Recovery is Unnecessarily Painful

All right, welcome back to the Ottawa Studios of Inside My New Head. I am your host, Dr. D2D. We are talking about the absolutely unnecessarily painful process of post-disaster recovery.

Sit back, grab yourself your favorite beverages. Let's get at her. Welcome back. Thank you for joining us.

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Recovery. It is a topic that rarely gets any wonderful news coverage. We all know that when disaster happens. And I'm going to frame this into the session about Jasper.

But you can, that's relevant. But you can insert earthquake and turkey earthquake in Nepal. You can insert a famine stop. Like you can insert any significant disaster that's happened in the last 20 years into the conversation.

And understand what's going on. Lights and sirens happen. You're CNN. Your CBC hits are there.

The flashy. All the cool people in the uniforms are standing in front of the mics. They're talking about how they're doing this and how they're doing that. And they're fighting the fire.

And they're searching the floodwaters and cars for people and they're surveying the damage. And they're assessing everything. And they're getting ready for the area after the evacuation to reoccupy by the residents. And I need to say this here because I have some fantastic friends who work in emergency management.

And this is one of the most frustrating aspects of response and recovery that never gets properly spoken to. So I'm going to take my platform and talk about it here for a second. Reoccupying and evacuated city takes time. And the fight is always between the professionals in emergency management and the politicians.

Because as soon as the wildfire is out or is no longer a significant threat, the politicians want to get everybody home. I want to stand up there. I want to be the one scene to tell you come home. Let's bring everybody back in.

But the reality is, is your society and the community live in is supported by the 10 sectors of critical infrastructure. Right? They have to be up and running to allow people to reoccupy. The basic thing, the police force has to be reconstituted first.

The fire department has to be reconstituted first. You can't bring a population back in if you don't have an open emergency room and ambulance service and at least access to one operating room for trauma. Can't happen. The water treatment plant basis on a number of bacterial cultures that may have to be re-grown in the water to allow for proper treatment of that system.

The same as the sewer system. It's all got to be inspected to make sure it works. Power distribution, if that was not that power distribution, has to be brought back online in the community. All these things have to happen after the disaster is fought.

So think of Jasper right now. Normally, when you have a significant event like Jasper in our youth work with Murray's example, it was 28 days after the evacuation when people were allowed back in. Okay, 28 days was a timeline to talk to get rid of a lot of the toxic chemicals from the fire and the ashes best that they could that could be cleaned up and to set all these sectors critical infrastructure back up and running for reoccupation. So that's my soapbox for today or my first soapbox.

You know me. But that's my soapbox. I got to make people understand that the reoccupation of your community post evacuation will take time and sometimes significant amount of time, but it is for very good reasons. Maybe frustrated you may want to go right back to you.

I got to generate it out of care. It doesn't matter. These pieces of critical infrastructure need to be up and running prior to allowing people back. So Jasper, that's right.

So you're going to be a significant period of time outside of your residence and for very good and professionally grounded reasons. Okay. Set aside. Everybody understands that reoccupation takes time.

Recovery is poorly executed in Canada and recovery is exceptionally poorly executed elsewhere in the world. Canada is non-litering recovery. In fact, I will argue with you. Canada is not only your in much in the emergency management space, but we can set that aside for today's discussion.

We all know the focus is always on the lights and sirens. Impact, rescue the flashy press conferences. Everybody likes that. Right.

That's what the CNN hits. But then as soon as the fire is out, as soon as they've got their pictures of Jasper, their pictures until they're happy. And they can show all of their readership how bad the damage is and the losses that family suffered. And they can get a few hits with families that have lost their homes so they can capture that emotional moment to get hits and likes on their media.

That goes away. Very quickly, the next event is going to overcome the news cycle. Jasper is going to go from the A1 page and newspaper terminology to B1 to C4 to E5. It's going to work its way to the back of the newspaper and eventually out of sight.

As it will no longer be one of the top five or six stories that hit on your dot CA or your dot com website. Very quickly, it goes away. This is when recovery starts. And I'm going to talk about two distinct groups today.

The first group of people I'm going to talk about are people who do not have a well constructed family preparedist plan. That includes recovery strategies within that preparedist plan. OK? These are people who evacuated that short notice.

Took what they could grab what they wanted or they thought they needed. And they evacuated on the route in a parking lot. We've all seen those parking lots and I've got a blog on my website preparedislaps.ca that talks about why those parking lot traffic jams are absolutely unnecessary and evacuation pod set that aside. You can go read that and I did podcast episode on as well.

On top of that, these people will likely evacuate to a government run shelter, which is probably no more than 200 beds in a hockey arena or in a high school gym. Or they will go to the Motel 6. And that's the point where they try to figure out what to do next. If you think that is a helpful and healthy idea for you and your family to literally grab what you can in an unplanned manner, execute and evacuation, get everybody out alive.

Don't get me wrong. That's very important. Obviously, it's the most critical thing. But then you end up in a hotel on your credit card, eating take out food on your credit card and stuck with your whole family in a single room.

And I've got to say this, the most healthy better of the two options. But I love my kids. But if we were in that kind of significant disruption in the young kids and we were sitting in a hotel room, how was I going to get everything done that I needed to get done? How was I going to be able to negotiate and start envisioning the reconstruction of the family life from a hotel room that was costing me $200 a night on my credit card.

And 40% of Canadian families can't put $400 together. And now we're asking people to put $200 a night on the credit card. Plus $100 a day to eat take out food. Day four of take out food, you will start likely getting violently ill or some member of your family well from the toxicity that is in most take out food.

And then you just spiral down from there. Right? I have no idea what I'm doing. And the mental health starts going off the rails and start to see lots of difficulties.

And other things start to occur. If you're in a public shelter, it's worse. Now you're in a room of 200 people. I'm very restricted public Wi-Fi.

If it's available at all sitting in a place where you have no privacy. They can see in most places, vacancy rates are a far below 1%. Which means if 200 families are out of the home, there aren't 200 places to put families. Right?

That just doesn't exist. So it's not like there are empty apartments that you can drop people into. Right? So you're setting if you choose, they don't have a family prepared to plan.

And includes evacuation and reconstruction strategies. And we're covering strategies. We're going to talk all about that today. You're setting your family up for failure unnecessarily.

So I will argue intentionally. It is your responsibility as a head of household responsible person to have a strategy for you and your family if the unthinkable happens to you. That's the idea of preparedness. It doesn't.

It doesn't consume your life. It's not hours a month that you're spending on preparedness ideas and talking through what would we like to do, what would we think we would do, et cetera, and I'll talk about the strategy. But that's the first group. That is an exceptionally painful experience.

It is literally, and I'll tell you if everything works out in line, it's going to be two years minimum, probably, based on Canadian averages, that your home will be built. So if you were a homeowner and it was a lot of wildfire in the neighborhood, you're looking at probably at least two years of relocation before you could reoccupy. Right? It's just the way it is.

It doesn't happen faster than that. Except I've seen it once and in one case only. And that was in him. Plains Nova Scotia, my home province, got a lot of being a blue holder where there was two, one notable construction company that I forget to name, I did highlight them in a previous podcasting around that time, where they actually set aside future work to rebuild the homes that were lost.

Now, whoever was counting on that future project work, it got delayed by a year. But these companies, there's one company, so one fires we say in the army over and dedicated their labor and their time to the reconstruction contracts of the pertevalence. That is rare. It's rare because right now the trades, so all of the trades contribute to their home and building construction industry are working at exceptional shortages.

So they're considered what we call an economic set full of women. There is no slack capacity in construction. There are no construction crews sitting around with nothing to do waiting for work. Every single construction crew is committed to a project.

So if you have 200 homes in a city that burned down, there isn't an available construction crew coming to rebuild. It has some other project. Now has to be delayed. Some other project has to be put under the shelf.

And for those construction companies to come in. And remember, there's huge amounts of financial capital tie up in the construction industry. So if you're going to look at a company and say, I need you to delay that major construction project for years so you can come rebuild these 200 last homes, that delay could cost that construction company millions of dollars to hold their capital at bay, economic terms, which means you're not only somebody's not only paying for the reconstruction of homes, somebody is going to have to pay a massive amount of money on top of that to persuade the construction company to put the current projects at bay. So there is no research capacity of labor sitting around doing nothing.

Reconstruction takes two years. If you're lucky and sum up to three years to get your home rebuild, even if you had pristine, perfect insurance. And then we'll get to that. So that's what happens if you have absolutely no preparedness plan in your stock.

You are in trouble. So think about this next days. And I talk about all the things that you should consider. And the steps you should have when you're executing a family preparedness plan, including your relocation strategy, think of the opposite individual who has none of us.

So we know that reality is that the public sector cannot execute recovery alone. In fact, it should play a minor role for the prepared family. A well-constructed family preparedness plan would see the navigation of the recovery process without any notable interaction with the government. They may be of assistance, but not a necessary element of successful recovery from significant loss.

So in calamity strikes, there are several lines of defense similar to a delaying action in the army. The intent is to have multiple strategies to employ to counter the effects of your opponent. And the significant loss in the disruption to disaster is considered your opponent. The effective population needs to be made whole.

Now in negotiation with unions and insurance terminology, this means report restored to your pre-event status. To reconstruct what was lost, both figuratively and physically, and reflect zero visible impact. It basically puts you back to the way it was before the event occurred. That is the goal of recovery.

The road is a place as a freak in mind field, not necessarily so, but it is a mind field nonetheless. So for the public, the initial line of defense is your preparedness. It's the creation and updating of a family preparedness plan that includes an evacuation and reconstruction strategy. So I talked a lot about evacuation before in season seven, season eight, and part of season nine, there are a number of episodes on evacuation.

I wrote a flood that horse anymore here, but I will say that if you do not have an absolute talk about it, we'll have to write robust evacuation strategies that you jump over to my site on Buzzrow. And you go on the end and go on Buzzrow that has a historical all 270 plus episodes and you'll find them there. So assuming you have a rock solid evacuation plan, we now talking to the first number of key tools you have is insurance. First risk transfer and form of insurance.

The intent is to shoulder the burden of replacing loss, physical items with the insurance company through a policy for fees to replace the need to self ensure and fund the reconstruction. Right? You don't want to have to pull out your checkbook and the old saying, and you probably don't have cash sitting around to reconstruct your house on your own. So you have insurance.

The insurance contracts are exceptionally detailed with a very specific set of covered losses and exclusion. This is the most valuable and misunderstood instrument available. Very few homeowners and renters are able to speak to the inclusions and exclusions of their policy. What their immediate responsibilities are and the coverage limits and timelines embedded in the policy clauses, intimately understanding an insurance policy and negotiating for your specific location hazards is a personal responsibility.

I've seen this many times when I interview people about losses post disaster is what happens is I buy a house and I need fire insurance right in Canada and many locations around the world to minimal acceptable standard for insurance. Right? You have to have so much fire insurance damage coverage. So what do we do?

We shop around for the lowest price. We sign the paper and we walk away problem. Except that insurance is your most valuable risk transfer tool in time of the loss. And most people and I would say the vast majority simply have no idea what's in their policy.

Have no idea when you have a loss what specific things and on what timeline are you required to do as part of your insurance policy? And there are very specific requirements of what you're to do. What are you covered for? Not what calamity could happen?

What is or is not included for that? Your second time, uh, your second line of defense that I want to speak to today is a reconstruction timeline strategy. This portion of the preparedness line outlines how the family intends to continue earning income. If that was lost during the event and where they intend to be housed during a reconstruction, both of these are determined advance with employment pivot plans should the current income stream be severed as well as several options for two, three year housing that includes provision for all family members, your education, take care, and either set it.

And element of the strategy is the availability of terminal clauses and insurance. These permit the homeowner not to reconstruct but the transfer the loss to the insurance company who will reimburse a policy holder for the value of the insured property, obviously paying mortgage company first, allowing for a complete and permanent separation from the property. This facilitates a reorientation of your strategy to relocation from recovery. Now if we think about the income, think about your, your member of Jasper and your home didn't burn.

Well, high five yourself. But what if your place of work did? What if the place you earn an income is no longer there? First of all, I'm going to ask you right now, do you know what your employer's planning is when they, when the, when the facility is lost?

Do they intend to continue to pay you during a reconstruction? Do they intend to reconstruct or they just going to wrap it up and close the doors and call it a day? What is their strategy? Because that's directly impacts on your ability to earn an income.

So imagine your family and Jasper, you saw that map and you're related to the fact that your home is intact, but your place of business is not or your place of income is not. Now what do you do? You can, when it's time to reoccupy Jasper, can you go home? Because you may not have any work to do.

You may not have a place of employment. So now you live in Jasper, I'll burn in your home, but you can't work. How do you intend to earn an income when your income source is lost in a disaster? That's part of a preparedness plan.

It's part of the trifectative preparedness plans that we offer in our books. And on our video course, it's all about understanding that you have a responsibility to answer the question is, what do I do? How do I earn an income tomorrow when I get fired? Now if you're fired, that's one thing.

But being fired can also happen from the building being burnt down. So if you were a class, a mechanic and an auto body shop and the auto body shop burns down, your boss is going to fire you. Not because you did anything wrong, but because there's no auto body shop anymore. It's your responsibility to know what you do next.

The government will not roll out a plan to cover your employment. The government will not roll out a plan for how you're going to go find another class, a mechanic job. That is your responsibility. That has to be included as part of your recovery preparedness plan.

Right. And then your relocation housing. And this is something I've seen again, your insurance, contract, your insurance policy contains provisions for secondary housing. What normally happens in an auto policy is like this, as you will be responsible for continuing to pay your mortgage for while your house is burnt down.

Right. So if your house is burnt down, yes, you still have to owe your mortgage. Yes, you still have to owe your property tax. But what your insurance policy does is cover your secondary, uh, residence, your new residence in that two to three year timeline.

The idea behind it is that you will not be out any money and you'll be made whole for place for your family to live. Number one, are those places available in the vicinity? Right. Because again, if you have to, you know, there wasn't many free homes in Jasper, like there's the vacancy rate in Jasper, it was pretty well there on zero.

Right. And with all these families, there are no places in Jasper for them to live. Right. There are none.

Zero. Big fat zero. None of these people are going to live in Jasper for two to three years while their house is being reconstruction. So knowing that knowing that they chose Jasper for a place to live, where do they intend to go?

Where do they intend to rebuild their lives for two to three years, whether waiting for their home in Jasper to reconstruct it? Does that location that they've chosen have appropriate childcare education for the family medical considerations relocation of their age, elderly in a family care home? These are all things that it is your responsibility to understand and to figure out. Some of these are going to be applicable.

Your family, summer not, but how you earn an income and where you live is important. Because if your insurance company pays market value, how do they consider market value? Because I have seen it where a family was given a certain amount of money per month, but it was insufficient because of the market spike in rents that happened as a result of all of these new families, supply and man, right? So market and available market went through the roof, you know, went out 10 or 15% because so many more people were looking for housing.

And because of that, that exceeded the amount. So now you have a family who has to pay the mortgage for a bird house, property high for a bird house and has to pay say $2,500 for a two bedroom apartment when their insurance company is giving the $1,800. They have to fund the other $700 a month from their income for two to three years. Why?

Because they didn't understand their insurance policy. And you will not win a fight in a court of law against your insurance company because you believed and don't worry. There are clauses in there that cover the fact that your insurance agent may say something that's not included in the contract. Yeah, that's not enough to break the contract.

Sorry folks insurance doesn't work that way. they're very, very good at what they do. Your third line loss is something called uninsured loss mitigation strategy. And there are provisions in insurance contracts that limit the exposure to certain hazards, war, terrorism, conflict, or certain calamities.

If those are not purchasable as a rider contract, this portion of the preparedness line outlines how the family intends to manage that loss. There are public sector programs that do offer some compensation for uninsured losses and calamities. And these would be included in this area. So I'll think about it.

I live in a city of Iowa, Ontario, right? My home owner's insurance does not come with earthquake insurance. And I nearly got knocked out of my chair in 2009 for a pretty darn significant earthquake that made the entire house shape. Right.

Had my house been damaged, I would not have insurance coverage because I can purchase a rider contract to cover myself on earthquake for an extra $500 a year. The vast majority of people look at that. I can't afford $500 a year, but they're protecting a half a million dollar asset for $500. Right.

It's dumb. It's stupid. It's ridiculous. But people do it all the freaking time.

Right. All the time. Understanding what is included in your insurance contract and an understanding your local hazard risk profile, which we talk about extensively on here, understanding that in Ottawa, I live in an earthquake zone, looking at my insurance contract earthquake is not recovered. I better put your quick insurance in there.

Right. That's intelligent understanding of what uninsured loss is. There are some things like war terrorism, etc. Now, if you have uninsured loss in Canada and FEMA has for the United States of America, we have a disaster finding assistance arrangement between the province of the province of the federal government as a how cows will be shared.

And it's usually 80% of your uninsured loss in certain circumstances. But again, if you're unaware of what might be covered by uninsured losses, it's a personal responsibility for you to go out and find that. So for example, this pops up when you're in a situation where I live in a place that's in a flood zone and I can't buy flangers. Nobody will sell it to me because it floods all the time and it costs too much money.

So the church company is saying, I don't care. We're not covering anybody for flangers. And this is happening in certain parts of California and Florida and other US states where insurance companies are leaving the industry. It's just too expensive to offer the insurance.

So if you find yourself in an area where you cannot buy a rider coverage and any loss from this calamity will become an uninsured loss. Again, the burden is on you to first accept that and you should probably think of that before you buy the property. But most of you also here you are. How you intend to mitigate that?

How you intend to cover that uninsured loss when you have a significant loss. Say you lose a half a million dollar house and the government's coverage is going to be 80% of that less deductible. So you may get $340,000 for your $500,000 loss. You are responsible for understanding how you intend to recover that $160,000 or how you send a management world without having $160,000.

So those are your main calamities. Now the fourth and final line of defense for recovery is mental health strategy. The loss of income home and relocation is a significant challenge for many, especially if there is human loss involved. If you had some fires in the paradise fire in California, for example, eight people in that town died.

That has a significant mental health component on top of the fact that you lost your home, your income and your having to relocate. Now a number of your friends and maybe a family member perished in those fires. Right. That is a significant and we must not underplay the mental health challenges when we have significant losses.

This is never to be overlooked. It needs to be included in your preparedness plan. Do the extent of where can I seek significant or help for a family member when significant events occur? Understanding that private psychiatry, social, social workers, online therapy, all of this stuff is available.

But how might I access that is part of a strategy ahead of time to show that when somebody in your family is insignificant to stress as a result of this, you have the ability to help them. But one of the most one of the best ways to mitigate this is strong family ties and high degrees of social capital. I talk about social capital length. It's a theoretical framework for my dissertation.

I am a board member of the International Social Capital Association, where we spend significant time researching and discussing the strengths and the value of human relationships in navigating all of life. And I'm actually the coordinator of the disaster resilience special interest group where an eclectic group of researchers, practitioners, experts and interested folks from around the world get together to talk about disaster resilience through the lens of human relationships. It's incredibly powerful to know that it is your human relationship that is far more valuable. And, you know, in fact, and I'll note this that all of the research that's been done and noted for the last couple hundred years has indicated clearly that the most single greatest indicator to better post event outcomes after significant events is the state of your relationships, the state of your human relationships, the strength of them, the value of them, the interconnectedness that have the sense of place in your sense of belonging.

That will bring you back better faster than any amount of money that's in your bank account. So never forget the need to talk about loss, the need to discuss loss, the need to have a strong friend group and maintain strong social ties to navigate significant loss. So what we talked about today, this outline is not what's included in public sector resident facing preparedness communications, not even close. Recovery is the poor cause of emergency management.

They're the ignored friend at the party. They own no license irons. They begin to speak when the cameras are gone and they're provided and they're provided with little to offer the public. Those dependent on government assistance and navigates significant disruptions will be prescribed a long and painful experience loaded with bureaucracy and less than expected benefits.

I don't wish that I anyone. We can do better. We choose not to. So hopefully the information that I talked about today and the strategies that I talked about today are things that you can sit down, drop down, talk about, consider with your family members and say, hey, listen.

And this is the question I asked all the time in emergency preparedness. And this is how I like it. It worked for me. And it was one of the cows that got me into the industry.

What does my world look like when my house burns down? What does my world look like when I get fired tomorrow? These things, it doesn't cost any money. I'm a fan of the old killer.

I love to make notes and I don't lose them in loose pieces of paper or apple notes. However, whiteboard, whatever your strategy is, just sit down with your cup of coffee. You're significant. Other your friends.

And even if you're young, if you're nearly 20 to have these conversations, what does my world look like when these significant events happen to me? The people of Jasper didn't expect us to happen. Right? The people of lit and BC didn't expect us to happen.

The people of Moro Glamas did not expect a loose half of their town in a major F5 tornado. Right? The people, Hurricane Sandy, Hurricane Katrina, we can go on on for all of these significant calamities that happen. These people didn't think it would happen to them.

They used to voice. They just dismiss it as something that was too big to worry about. They became agnostic to it. The idea here is that you're going to spend a small amount of time with a piece of paper.

You're significant other and walk through what this world would look like. And the number one thing, if you take nothing else and I said this on the matter of facts, podcasts, when I was a gas dad and how it facts great podcasts, by the way, my nephew's one of the two hosts fantastic individual. Listen to that. If you're a blue knows what it's all about life and Nova Scotia.

Well, I was a gas on that podcast. I flew down because it was a great honor. And that's what's the number one thing people could do. And my answer was the same as it is today.

Intimately, no, you're insurance policy. I don't care if you're a renter. I don't care if you're an 18 year old renter who shares an apartment with three other people. You have to have insurance.

If you don't, you're a fool. Right? Skip, suffer, and buy insurance. I'm dead serious.

Right? There is no excuse in today's modern society. And there is no economic reason why you don't have insurance. Right?

It's a choice you're making. So have insurance. But then understand the insurance. Does the insurance cover what you think it does or what does it cover?

What it doesn't cover. How are you intent to deal with that? And can you purchase a rider policy to cover that? If you have belongings, for example, in your house, if you have belongings insurance in your renter, and they apparently burns down, do they cover the appreciated costs or replacement costs?

That's a big deal. If you have a five year old TV and they do replace depreciation costs, you're going to get 10 bucks in a box of 10 bits per TV. Right? That's it.

Not replace with us. Understand what your insurance covers. If there's nothing else you do as a result of this podcast episode, they still pull out your insurance policy, read it. And basically, I always recommend get a list of questions together.

Very specific detail questions. What does it cover? What doesn't cover? How can I do it?

And when there is a loss, what do you expect me to do? And how much you're going to pay for my retirement, my replacement residence, and then get on the phone with your insurance broker. Get on the phone with your insurance agent. Talk to your insurance agent about your insurance contract.

Most people go for the lowest bidder sign contract and carry on with their day. Right? That putting themselves in their family at a high degree of unnecessary risk because they just don't care. Well, if you're going to do a doctor life, you need to start caring.

So that's the one thing that you do after this podcast, that is all that I care. Know your insurance. So you now know what you're covered for and what you're not covered for. Now you can sit down and start working on the preparedness strategies that are included in this podcast.

And I hope you find the valuable thanks for joining us again here at Inside My New Ed. And as I said at the very beginning of today's episode some 36 minutes ago, please, if you would enjoy what you hear, please tell someone about it. Past the word this inside my new head is free. It always will be at his our public service here at Preparedness Live Inc.

To the world we're downloaded in 58 countries and over 600 different locations in 58 countries. We are here to provide actual intelligent evidence based non-apocalyptic preparedness material for rational people. The world is going to get much more chaotic as we approach the end of the 2020s. We're going to have more about that coming conflict and what I could need for you in future episodes.

But for now, you're in your world, be prepared for things that are beyond your control and your life will be so much better. So that when in the very unfortunate possibility, a significant event happens to you, you and your family are executing and well understood and well crafted plan while everybody else is running around on a cell phone at the Motel 6 eating take out, trying to figure out what to do next. Don't do that to your family. Thank you very much.

Take care. Stay safe.