Five years after wildfire destroyed most of Lytton, British Columbia, rebuilding remains slow despite more than $140 million in committed public funding. Norm Van Eeden Petersman talks with Michel Durand-Wood, author of You’ll Pay for This, and Graham Watt, who manages strategic initiatives and flood recovery for Grand Forks, British Columbia. They look at what happens when a small town is pushed to rebuild everything at once, while also dealing with hazardous conditions, limited local capacity, consulting costs, modern codes, and the long-term obligation to maintain whatever comes next. The money creates a promise of recovery, but Lytton shows how hard it is to turn that promise back into a town.
Five years ago, the village of Lytton, British Columbia, was almost entirely destroyed by wildfire. Nearly 90% of the community of about 210 residents was lost, with over 500 structures burned. More than $140 million in provincial and federal funding has since been committed to recovery. A June 17 article for the Canadian Press by Brianna Owen examines why rebuilding remains slow, why concerns have emerged over governance and consulting costs, and the overall recovery process.
Five years later, as Brianna writes, the scant progress is not for a lack of funding. The federal and provincial governments have committed more than $144 million, or about $1.9 million for each of Lytton's current residents, whose number has dropped by more than half since before the fire.
In this conversation today, we want to talk about the challenges of recovering, the challenges of navigating the goal of making everybody whole again, but also the need to actually do so in a way that is financially responsible and creates the conditions for lasting prosperity, rather than saddling the community with new constraints that will, in time, become a real burden for them. We want to know: How do we recover after disasters like this, and what does it take to rebuild a town?
Welcome to Upzoned, where we take one big story making the news and explore what it can teach us about building stronger towns. I'm Norm Van Eeden Petersman, and I work with Strong Towns as our director of membership. With me today is Michel Durand-Wood. He's the author of You'll Pay for This and a longtime Strong Towns contributor through his writing on the Dear Winnipeg blog. He's also a member whose work focuses on making local municipal infrastructure and finance fun, compelling, and interesting for folks. Michel is in Winnipeg, Manitoba, a large prairie city that has had to invest a lot in flood event defense systems and water diversions.
Also joining us for the first time on Upzoned is Graham Watt. Graham is the manager of strategic initiatives and flood recovery for the City of Grand Forks, British Columbia, a community of about 4,200 residents, also in the interior of British Columbia. Graham brings firsthand experience helping communities, including his own, recover after disasters. He's been a longtime member of the Strong Towns movement, and it's great to have you both here. Welcome, Graham. Welcome, Michel.
Thank you.
Hey, Norm. Great to be here.
Let's start with Lytton itself. Graham, you're 260 miles from Lytton, so it's not exactly in your backyard, but you have a general sense of what it and other interior BC communities face. What stood out to you as you read this story?
The first thing that jumped out, of course, is just the horror of the event itself. A firestorm swept the entire community to the ground. As a public servant, imagining my city hall burning down, all of our records and even our backup server disappearing, I just can't imagine the stresses faced by the community and by my counterparts, the folks that faced that year.
I've been involved in emergency management and community planning, and that kind of interface, for over 10 years now, and seeing that event unfold was really huge. Five years after, there's always that recurring story that comes out: How's the community doing? How are they recovering? I can always see the backstory. It's not the headline. There's always going to be complexity, because no community is the same.
Are there lessons being learned in the immediate aftermath and in the challenge of responding to something on such a dramatic scale, with the majority of the town being wiped away? From your perspective in this work, what stood out?
The impossibility of trying to easily build back a town when there is hardly any place to live within an hour's drive over mountain highways and desert highways, with the community scattered across the province and very few local and regional services that were directly connected. To me, that's the backstory you start with. No community faces this the same way, but when you're rural, remote, and only had half a dozen staff at the time of the event, how do you pick up those pieces?
The other thing that really stood out to me, and this story didn't speak to it as much as some of the other ones I've seen, was the complexity when you have hazardous materials, toxic ash, and soil all having to be excavated and removed to be able to inhabit it. Layer that on top of the fact that it's all a rich, multi-thousand-year archaeological site for the local First Nation, and it's going to be complicated. There's going to be a lot of experts involved.
Whenever the article spoke to some of the frustration people were seeing with a long and complex recovery, I wanted to make sure that when people are thinking about a place trying to rebuild, they're looking at what it would take to put back the roads, the sewer, the water, the electrical, and the functional systems of the community, as well as the governance ones. They're not going to be easy.
Living in BC at the time, I remember we were in the midst of a heat dome. Lytton was setting incredible records for the hottest place, I think, in North America at that point. The question was, what's going to happen? Then all of a sudden, the shock of seeing it go up in flames and the devastation that created.
Now, as you said, we do these check-ins five years later: How are things going on the ground? Jasper, Alberta, burned, for example, and there are stories picking up on how things have gone there. In all of our communities where we have Strong Towns members, we have these pockmarks, or these stories in our past, of serious events that have taken place.
Michel, you seized on this article, or a similar one from April as well, touching on some of the challenges. What stood out as you were navigating through this compelling story?
For me, it was the larger question of financial sustainability. When your town or your city has a natural disaster like this and everything is lost, and you have to rebuild everything you owned, it can seem overwhelming. It seems like it requires a lot of money. But the reality is, that's every city. We all have to eventually replace everything we own, but a natural disaster forces us to do it all at once.
What was striking to me is that when we look at it as an all-at-once thing, we start to ask questions that we weren't asking before, like: Can we afford all this all at once? The reality is, if we can't afford it all at once, we still can't afford it all over its natural lifespan. To me, it was really interesting that the natural disaster is forcing some questions that elsewhere we just forget to ask.
In particular, there's a lot of federal and provincial money flowing into this all at once to rebuild everything they need rebuilt. But when there's a lot of money flowing, it's a little easier to stop asking those questions. To me, there are parallels to every city in Canada and every city in North America. There is state, provincial, and federal aid for infrastructure, and these big sums of money come into our communities and make us forget to ask these hard questions: Can we afford to maintain this forever?
One example in the article that stood out to me is this $50 million coming in from the province and the federal government to rebuild one recreation center and fire station. Of course, they're being rebuilt to Olympic standards for the pool and all of that, which is nice to have. If you live there, you're going to think, 'This would be wonderful.' But this is a town with 100 people living there now. Once the federal money and the provincial money stop flowing, those are the people left holding the bag on the maintenance. Can you do that? A $50 million complex, even if it's going to last 100 years, is still $500,000 per resident. That's a lot of money.
Again, it's a reminder that when everything needs to be rebuilt all at once, it's hard to ask those questions in the face of it. But everywhere, we should be asking that, because it's the same whether we're doing it all at once or over time. We still have to replace everything we own eventually.
Maybe, if I can respond directly to that, having been through that ourselves, where a third of our community's residents and about two-thirds of the business and industrial core were affected by the flood. It didn't wipe it out, but there was massive damage. There were multi-week shutdowns, layoffs, and bankruptcies. Many people were out of their homes and living in their RVs for over a year.
There is a real pressure to try to get the systems functioning again so people can start rebuilding. In Lytton, it's a bit different because people were scattered. Starting out is hard, and people are going to be looking for those kinds of answers. But the bigger question is how to take that moment to think about what this community wants to become. What might look different? Are we going to try to put everything back exactly as it was, or is there something different that should come of this? That's the climate adaptation and risk management side of this that also needs to be discussed.
In Grand Forks' case, a portion of our community's North Ruckle neighborhood is right across the river from the confluence of two rivers, right across from downtown. The floodwaters were two to three meters high in that area. There was a dike that had been built in 1974 to respond to a flood that happened two years prior to that, so it was a quick rebuild of a dike that wasn't actually designed for flood of record or a design event, as we talk about it.
The community ended up deciding to take back that floodplain and naturalize it, to buy out all the properties, remove the old dike, and build a setback dike. That was a big decision that took the community thinking about what this should look like, given the kind of hazard exposure that we have.
That's different than when you have an existing community with all of your built-out infrastructure. Hopefully you have an asset management program where you're figuring out what to invest in and where to make the most difference for the community. That's something that can be built on incrementally. But all those services and all those homes that were built up over the years weren't necessarily built with hazard exposure or risk governance in mind. Now, when you're rebuilding all at once, every single one of those risk layers has to be added: the new building codes, the new fire codes, all the life safety stuff, the water infrastructure permitting. Every single layer of risk governance now is more expensive than it used to be.
Having to do it all at once when you don't actually have a community around it to support that is going to be really long and very expensive. I don't balk at the big figures. I think it's important to ask what some ways are to create regional support and help a community in a rural area. In BC, we have something called regional districts that can share services with all local governments, and often the emergency management role is done in partnership. Can your recovery be in that? That's what happened in Grand Forks.
That infusion of one-time money is one of the areas I think we want to focus on. The opportunity to gain is not a windfall, because it's in the context of severe disaster, but the flip side is there was a readiness to say Lytton is Canada, and Canada needs to stand with the people of Lytton. We need to make things right again.
It's been interesting. There are some real obstacles to getting things rebuilt, as you mentioned, with the First Nations sites and things like that needing to be addressed in a wholesome way. In addition to that, the sheer scale of all the available funding upfront means there is a lot of public money being spent first, with the goal or hope that it will then spur private investment.
At Strong Towns, we're saying this is not just a project management problem or even a personalities problem. Our system continuously backs its way into putting all the money in upfront and then trying to recoup that over time through property taxes, other means of raising revenue, and build-it-and-they-will-come speculative systems.
I see it in my city, where for every $3 of private investment in terms of land and property, we have $1 of public infrastructure to keep up. That's our community centers, roads, and streets. We have a three-to-one ratio of private dollars available in the land and buildings to $1 of public infrastructure, which is nowhere close to enough to be self-sustaining when we have a big flood or an earthquake. Again, we know it's not if that happens, it's when that happens.
We need to be preparing for that. If Lytton is costing $1.9 million per resident, I'm stunned at the expectation that we would have something similar for a much larger population of 120,000 in my city, let alone across the Lower Mainland. That precariousness of an approach that says, 'The way we get out of these problems is to put all the money in upfront,' is going to be a huge burden for us.
Michel, I know Winnipeg had to make some pretty serious decisions about the way it would invest in flood defenses and other things, because that was the primary threat in Winnipeg. But that has since given rise to its own version of lots of public money going in. Yes, there are now new residential subdivisions in the areas newly protected by the diversion. The flip side, in Fargo, North Dakota, which I was just up in, is that they've done the same thing. They created a huge diversion, and it has led to suburban sprawl and created conditions where a lot of public money gives rise to a low-productivity use of land. The corresponding challenge is saying that if this ever needs to be repaired, we actually won't have the productive land use to justify repairing it. Michel, that's right in your wheelhouse.
In Winnipeg, the Red River Floodway dates back to the 1950s. It's an old project, and it was a provincial project. The province paid for it because it was all on provincial land, but the idea at the time was to protect the province's major economic driver, which was the City of Winnipeg.
To say that it led to sprawl, I don't know. Maybe it's one factor out of many. It protected more land than just the city of Winnipeg proper, obviously, but there is a lot more nuance and complexity than just linking those two as a straight line. I don't think so.
In the 1990s, we had another flood of the century. The City of Winnipeg was protected, but then the province did upgrades to bring it back up to that standard. Again, that's been provincial money protecting the city, and the city has not really had any cost to incur with respect to that because it bypasses the city.
It's difficult to say. From what they've looked at, the flood damage and potential flood damage had that not been in place, especially for the 1950s, and then there was a flood in the '70s and the '90s, in addition to regular annual flooding, apparently it has more than paid for itself. From a provincial standpoint, it was a good investment. If the city had had to pay for it, would that have changed the math on it? Probably, because the incomes and expenses are different from that perspective.
A little bit to what you were talking about earlier, the rebuilding, when you get provincial or federal funds, almost acts like an insurance policy, a group insurance policy. We're going to help rebuild. But the core question is whether federal, provincial, or state support is required beyond that to keep operating and maintaining it. In most places we live in, that is actually the case. When that money doesn't show up, we just don't maintain it.
In the case of a natural disaster, you get all this federal, provincial, and state aid and rebuild everything. But after the aid program is done and the community is left to its own devices, those places are just going to eventually slowly erode and get abandoned to the point where, at the end of their life, they will just be a building that they close down. That's not what we want for our communities. It's not what we want for our towns. We want to be able to maintain it.
The thing that stuck out to me in the article is that this federal aid has a caveat on it that the town must show it will be able to do the maintenance and operations for six years after federal aid ends. Six years is not a very long time. It seems like a very bureaucratic, check-a-box thing: 'You'll be good? Okay, cool. See you later.' Then six years later, the town is in deep trouble. Again, I feel the natural disaster has highlighted, in a very stark fashion, something that's happening at a slower, gradual pace everywhere else in North America.
Graham, I'd love to note as well that the challenge Grand Forks faced, and more communities like this face, is that if they're smaller local governments, they're sharing services with the district, or sharing services with others, or bringing in outside consultants to manage things. In a lot of our cities, consultants will take care of your planning and your property disputes. There's a whole system there.
How is it that local governments can become quickly overwhelmed, and what would that signal or create? What sort of tensions does that create?
It's a great question. Once again, every community is different, but I think a Strong Towns approach to disaster resilience is investing in that human network of local institutions that could have the capacity to provide support, whether within that community or to a neighboring community in the event of a major disaster.
In Grand Forks, we had those relationships with the regional district. We had those relationships with community organizations. The groups that stepped up to help the community out during the flood were then tapped to become part of the community-based flood recovery program. We faced a choice early on: Is this going to be a consultant-led, external-capacity project, or is there any way we can leverage those funds to build capacity within our own institutions? Luckily, the leadership said, 'Okay, let's figure out how we invest in that path.'
For people like myself who got involved in the recovery organization, the province paid for our backfill positions, and in many cases for the organizations that were involved in the different pillars of recovery, to hire staff. Many of those organizations retained those staff and then built capacity to actually use them over time for something that was a benefit.
People talk about building back better, but with those human institutions, if there's an injection of money happening, how can it be leveraged for something that will be enduring growth? For places that don't have the relationships and capacity in place, the burnout is going to go through the roof. There's going to be a lot of turnover, and the relationships those people were maintaining will be lost. There won't be the capacity there yet to recover.
I think that human care, not only for the citizens and the people who are affected by the event, but also the capacity in the local organizations, who we know, and how we know each other, is an investment too.
I like your point about building that local capacity. That's a really good point. As an example, in personal income, somebody who makes $30,000, $50,000, or $60,000 a year generally will take care of their own financial needs. But as that income goes up, maybe now you need an accountant, or maybe now you need a financial planner. If you're making $50 million a year, you've probably got several staff taking care of your money for you.
You can use the example of Lytton, which had an annual budget of $1.4 million. They had the local capacity to manage that kind of money. But you bring in hundreds of millions of dollars of federal and state aid, and they maybe don't have that local capacity there. That's why you get all these external consultants.
Graham's point is really good: How do we use these events to build the local capacity rather than just let this happen to us so that we can move forward stronger as a local community? That's a really strong point to highlight. Otherwise, the end game is the money leaves, the consultants leave, and then you're left to your own devices to slowly fall apart.
The alternative to that is the federal money comes back, or the provincial or state money, and you are constantly under external control forever, as a ward of the state or ward of the federal government, which is not something anybody local wants. It is really about that grassroots, bottom-up building of local capacity to tend and care for your community.
One of the local council members there, who I actually reached out to, and the timing didn't work for her to come on the podcast to discuss this with us, said in the article that especially after large disasters with a lot of money, the system does not support good decision-making. People see dollar signs and want to capitalize on it. Even this whole system, or system of people participating in the recovery process, she said some are well-intentioned, but they're making money.
That stood out to me. That is a symptom, but it is not unique to Lytton. It is not unique to smaller communities. Even larger communities can grapple with this. They have to make that decision fairly early on: Are we going to support our operations locally, or are we overwhelmed and need to bring in assistance from outside?
A lot of our systems are set up in such a way that your community needs that grant administrator, and then the grant administrator needs the additional capacity of technical consultants that come from out of town or out of state. The result is that you've delocalized it. You've removed it from that space.
Graham, in your context, some of the work you did around neighborhood shifts or changes seemed to develop in-house capacity to address that. Does that set you up for future responses in a way that you think might serve you better than some of the places that haven't had the ability to do that or made the decision to do that?
Shifting to think about mitigation and the capital program that it takes to build, the city built over 3,000 meters of new dikes. There's new infrastructure, but that was all based on return on investment. We had to show that it was protecting areas and existing assets that were valuable. A lot of those are industrial assets, and a lot of those are community-based ones. On that side, the return on investment is there under the granting programs that we're in.
But how the community chose to administer it is important. During one part of our project, we had external project management partners, plus external engineers and external contractors, as you typically have. Later in the program, we basically stood up a special projects team. We're all on term contracts, essentially. Having a planner, a project manager, and an engineer together doing the in-house project management meant that the city could actually take ownership of a lot of those decisions that otherwise might just leave the community with external project management.
You could probably do several hours of podcasts about each of the different projects, but an interesting one with the floodplain naturalization of North Ruckle was that buyout program, where the city worked with an external consultant who did all the appraisals and was the land agent. You never would want to internalize that function, because these are our neighbors in the community. You need people from the outside who have that complete independence. In a way, the city was able to provide oversight, support, and capacity in that program.
It's always going to be full of challenges, but then when it gets into restoration, bringing in local and regional resources, whether it's the capital projects or a new fish habitat offset channel, a lot of new learning happens because of that.
I think what's interesting too is that in that quote, she says it's not that people necessarily don't mean well. It's that the system is built this way. The way I see it is a system built to overcome technical complexities. As Graham pointed out, there's so much going on on the technical side, with different challenges and different aspects that you need to overcome. This is a system built to power through that and deliver large-scale programs and projects, getting through all of that technical complexity.
What it's less good at is dealing with the human complexity. The needs of the community get papered over a little bit, or a lot. It's that human aspect that the system is not quite built to integrate into the process, to see whether we are actually meeting the needs here or whether we are making things worse for everybody once we leave. That aspect is not necessarily brought into the system.
It's a system that comes into town and is really good at steamrolling over everything and addressing all the technical problems that you run into. But the human aspect is left as a side thing to be ignored. Again, that's just my impression, and it's not just this particular program. This is how it's always done, with road expansions and all kinds of infrastructure projects in all kinds of ways.
When it comes from federal money, it's not nuanced to the local context. It's meant to deliver money and deliver projects and do it on a grand scale. That's what I notice here. The same thing is happening on a big scale, and it really is stark because Lytton is such a small community. Because of the natural disaster, it's starting from zero, and the need is so big. It becomes a stark exposition of the entire delivery mechanism.
The other thing that stood out in part of your comment, Michel, was that every building in our communities needs to go through a rehabilitation or a restoration at some point. In Lytton, because of the immediacy of it, that meant having to do it with every structure in the community, or nearly every one.
What stands out for me is that recovery mode is often one where we are comfortable with things moving more aggressively. We're comfortable even if the costs are a little bit higher when we are in recovery mode from a serious disaster. We assume that things are going to move.
Near the same year, we had significant disasters strike our roads. The Coquihalla Highway and several other highways were washed out. I think we had the heat dome and, if I remember correctly, the atmospheric river in the same year. It was insane. They basically put aside all of the environmental reviews. They seconded steel structure or steel materials from other building sites and used them to restore the highway bridges. They moved at lightning speed, it seemed, in order to get these vital arteries reestablished.
That sense of being in recovery mode is one of those things that makes me wonder why our communities can't be more adept at saying everyday life should have that thread of recovery mode in it. Everyday life should include saying, 'This building has reached the end of its lifespan. It really does need to be restored.' For it to sit, as we see in our places, not only because of owner disinterest, because sometimes the owners are willing to go ahead and do a project, but because they know it is going to be so painful, unless you got into a situation where everybody was rebuilding all at once, all at the same time.
That distinction, and probably what feels wrong here, is that seemingly so little has been done in five years. There are ballooning costs and things like that. Graham, I'm oversimplifying that, because one thing that stands out is that recovery from flood is different than recovery from brutal fires like this, with the creation of hazardous conditions and the unresolved questions of archaeological sites that need to be properly protected. Are those the only reasons why this moved slower than maybe other places that have had to recover, where just a few years later you drive through and realize there are fresh buildings, but you wouldn't necessarily know that some big disaster had hit?
The rural, remote nature of it is one part of it, but the province itself is kind of an interesting piece of timing. The province had only brought in an interim recovery framework in 2019. They had some experience from the 2017 floods and fires and our 2018 flood, where there was a huge investment in recovery. The province was trying to figure out its own policy and legislative tools, which were not designed for the scale of event and were not designed as well for community-based recovery that Grand Forks cobbled together.
There are always a lot of questions when you're trying to build a recovery program out. What is fundable? What is doable? What can we do to respond to need? There's actually an auditor general's report from March, so there's been reporting around it, but that gets into the provincial structural side of it. The tools that were in place were just not ready for that type of event.
Later in the same year, the atmospheric river, the washouts, and the deaths affected all the roads around this region. Not only was all the access to the interior cut off, every single connection to the coast was cut off. The province also had to deal with that entire recovery, not only for the highways, but for one of the nearby communities a little bit further east, Merritt, which was largely washed out in the lower core of the community during the same 2021 flood.
I think about compounding disasters that happen together: similar disasters in the same year, or you have a heat dome, then a fire, and then the floods that fall. They're not disconnected. The more shocks a system has, the less resilience the system has for recovery. The only way to get over that is to try to understand what the natural hazard or climate-boosted natural hazard events are that can create these disasters.
A lot of it really comes down to how exposed we are as communities, what kind of danger our planning has allowed people to accumulate over time: the number of permits in the floodplain, or the number of houses being built in a fire interface area. Those are small investments as well that come down to that culture of risk management that we are declining.
That's a roundabout way to get to thinking ahead before the disaster. What can be done to reduce that exposure so there is a better chance for a resilient return? When you wipe everything out in a small rural area, and then the system itself is under stress and not designed for it, that's the perfect storm for a longer recovery and a more expensive one.
That's a really great point about reexamining your needs and making sure you are more resilient going forward. It speaks a little bit to Norm's point about how in a disaster we tend to be quicker to rebuild things. The view I have is that we don't ask these hard questions without a natural disaster.
My city is not even close to being able to afford our infrastructure, and this is the case everywhere in North America. If we all of a sudden had a natural disaster where everything got wiped out, the question is: How do we build back better? But better rarely means smaller. It generally means bigger.
The questions we should have been asking before, we should be asking even more after a natural disaster. Better might not be bigger. Better might be smaller. Maybe you reduce your exposure to risk by reducing how much infrastructure you actually own. Instead of 12-foot lanes, maybe they're 10-foot lanes. That's less pavement, so if you do hit a natural disaster again, you have less to replace. In that vein, it also reduces your financial risk going forward.
If you were struggling before the natural disaster, building back bigger is definitely not going to be helpful. Even if you are more resilient to natural disaster shocks, you'll be less resilient to financial shocks. It really requires that big-picture view of what we look like going forward. Does everything we have today meet our needs? Are there ways to meet those needs in a smaller, less expensive, or less risk-exposed fashion, whatever those risks are?
Graham, you talk to your own city leaders, folks in the region as well, and more broadly, and I appreciate that about your work. Is there a lesson from this story that you would want most local leaders to carry with them? Especially if you're a listener, you are a local in your community, so what we are talking about has corresponding effects in your place as well.
These might be lessons you can pass on to your local leaders, or if you are that local leader, something to be saying: 'I know that a type of disaster is looming. We don't know when, but we know that it's due to come. In that context, we can actually learn the lessons from past events in order to be ready this time around, while still being caught off guard by some elements of it.' What are some of the lessons you want to pass along, Graham?
Thanks for that opportunity. I was thinking about the best way to frame this in a Strong Towns message, and one of the ways I think people will respond is that there is a real business case for resilience.
A community that understands its own infrastructure debt or deficit, understands its asset management commitments, and understands what it costs to maintain a community will start investing. They'll carry an unreserved balance. They'll have reserve funds for their different infrastructure assets. They'll be looking to be proactive. If they're opening up the road, they're going to look at all the things that need replacing.
We talked about the business side of municipal service. We talked about the human side and the institutional density. There are also investments that might determine whether or not a community can come back from a disaster. That is absolutely the case.
A study came out a couple of years before this event. Deng Chen from Albany, at the State University of New York, looked at basically 20 years of fiscal data in New York state and how local governments deal with disasters, and how well they are financially off after disasters. The ones that did best had substantial unreserved balances or accumulated surplus, as some might call it. They had a buffer, and that buffer was able to be used to feed money and carry over things.
If you're going to be waiting for reimbursements from other agencies when you're doing repair, if you have something to kick-start it, those communities generally did the best. I think it's a question of how we keep our communities able to grow and thrive in the future, or just be in a future in a way that people want to keep being there and investing there. It's trying to figure out how to invest in the systems that keep people wanting to be there.
The other day I was downtown for lunch, and there were about eight different bikepackers, people with mountain bikes, taking the rail trail that goes from the coast through to the Rocky Mountains. There's a big race happening. I was so excited. They showed up in downtown Grand Forks, having lunch on a beautiful little pocket on a sunny day, and I was thinking, that's that peak of wanting to come to a place because it has those things that connect to people.
Your comment makes me think that if we were to approach it in a Strong Towns way, we might also say, 'All right, if we have $10 here, we probably have $10. What can we do with it? Let's make sure we do that $10 thing. Let's also do the $100 thing. Let's also do the $1,000 thing.' Involve the community in each of these stages, rather than starting with, 'All right, we need $26 million for our community center.' Start with the lowest rung that we can just begin to address.
That period of inaction feels to me like one of the things that really stands out. Building upon that, Michel, any lessons? Then we'll go into the downzone.
I think there are tons of lessons already, but the big takeaway is that the questions that seem obvious from an outsider view in a natural disaster are the questions we need to be asking every day. We need to be continually asking how we become more resilient, or more antifragile, which is even further than that, every day.
Every time infrastructure comes up for renewal, we're not automatically rebuilding it the same or rebuilding it bigger. We're actually reevaluating how we can make ourselves more resilient from a climate perspective, from a financial perspective, and from every kind of risk we can address. We need to be doing that constantly through the regular maintenance and replacement cycle, constantly reevaluating and getting to a place where we have a stronger town.
The best time to do that is today. If you're looking for the opportunity, I was reading the Asset Management BC magazine for fun, because that's what I do, and basically every other article was, 'How do I get people to think about this ahead of time? How do I get people to pay attention to it?' I feel like the disaster readiness magazines probably have the exact same questions: How ahead of time can we begin to do that?
If you're a strong citizen in your community, asking those questions and beginning to probe what types of structures we have in place is useful. I love the very practical recommendation, Graham, of having a reserve fund or something that is able to be tapped into. It may include borrowing capacity to be able to do quick responses, but then, crucially, not diving into that unless there's real need. In case of a true emergency, break the seal, and then use that as a way of responding.
This is a heavy but important discussion, and I really appreciate the conversation. Let's go into the downzone, where we shift gears and talk about something we're taking in that can be something you're reading, watching, or enjoying that stands out. Michel, you've done this before, so why don't you go first?
I'm reading the Babysitters Club series, not directly. My youngest has gotten into it, and it turns out they've reedited the entire series, and they're rereleasing all of the old Babysitters Club books in a new, updated fashion.
The thing that was interesting to me, in rereading them with my daughter, is how current it was. I was really expecting it to have 1980s cringe, 1990s cringe, but I was surprised at how well it has aged. They've been reedited, so references to cassette tapes have been updated to playlists. It reads very current, even though the storylines are all exactly identical. It was a nice surprise to see that. It's fun to see stuff we read as kids that our kids are getting into in a new version that stays pretty close to the original.
I didn't even know that was allowed. That's awesome. So, you've got babysitters and boxcars. Graham, that's hard to follow. Go ahead.
There is probably the big one that comes to mind. Maybe I'll take the downzone and call it the doom zone here for a moment. One of the best climate change books that I listened to, as an audiobook and podcast person, because that way I can go garden and do other good things while doing it, is by Kate Marvel. She's a climate scientist who builds these earth system models and plays around with what happens if you do different things. She understands the earth system better than many people in the world.
She wrote a book called Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet, and it's a delightful read by Courtney Patterson. I would absolutely recommend it. I just finished it last night. I'm someone who worries about the big system problems. I read on global tipping points and understand what's happening with climate change and the effect on our communities, and I'm trying to find ways to translate that to practitioners, to planners who are working in the policy areas where we have to adapt to these events.
I found Kate's approach in her writing to be so warm and friendly and full of humor, and brutally honest sometimes, in a way that makes it feel like people might just have feelings that they could actually rant about stuff. There is a lot of mythological reference. It was a good listen and a lot better than reading the IPCC report.
I love it. I'll have to look for that. Michel, I should have dipped my toes in the Babysitters Club, taking the cake on that one.
On my side, a book that I picked up at Michel's house that my son is now reading, and I'm reading it with him, is The Blackthorn Key. It's a series. It is great escape literature. It's juvenile fiction, but it's fantastic. That's my item for the downzone.
We're at our time. We have probably disasters to prepare for and emergencies to think ahead to. As we close, I'm just grateful for the chance to chat with both of you. Graham, especially, welcome to Upzoned. As a first-timer, glad to have you on.
Thank you very much for the chance for the conversation.
That's great. Michel, good to have you on as well.
Fun as always.
We'll be back, same place, same Batcave, next week. Keep doing what you can to build stronger communities, or as I'm trying to make it my slogan: Take care and take care of your places.
This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.