The Mulvehill Monologues Part II

Another re-post from August 2012, former Commissioner Mulvehill's report to the City Commission on her trip to Bonn, Germany.

The transcription from last night's Commission meeting continues:

Because the dams (unintelligible) so some of the observations is that rapid (unintelligible) and growth and climate challenges are converging in dangerous ways and this is something that was discussed through, hmm, the theme of the conference. Resilience and adaptation plans are needed. Hmmm. We'll talk about Copenhagen in a minute, but one of the things that Copenhagen realizes is you have three years after a disaster to do something. That people forget after three years. So we haven't had a hurricane here since 2005. Ahhh. It's, you really don't see any preparation, you know, you forget after three years. So they capitalized on some recent things, on a recent disaster that they had. And the need to (unintelligible) ideas and knowledge, global communities, hmmm, the partnership idea was a theme that resonated throughout the conference and how to, how governments are partnering with different municipalities, different agencies, et cetera. Thanks. This was a quote from the conference, "guiding new development toward resilience is always better and cheaper than only engineering an infrastructure to withstand possible, poss, possible, hazards. Cities must be proactive instead of reactive." So, and that's a challenge and having finance, things, being proactive. It's easy to finance it when the hurricane's already hit and you have to clean the streets and get the electric going on but how do you finance and prep for it. There was an issue in, ahhh, one of the case studies, there, was in, ahhh, Italy. Where they have a mudslide on one that went right down into the village, and, they, they've actually set up warning systems now because thousands of people have died because all of a sudden it rains, they get floods and then the, the mud literally slides right down and kills thousands of people. So there are warning systems that have been set up particularly in this, this particular cove to present, to prevent that type of at least give people warnings to those types of disasters. So this case study was in Copenhagen, hmmm, Copenhagen, Denmark, was actually one of my favorite. Ahhh. In terms of what I was able to capture from it because their approach was, can an adaptation strategy plan be turned into green growth, innovation and employment. So the way they, they spun it, the angle that they put on, how do we take this disaster, and this, this picture was from what they call a cloud burst that they had in 2011, hmmm, severe flooding, that flooded the whole city of, of, ahhh, Copenhagen where the manholes were actually lifted off. So that is how much water they had and that's just one of the images. The damage was 67 million euros and, ahhh, this was just one of three severe rainfall events in twelve months in 2011. So, they had to take some action. 

 The person who volunteered to do this left this message with the latest submittal:

Dear blog master: Am up to 5 minutes and thirty seconds of the Mulvehill transcription. The total video is just over eighteen minutes. Cannot take any more today. Sorry. 

I am sure that all our readers are hoping for a speedy recovery! Thanks for your yeoman's work.