue early on and already have the planning done."
SDR's reports on hurricanes, tornadoes, heat waves and other disasters contain specific recommendations that are gathered from scientists from related fields, on what science and technology research needs to be done to help lessen the impact of the events. The tornado document calls for improved modeling of tornadoes, deployment of cutting-edge phased array and dual polarized radars and integrated data forecasting "to reduce costly and unnecessary evacuations."
The hurricane recommendations include improved use of remotely piloted vehicles for airborne observations, global space-based sensing that more accurately predicts hurricane behavior and more research on atmosphere-ocean interactions.
"SDR should be the authoritative source on what needs to be done, so we can say 'these are the 15 things that need to be done' and that we can work together on in the near term," Woods said. "And then we can talk about the long term."
Getting multiple government agencies to work together is as much an art as it is a science, Applegate noted, but with backing from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) participating in SDR, the subcommittee's recommendations have some credibility.
The disaster documents serve as guidelines for setting agency budgets, so if NOAA asks for funding for those "dual polarized radars" to help in tornado research, for example, budget officials can see it is a priority on the SDR documents.
"At some level the subcommittee is a bully pulpit," Applegate said. "The OMB is a key user of these documents."
Applegate said that the subcommittee members are also aware of the reality that "resources tend to flow after disasters, not before them," but the SDR documents are important even then.
"In the chaotic environment after a disaster you may not have a thought-out program or response," Applegate said. "If there is a major tornado, we can step forward and say 'here are the investment needs to better respond in the future.'"
"It's better to have a well thought-out program that's been vetted by scientists, than not to have one," Wood said. "That's what SDR does."
