Transcript: This is Climate: Relief and Resilience - The Washington Post

Transcript: This is Climate: Relief and Resilience - The Washington Post

MR. DENNIS: Hello, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I’m Brady Dennis, a national environmental reporter at The Post.

Michael, Alice, welcome to Washington Post Live.

DR. OPPENHEIMER: Good to be here.

MS. HILL: Thank you.

MR. DENNIS: Michael, let's start with you. Right now, as we speak, somewhere north of 50 million Americans from southern Arizona all the way over to Florida are under severe heat alerts. Parts of Texas have seen triple-digit weather for many days in a row now. Records are falling. Can you explain why an event like this is so significant, why it's the sort of thing that scientists are telling us is likely to happen more often in a warmer world, and what are the sort of health risks and worries when we face events like this?

DR. OPPENHEIMER: Well, the greenhouse gases, primarily from fossil fuel burning, have been building up in the atmosphere, and those gases trap heat that would otherwise escape into space, and that's making Earth warmer. It's a trend that's been going on for 150 years, and it looks like it's accelerating because we continue to pour more and more of those gases in the atmosphere.

The effect of that is extreme events like extreme heatwaves, like extreme rainfall because the extra heat evaporates water from the ocean surface and what goes up has to come down so you get more rainfall, like extreme levels of seawater at the coast because sea level is rising as the ocean water warms and as ice melts all over the planet. That means extreme events, that events that we rarely saw, if ever, in the past, are going to happen more and more frequently, and we're just not prepared to deal with that right now.

MR. DENNIS: Alice, sort of along those same lines, this week--or excuse me--in recent days, we've seen something like 40 million people in the Northeast and the Central Plains at risk of really severe storms, and this is, of course, summertime. There is bad weather. But as a nation, the number of really damaging storms of so-called "billion-dollar disasters" has been rising sharply in recent years. What's your biggest concern when you look at this increase in extreme weather and sort of how it stretches to almost every corner of the country?

MS. HILL: The biggest worry is, as Michael said, we are simply not prepared. We are seeing a climate that didn't exist before, but everything we built is built to the climate of past. So we routinely see infrastructure that's inadequate. The electric grid is a wonderful example of that. It routinely fails. Power outages are up, and that has very serious consequences for public health, people who are dependent on machines to thrive, or for the economy. Businesses close. Kids have to go home. There's no air conditioning. So, we are seeing that we simply don't have what we need for a climate-worsened environment, and we are sorely behind in the land use choices, the building codes, the type of changes that would keep us much safer in a hotter, more dangerous world.

MR. DENNIS: Let's go back to Michael, and, Michael, the nonprofit First Street Foundation just this week released new data that finds climate change is fueling more devastating rains and flooding around different parts of the country, and that that's set to really only worsen in the years ahead.

One finding from that study found that in roughly 20 percent of the country, what was maybe one day a one--what used to be a one-in-a-hundred-year storm now may happen every 25 years.

You tweeted that the news was, quote, "another way FEMA is way behind on protecting Americans," and I'm just wondering if you could talk through what you meant by that.

DR. OPPENHEIMER: Well, the primary problem is--you know, FEMA does a very good job most of the time on cleaning up after disaster. It's a congressional mandate. But the thing is with climate change, you have to plan in advance, and I don't mean a day or two in advance, like when you see a storm coming. I mean decades in advance because building a resilient society, for instance, to take your example, improving drainage systems around the country, particularly in urban areas, takes multiple decades. We just can't afford to do it all at once in a year or two. That means we need a lot of advanced planning, and that hasn't been FEMA's job in the past.

The federal government as a whole has not been set up until some initiatives in the Biden administration, in fact, to deal with thinking a long time in advance with regard to a changing climate. That's no surprise because the climate has not been--you know, it hasn't been changing in a significant way for a long, long time, and then recently, in recent decades, the changes, due to the buildup of the greenhouse gases, have become very noticeable. So that we need a reorganization in both the federal government itself and in the relationship between the federal government and the states. After all, most of the money to do things like build water supply systems, build coastal defense, build dams, a lot of that--and in most cases most of it--comes from the federal government, but the implementation, in large measure, is either in the Army Corps of Engineers, which has its own set of priorities, or at the state and local level. State and local level has responsibility but not the money. The federal government has the money, but it hasn't had the mandate to think ahead.

That's slowly starting to change. It's not changing fast enough. We need more centralization of the responsibility for climate adaptation and resilience building, and we need it fast.

MR. DENNIS: Speaking of adaptation and building of infrastructure, Alice, I wanted to ask you--I covered the First Street report this week, and one thing that jumped out at me was the point being made that the government's current precipitation estimates don't capture what's actually happening any longer as the climate changes, that also that this comes at a time when the nation is pouring, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars into new infrastructure.

We know that NOAA is working on estimates that will factor in climate change, but those are some years away from completion. And I just wonder, do you worry that we are going to end up, in this moment that we're in, building roads or bridges, stormwater systems and other infrastructure that might not really be adequate for the climate of the future or the climate of the present for that matter?

MS. HILL: There is a huge risk that we will take this once-in-a-generation amount of money and spend it in a way where we don't build the bridge high enough for the floodwaters, the road doesn't have a wide enough drainage ditch to accompany the extreme precipitation that falls.

You know, we base our building practices here in the United States on model building codes. Those model building codes also rely on the calculations of past rain that we've had. So those model building codes, even if they're the latest codes, do not yet reflect the future risk.

But here in the United States, because of the way we're set up and the decisions about how and where building occurs rests with state or local governments, more than half the states, 40-some states, have a very low level of code that's disaster resistant, and that's to the events that occurred in the past, not the events in the future.

And we're also seeing much greater development in coastal areas. Forty percent of our population lives along--in a county along the coast. That's only 10 percent of the land mass, but that area is vulnerable to bigger, more intense storms as well as sea level rise. And then we're seeing just lots of people moving into this wildland-urban interface, which faces much higher wildfire risk, and they are also vulnerable. And then we're going to have infrastructure that's built to outmoded standards, and also we don't have good vulnerability assessments yet on a community-wide basis about what these future risks will look like as we made the choices about where infrastructure should be placed. Should we even be building a bridge there? That's a fundamental question in the face of climate changing. But we don't have that kind of information for the communities to be able to work off of.

Maybe a wealthy community does, but many of our communities simply don't have that kind of planning expertise or access to it to be able to make the wise choices with these dollars that are coming very, very quickly with a lot of pressure to spend them.

MR. DENNIS: Michael, Alice was just speaking about different kind of hazards, and I wanted to go into that a little bit as well. As you both know very well that climate change is not just affecting rain and hurricanes but is supercharging any number of weather-related disasters, such as wildfires, droughts, the heatwaves we're seeing in parts of the country this week. I just wonder whether you can talk about--a little bit further about whether you think the government is prepared for this array of challenges. How do you prioritize where to focus on adapting and preparing for those challenges, and are individual communities prepared for what lies ahead?

DR. OPPENHEIMER: I mean, the straight answer is, given some of the uncertainties and lack of information that Alice cited, we really have to act anyway, because having a full--fully built resilient country for what's going to happen in 2050 means we have to start now, because we clearly don't have a fully resilient country for what's happening now. So we have a long way to go, and that means not just waiting and planning the biggest, most expensive things. It also means doing things that we can get in place cheaper, like preserving wetlands along the coast and maybe extending them or building up dunes that have been destroyed by various kinds of development. It means, for instance, grappling with the most common cause of climate-related mortality, which is heat-related deaths.

You know, we basically privatize the business of dealing with extreme heat. We tell people go out and buy an air conditioner, but what happens if you can't afford an air conditioner? What happens if you don't have access to the very minor role that government plays in protecting people from extreme heat, which are cooling centers in many cities? A lot of them are built in places where the most vulnerable populations--people who are poor, people who are sick, people who have been disadvantaged in various ways in our society--don't have access to them because they would have to drive a mile or they're too sick to walk the mile, and they don't have a car, and they don't know a lot of people who can just come pick them up.

We have to fix the society's--the way it's dealing with people who don't have the resources to help themselves, and we've got to start with these things which are quite obvious, like building cooling centers in the right place, for instance, or fixing drainage systems. And when you do that, think about the amount of rainfall they're going to have to accommodate in 30 years, because we don't want to come back every five years and rebuild the drainage system.

So the first thing we do is look for the obvious, and while we're doing that, we planned for the bigger things like surge barriers--for instance, it's one that protects London--which we don't know if we're going to need in some of our cities, but we might. And it takes--once you decide to build one, it takes a decade or more to get it done. So we've got a lot to do. Implement the easy and cheaper and effective stuff now, the stuff that can save lives at a relatively low cost, but be planning for the bigger stuff as you move into the future.

And then there are probably some big things in some places that we can't wait with, and those just have to be done now. And the federal government has to help localities pay for those.

MR. DENNIS: Alice, Michael just mentioned the very real reality that a lot of times the most severe climate impacts fall on those least equipped to deal with it, and I just wonder if you have any more to add about how you think about whether the nation and how the nation ensures that the funding and resources that do exist to adapt to prepare for extreme weather disasters and to recover from them, that it actually reaches the places that where it's most needed, low income, minority, rural communities that maybe don't have the resources of some of our larger cities. How should we think about that as a country and prioritize that?

MS. HILL: Well, it should be a priority, and I do believe that the Biden administration has put great emphasis on making sure that the federal aid that's available is reaching the most vulnerable. Of course, there have been some studies that have shown that past aid provided by FEMA, for example, has benefited richer White people than it has benefited poorer Black people who tend to be, because of racial profiling and redlining, located in flood plains. So we have many poor, marginalized communities who are just at physically greater risk because of historical discrimination in the United States. So I think the Biden administration has been looking at how do we provide some kind of extra aid if those people want to relocate.

FEMA runs a buyout program. 60,000 homes have been bought out to allow people to move out of the flood plain to a higher area, and by the way, just recently, very good news, that program, 70 percent of the people who took advantage of that program moved to higher ground, which is exactly what we want. We don't want people to take that money and move to someplace that's equally vulnerable to flooding.

But we need to look at how do we help the people that are already there who do not have the means to leave leave. We also need to think about, as insurance costs go up, we are on the edge of a major disruption of property insurance availability. We also see disruption in the flood insurance, which is primarily provided by the federal government as rates increase to reflect the growing risk, and some people simply can't afford those new premiums. How do we help those people be able to be insured as they go forward? Because they're sitting in an area that's really more at risk than many others.

It has to be a big focus. Unfortunately, it's going to be a huge cost. We talk about how much it's going to cost to transition to green energy. This cost to prepare the United States for the type of impacts, including things like wildfire smoke spreading across the Midwest and the Northeast, something really our models haven't been talking about, wildfire smoke from another nation, how do we get ready to have the proper filtration systems, the places where people can be endorsed safely and cover the economic loss that comes from people not going to sporting events, concerts get canceled, all sorts of downside, downstream impacts that we simply haven't modeled for, planned for, or accounted for that we need to get busy? And those impacts typically hit the most vulnerable the hardest because they don't have the resources to self-insure or to take care of reducing risks themselves.

MR. DENNIS: Michael, I'm going to come back to you. I believe this is probably the last question. We just have a minute or two left here, but I wanted to zoom out from this focus on the United States. And you made the point very early on that this all comes back to the fact that we as a world continue to put greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and that that is worsening all of these problems. Sort of the two questions I have on that is, you know, there have been a lot of promises made, both by our nation and others, to do more to cut greenhouse gases in recent years, and yet the globe's emissions continue to rise or at least to plateau. What must change for that to change in the drastic way that scientists say it needs to change? And then, you know, what gives you hope that it will? And I would just add to that, what role do wealthy countries, such as the United States, owe to other nations that are feeling the same kind of impacts, if not worse, than we are seeing here in America but did little to nothing to cause this problem?

DR. OPPENHEIMER: I mean, the basic bottom line is if we don't rein in greenhouse gas emissions, we're never going to adapt or build resilience fast enough and effectively enough to catch up with the climate change. It's just going to run ahead of us, and I can't imagine what that world looks like in a few decades if we just sit here and let it happen.

So what's actually going on is that most countries have made some serious commitments to reduce their greenhouse emissions and their contribution to warming. They're not really living up to those commitments fully. But they--but a lot of countries are trying, and on the good side, there is an energy revolution going on in the United States and elsewhere. We are making a transition towards less carbon-intense energy, less energy produced by like coal, for instance, coal burning that produces carbon dioxide. We are in a transition to driving electric cars that eventually will be powered mostly with renewable energy and hopefully entirely one of these days. It's all not happening fast enough.

So governments, now that they've taken the first steps, have to increase their level of ambition. Imagine what the world looks like if climate change just runs away and we don't have any chance to catch up. We'll be dealing with these events not every hundred years, not every 10 years, but several times a year, as it's been calculated for coastal flooding, for instance.

So there's just no choice, and I'm sure countries are realizing that slowly, and we are at a pivot point. We have an energy revolution going, on the one hand. On the other hand, we have countries lagging but starting to reduce their--to increase their commitment and their actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And being an optimist in life, I think the whole thing has a good chance of coming together and producing a slowing and then--of the climate change, then a stabilization of our climate, and avoiding the kinds of outcomes that we just will never be able to deal with effectively. And that means saving lives, and in the long term, it means saving money.

One report argued that for every dollar spent in advance, you save three or four dollars after the fact, after disasters have happened. So it pays to think about this now from the point of view of adaptation and certainly from the point of view of cutting our emissions as soon as possible.

MR. DENNIS: Okay. Well, I think we're going to have to leave it there for today. Michael, Alice, we very much appreciate your time, and thank you for joining us here on Washington Post Live.

DR. OPPENHEIMER: Thank you.

MS. HILL: Thank you.

MR. DENNIS: Please stay with us for our next conversation, but before that, the upcoming segment will feature Ryan Lanclos, a director from Esri, a presenting sponsor of this program. Lanclos serves as one of 40 appointed members of the FEMA National Advisory Council and was appointed by FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell. Esri has no role in the editorial content of this program.

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MS. LABOTT: Hello. I'm Elise Labott, and today we're discussing the impact of our changing climate on disaster response and how technology is used to support aid efforts. From extreme weather to earthquakes, floods, and fires, these disasters have a devastating effect on the humanitarian and public health of communities all over the world, and innovations in location intelligence technology can be invaluable for anticipating a disaster event and coordinating a response.

To talk about the role of geospatial technology in transforming the way communities prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters and crises worldwide, we're joined by Ryan Lanclos. He's the director of National Government and Public Safety Solutions at Esri.

Ryan, thanks so much for joining us.

MR. LANCLOS: Hi, Elise. It's good to be here. Thanks.

MS. LABOTT: Let's start with the increase and sheer number and intensity of these climate events around the world, also here in the U.S. I mean, the impacts are undeniable. Talk to me a little bit about how you and emergency managers you work with are handling this growing challenge of changing climate. I know at Esri, you have that disaster response program to help organizations and communities use geospatial technology and implement disaster response.

MR. LANCLOS: Yeah. I think it's clear we don't have to look very far to find examples of what you're talking about. Here in the Houston area, where I live, last week on a walk, smoke was impacting my family and I from wildfires in New Mexico, early in the season, and those on the East Coast, who know what I'm talking about, who had the worst air quality in the world as a result of wildfires in Canada, the largest on record, just unbelievable examples is right in front of us.

And I think it's clear that what we see in these disasters and events is that the past is not a good predictor of the future, that we need technology and tools to help us understand a changing climate, what that means for us in terms of preparedness and response. And geography as a toolkit allows us to start to understand and ask questions about it, and GIS as a technology, or geographic information systems, can really help us start to understand and look at these complexities that are not just about the natural systems, the earthquake, the flood zones, the fire, but also the social and the economic potential impacts and how these things interrelate to each other.

I think emergency managers are all about preparing and being able to ask smart questions about each of these specific areas. To understand flood risk, where to plan evacuations for wildfire is key in the future world that we live in today.

MS. LABOTT: Well, obviously, these disasters in the places where they occur are different, so there's not that cookie-cutter approach. So how does technology and data-mapping geography factor into the protection of vulnerable people and homes in the path of a disaster event, even as it approaches?

MR. LANCLOS: Yeah. I think that's just such a critical question. It really gets to the crux of what can move from an emergency to a disaster very quickly, and that is the lack of understanding about inequities and vulnerabilities that exist in a community. And often that tipping point is available to us to understand by just asking good questions.

And so that looks at not just demographics, but it's also where people maybe have lack of access to transportation or lack the means to purchase insurance that can help them recover more quickly. All of those tell us a lot about how to prepare for these events that we're talking about today.

And one way we can do that is to create what we call a "digital twin." Imagine if you look outside, you see trees and roads and buildings, and oftentimes we would represent that on a map. And many people orient themselves to a two-dimensional map, a paper map. But imagine being able to look at that in three dimensions and understand how certain impacts will cascade across not just that infrastructure in the built environment affecting structures and buildings but also looking at how it impacts people specifically. And when we start to look at that level of detail, we can really understand these inequities. We can plan much more targeted interventions that mitigate future risk and also adapt in a changing world to make sure that we can move forward, where to plant trees for heat islands, where to adapt building codes and structures for floods. These are the examples we need, and using tools allow us to really plan in a changing world that truly isn't like it was yesterday, as I said earlier.

MS. LABOTT: Right. So we're always going to need to respond and recover, but what have we learned from the recent disasters we're speaking about and how technology is evolving to help us understand the potential scope and impact so that we can plan better, evacuate faster, and save more lives?

MR. LANCLOS: Yeah. Well, I think the key is that that digital twin that I just described is not static, right? It is a living digital twin. We can look at real-time traffic patterns. We can see weather patterns playing out in forecasts. We can see alerts that are coming from sensors that tell us more about our world than ever before, things like the air quality sensors that alerted us to that poor air quality or stream gages that tell us about floods or even new technologies that are early detecting wildfires out in California. Like these are all sensors that allow us to understand what's happening in real time, and using GIS to bring all of that information together, not to just visualize it but to simulate different scenarios, what happens at certain levels of a flood or a certain level of a forecast allows us to not just plan better, but then when that scenario takes place, we can real-time monitor that. And we can adjust our plans accordingly to respond as effectively as possible, and I think we see that playing out in hazards of all types when they occur, from floods to fires or earthquakes.

MS. LABOTT: So now that we have the technology, it's become critical for disaster response, but it still takes human ingenuity, resilience, collaboration. What would you say to community leaders and emergency personnel about the future of disaster response?

MR. LANCLOS: Yeah. If you're an emergency manager listening and you're reacting to this, you are all about ingenuity and collaboration, and I would say that you know that being prepared is about being armed with the best information possible.

So when we respond, it's also being able to adapt as that information changes quickly, and I think GIS, as what we're talking about today, is the tool that allows us to monitor this change, to ask questions about various options and plans that we may be putting into place and to make decisions in real time as it plays out in the community. Now, one example of this that I can use very quickly is the Turkey earthquake. The largest search and rescue mission ever conducted relied on maps to communicate not just what was happening in the field and to coordinate all the moving logistical components but to make sure that all those decisions made in the field were being reflected back in real time, so that decision-makers and elected officials could communicate and seek additional resources to recover as quickly as possible.

I think that's the future of disaster response. Technology is there to lend a helping hand. All of those first responders that have lived experiences responding to crises and disasters need support in this new world that we're in today.

And again, as we said earlier, the past isn't a good predictor of the future, and so this is where technology and tools like GIS allow us to have a better insight to the future and hopefully avert disasters.

MS. LABOTT: Well, with our changing climate causing these disasters that are more frequent and intense, it's clear spatial data from GIS and location intelligence technology further equips organizations and communities to prepare for a crisis, understand it, make better decisions, and respond more effectively to save lives.

Ryan Lanclos, director of National Government and Public Safety Solutions at Esri, thanks so much for joining us.

MR. LANCLOS: Thanks, Elise.

MS. LABOTT: We'll send it back now to The Washington Post.

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MR. DENNIS: Welcome back. For those of you just joining us, welcome to Washington Post Live. I'm Brady Dennis, a national environmental reporter for The Post.

I'm joined now by FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell. Administrator Criswell, welcome to Washington Post Live.

MS. CRISWELL: Thanks, Brady. It's really great to be here today.

MR. DENNIS: I want to start with some of your own words. I noticed that you have repeatedly called climate change, quote, "our number one threat." Would you just take a moment and explain what you mean when you say that, how is climate change complicating your job and the work of--and the work of FEMA?

MS. CRISWELL: Brady, I think that's a great way to start this conversation. This is truly what I think is the crisis of our generation. As we continue to experience and observe an increase in the number of severe weather events that are impacting our nation, it's causing more complex recoveries. It's taking longer for us to be able to get in and assist these people and help them on this road to recovery.

Just a few stats even to share with you, we have had, over the past five years, more than 20 $1 billion severe weather events across this nation every year for the last five years, and just in 2022, those five--those 20 $1 billion weather events have really cost us in recovery a total of $175 billion so far. And so we have to start to think about what we're going to do to reduce the impacts of these events so we don't have these complicated recoveries and we can make our nation more resilient.

MR. DENNIS: You mentioned the number of billion-dollar disasters, as the government calls and tracks them. I did want to go a little deeper on that. If you look back over the last, say, 40 years, the average number of those disasters, inflation adjusted, something like seven or eight on average per year. But as you mentioned, in the last five years, there's been more like 18 per year, and these include massive events, like Hurricane Ian from last fall but also lesser known but still destructive events all around the country, flash floods, cold snaps, wildfires. What worries you about that trend, and is FEMA and the federal government honestly equipped to deal with that many disasters, especially if that number continues to rise?

MS. CRISWELL: I think, Brady, the thing that worries me the most about this trend is the movement of people that we see happening across the nation. COVID-19 really spurred an opportunity for many people to move into different areas. They moved from a lot of urban centers and into coastal areas or more rural areas, and they haven't experienced perhaps some of the threats and the risks that these communities are facing. And so what really worries me is that as this trend continues to change, that we need to take the time now to educate people on what the risks are where they live.

The other part that worries me is the nature of these storms is continuing to change. We talk about Hurricane Ian, and Hurricane Ian hit in a very similar spot of Florida that Hurricane Charlie did. But Hurricane Charlie and Ian were very different storms. Hurricane Charlie was primarily a wind event, but Hurricane Ian brought 19 feet of storm surge and extreme rain. And what we're seeing is that these events are different than what we would've faced perhaps several years ago, and people have a misconception of what the risk is that they're going to face from these types of storms.

So we really do have our work cut out for us and making sure that we are helping people across the nation understand what their unique risk is where they live. Now, whether FEMA is equipped to continue to respond at the rate that we're going, it would be a challenge, right? So we need to take the time now to invest in a couple of different things.

One, as far as the response rate, we used to plan our readiness cycle around the peak of hurricane season, and we would make sure that we had the staffing available for this short period of time in the summer. But I think as you're seeing, our operational tempo is constant year-round, and it has been for the last several years. So we are taking a step back and reevaluating how it is we need to be structured in order to sustain a year-round operational tempo instead of one that really peaks at a certain point of the year and then levels out.

So we have some work to do. We've made some progress, but we have a ways to go yet in order to make sure that we can continue to keep up with this level of events.

But we have to start investing. We have to invest in helping communities reduce the impacts from these events. If we continue on this rate, we're just going to continue to respond, recover, rinse, and repeat. And we have to stop that cycle. We have to reduce the impacts, invest in mitigation, which also means personal preparedness, and make sure that we are building resilience, even after disaster, we're building that resilience as we're rebuilding the community so we can better absorb the shocks and the stressors that these communities are experiencing.

MR. DENNIS: I want to follow up on a few things you said. One early on was that you mentioned the movement of Americans in recent years, and just to quickly follow up on that, we've seen large numbers of Americans flock to places that are quite vulnerable to disasters, whether it's on the edge of a fire-prone area or to coastal areas that are very susceptible to floods and hurricanes. Do you feel like it's FEMA's--part of FEMA's role or the federal government's role to do more to discourage movement to certain areas or development in certain areas? And if so, how? How does that work?

MS. CRISWELL: It's a really interesting question, Brady, and I get asked this question a lot, right? The question I typically get asked is, should we let people rebuild here? And so I often answer, well, where would you like them to rebuild? Right? Whether it's in a coastal area that's experiencing hurricanes, whether it's in the urban interface where they're experiencing wildland fires, or in the Midwest where they're in tornado alley. So there are definitely places across this country where we should encourage, as much as we can, not to rebuild, but we have to actually have the conversation about how we build.

Even in areas like Fort Myers Beach, I saw homes that were built to a much higher standard, a much higher code that did not have the significant impacts that we saw on other parts of Fort Myers Beach. I've seen this in Louisiana. I've seen this in other places around the country, yet only 40 percent of our counties across America have adopted modern building codes. That's something we at FEMA are very focused on.

We can't direct the adoption. We can try to incentivize, but what we can do is really educate, and that is something that our team has been working really hard on with our first-ever building code strategy and how we're going to be able to get out into communities, help them understand what this investment means. And just from a dollar standpoint, the building code investment, every dollar invested in adopting building codes will save you $11 in the recovery costs. That's more than our mitigation return on investment, and so it's so important that we still can continue to help educate communities about the value of building codes and how it's going to help them as we continue to see people moving into different areas and we see the number and the types of threats continue to increase.

MR. DENNIS: As we speak here this afternoon, there's a crippling heat dome with temperatures near 120 that's affected millions and millions of people in Texas and other parts of the South. Heatwaves, as you know, heat causes more deaths each year than any other weather event.

MS. CRISWELL: Yes.

MR. DENNIS: Correct me if I'm wrong. I think FEMA has never issued an emergency or major disaster declaration for a heatwave. I'm wondering why that is and if there's some legal barrier, or maybe more importantly, do you think going forward that's something that we may see or should see, given what a threat this is year after year?

MS. CRISWELL: You're right, Brady. Heat is the number one natural hazard killer across the United States, and we are seeing a continued increase in the number of heat domes that different communities are experiencing.

I remember one of my first few weeks on the job and having a conversation with the governor of Oregon about the heat domes that she was experiencing there and the impact it was having on people.

Within our authorities on the Stafford Act, you're right. We have never issued an emergency or a major disaster declaration based on heat, and a lot of that has to do with what is it that we're going to actually provide in a monetary sense or bringing in the rest of the federal government to support it.

But we do have a role, I think, in the heat conversation, and that's through preparedness, and that's through our mitigation funding. We can use mitigation funding to help these communities develop cooling centers to help keep people safe. We can use mitigation funding to help support other operations that are going to help harden the infrastructure so they don't lose power. But we also want to get out there and educate the community. We want to get out there and deliver the preparedness messages about what it is you need to do in the event that you are faced with one of this.

Just because we don't necessarily have the authorities right now within the Stafford Act, that doesn't mean that we are not--that we're sitting idly by. In fact, our Region 5 regional administrator hosted our first-ever heat summit a few months ago in Chicago to really talk about what are the impacts and the hazards from heat, what role can FEMA play to help communities better withstand what they're seeing with these types of heat events that we're across the country.

MR. DENNIS: There has been a history of uneven federal disaster recovery and relief that can exacerbate racial and social divides; for instance, studies and reporting that show that disaster aid doesn't always reach the marginalized or low-income communities that suffer some of the worst impacts of a disaster. I'm wondering, especially as extreme weather becomes more common and some of these events become more intense, how do you think about this problem, and what are you and FEMA doing to prioritize equity when it comes to disaster recovery?

MS. CRISWELL: This is something that I think about every day, and this was one of my priorities when I first came into the agency to serve in this role as FEMA administrator. I took the time to reflect as I was being--going through the nomination process about what are the areas that I really wanted to focus on when I came to FEMA in this role, and through my time as a local emergency manager, whether it was in New York City or whether it was in Aurora, Colorado, but also my time as a federal coordinating officer during my first period with FEMA, working with states and local jurisdictions and understanding the diversity of the communities, not just cities, but the neighborhoods within the cities and the challenges that they face, and how do we make sure we understand what their barriers are to accessing the programs that they're eligible for?

So we put it in my strategic plan. I have three goals, and equity is one of my goals. To make sure that we can deliver emergency management services in an equitable way has been a priority, and we've done a number of things. One, I have told my staff over and over again, just figure out a way to get out of our own way, right? Look at our policies, and what can we do within our authorities to make sure that we understand the barriers that people are having, and adjust our policies in a way that are going to help us get these services to communities for the things that they're eligible for?

Another area that we're focused in on is we talked about with the resilience side, right? So the policy piece was more the after, but the beforehand with these types of events is we want to get out there and help communities understand what it is they can do to better harden themselves and make themselves more resilient.

And so through our BRIC program, our Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, I directed the team to do direct technical assistance. I wanted them to go out and find those communities that were the most under-resourced and the most underserved, to be able to get in there and provide technical assistance to help them better understand what was in the realm of possibility to be able to--to increase their resilience.

And I want to give you one example, which I think is a great example. And so Eastwick, Eastwick is the lowest-lying neighborhood in the city of Philadelphia, and it has an incredibly long history of flooding, and Eastwick is one of the communities that has been identified as an economically disadvantaged community. And so it made them eligible for this program, for direct technical assistance from FEMA, and so we pooled all of our resources, brought in our other federal partners to go in and work with the community of Eastwick, to better understand what they needed to help improve their own resiliency. And it's worked. This is exactly where I wanted to see this program go. So we have this under-resourced neighborhood of Eastwick. We sent in these technical resources to go in and help them envision what was in the realm of possibility, and they have now applied for and will most likely receive $700,000 in mitigation funding to help support some of those projects.

We need to continue to do this. We are taking a very place-based approach and focusing all of our efforts on the communities that need the most help instead of always being able to provide the assistance to those that have the greatest means, and I think we're seeing some progress already. I think we're going to see a lot more progress in the years to come.

MR. DENNIS: When you talk about helping communities, I did want to make sure and mention that the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law sets aside--I think it's somewhere in the neighborhood of $7 billion for FEMA's resilience and mitigation programs. Can you just briefly walk through some of the ways that money is being spent, some of the ways that it will likely be spent? And the bigger question is, is that nearly enough to help the nation prepare for some of these changes that are coming as far as extreme weather, or is it more of like a beginning?

MS. CRISWELL: Well, I'll start with the last piece of that. I don't--it is not nearly enough, but it is just one piece of the puzzle. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law gave funding to many federal agencies to help improve the resiliency, and it is the most funding in FEMA's history to really get in and focus on reducing the impacts through our mitigation programs. And this $7 billion, I think is going to go a long way.

Part of that money was going to do this direct technical assistance, to go out there and help the most communities--the communities in most need, better understand what they need to do to apply for additional funding, whether it's from FEMA or other federal agencies, to help harden them and make sure that they are more resilient to the shocks and the stressors that they're facing.

But it's also supporting then the programs. Our flagship program, the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, this is a great program, because not just through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, but through the investment or the enactment of this program itself, it raised the federal cost share. So under our legacy program, which is the Pre-Disaster Mitigation program, FEMA had a federal share limit, a cap of $5 million, and we could do a lot with $5 million. But when we're talking about the type of mitigation projects that need to happen, that barely scratches the surface. And through the BRIC program, we now have a federal cap, a federal share cap of $50 million. So we can really work with these communities to help them think about system-wide projects and not just these smaller projects that they've been limited to before because of that federal cost share.

And with the additional funding that's coming through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, it's really giving us a lot of opportunity to go out and help these communities with these larger system-based, community-wide projects that are going to have a broader impact on the whole neighborhood.

We have other programs that this funding is helping; our Flood Mitigation program, which is assisting with buyouts across the nation and helping to move people into safer areas. I think you heard earlier that we've had over 60,000 families that have benefited from this program, and we've been able to move them into higher ground, into a safer area. We're also being able to use our Swift Current Initiative program, which is taking that funding, and in taking the opportunities that arise after disaster to get in there quickly, put funding on the street faster, to help them make their decision, because we find that the longer you wait from a disaster to implementing these buyout programs, the harder it is to get people to want to move. But if you can get in there right away, we can really help them get to safer ground in a much more expeditious manner.

And so those are just a couple of the ways that we're able to help this. I mean, I want to just add even just one more thing, Brady, which I also think is a big support here, and it's the STORM Revolving Loan Fund. This is the first-ever revolving loan fund that FEMA has had, and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funded it. It was enacted previously, but it gave us the funding to provide low-interest loans or no-interest loans to communities to help with some of these projects.

What we find in many--back to the equity conversation, many of these communities can't cover the cost share, and so this revolving loan fund is going to help them with that piece of it and help get these projects into reality, shovels in the ground, and making a difference.

MR. DENNIS: I think we only have maybe a minute or so left, but I did want to squeeze in one question about the National Flood Insurance Program. We won't go into all the details. It can get, I know, pretty complex, but that is a important program that is up for reauthorization this year. It's been around for more than half a century, with the goal of helping people avoid catastrophic losses from floods and discouraging unsafe development in floodplains. You know, any number of things are happening with the flood insurance program. FEMA has gotten some criticism from folks on Capitol Hill about rates rising in certain districts. Although the idea, I think, is that some of those rates are now reflecting the true risk, but also there's been a drop in people having flood policies in recent years. I just want to ask you, broadly, what are the ways that Congress should amend or reform that program, and how do you think about the role it has to play going forward, especially in an era when we see more flooding and yet see fewer people with flood insurance?

MS. CRISWELL: The risk--the flood insurance program, the National Flood Insurance Program, is such an incredible resource and such an incredible tool for us to help communities have that level of ability to protect themselves and more quickly recover from the number one threat that we face, which is flooding events across the United States.

We did recently update the program with our Risk Rating 2.0, and you're right. It now reflects the true risk of a person's home, and while we do hear about those that the rates are going up significantly--and there definitely are some of them--20 percent of our policyholders have seen an immediate reduction in their rates. And it's those people that we are really targeting our efforts on to say, "Hey, this is not mandatory in your area. The rates have come down to better reflect your risk, and this is an incredible resource that you should have in place to help protect you and your family."

We continue to work with Congress, whether we do it through the reauthorization or other manners, to help also understand the fact that even though some of these rates are going up, mostly it's for those that have higher-value homes in higher-risk areas. But we know that there are those that are kind of in the middle, right? They're in this high-risk area, but it may not be a high-value home, but their rates are really beyond their means, and we are working with Congress to better try to find out how we could implement an affordability plan, an affordability framework, to make sure that everybody who needs flood insurance has the opportunity to purchase it. And that's one thing that we'll continue to work with them on.

MR. DENNIS: I have more questions, but unfortunately, that's all the time I think we have for today. Administrator Criswell, thank you for taking time to join us at Washington Post Live.

MS. CRISWELL: Thanks, Brady. This was a great conversation, and I appreciate you making the opportunity to have it today.

MR. DENNIS: And thanks to all of you for joining us. To check out what interviews we have coming up, please head to WashingtonPostLive.com to register and find more information about all our upcoming programs.

I'm Brady Dennis. Thank you again for joining us.

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