Tools to Empower Disaster Survivors and At-Risk Communities

Episode Notes

Transcript

David Bonebrake:

It is a real game changer in terms of their ability to get information about the types of disasters that they face and how they can better prepare themselves and protect themselves.

Speaker 2:

Equal access to justice is a core American value. In each episode of Talk Justice, an An LSC Podcast, we’ll explore ways to expand access to justice and illustrate why it is important to the legal community, business government, and the general public. Talk Justice is sponsored by the Leaders Council of the Legal Services Corporation.

Ron Flagg:

Hello and welcome to Talk Justice. I’m Ron Flagg, president of the Legal Services Corporation and your host for this episode. Today we’re gathering a group of experts to talk about disaster resources available to people in the middle of the country, sometimes called the Heartland. Late last year, LSC launched Heartland disaster help.org. The website is designed to empower residents across 10 states in America’s heartland that have faced significant flooding, windstorms, extreme heat and wildfires over the past decade. The site has tools that help users assess their disaster risk, gather information about specific disasters and available recovery support, and it also provides a directory of local organizations that may be able to help them, including Legal aid offices. As our discussion today will demonstrate legal services are a critical component of a comprehensive approach to disaster recovery and preparedness. Let me introduce our guests. Stephanie Hudson is the executive Director of Oklahoma Indian Legal Services and the clinical professor of the American Indian Estates Clinic at the University of Oklahoma. Shirley Peng is a managing attorney and the debt and finance unit director at Legal Aid of Nebraska. David Bonebrake is deputy director in the office of program performance at the Legal Services Corporation, and David oversees our projects relating to natural disasters. Helena Cawley is the head of business Development and Legal at First Street Foundation, an organization that seeks to make climate risk information accessible to the public. Helena, my first question is for you. Can you tell us more about risk factor.com and the data that your organization collects and shares?

Helena Cawley:

Yes, absolutely. Thanks Ron, and thanks for having me today. So risk factor.com is a software platform that provides physical climate risk information for every property across the United States. So what we’ve built over the last seven years or so is a way for any individual or any business or government agency to type in an address and understand what is the risk to that particular property from a variety of different climate related perils over a 30 year timeframe. So if you’re interested in understanding the risk to your home or your community, you simply go to the tool and you can see how the, for example, risk of flooding in a, let’s say one in 100 year type of flooding event, how it will change over a 30 year timeframe because of some of the impacts that we’re seeing from a changing climate, similar to things like extreme heat. What is a local hot day in your neighborhood today and what is that going to look like 30 years from now as the climate continues to change and extreme weather events continue to increase?

Ron Flagg:

Wow, that’s a powerful tool. Where do you get your data?

Helena Cawley:

Well, we have a lot of really, really smart people, smarter than I am who are helping us build out these models. So we have a team of climate scientists that work with us to create our proprietary models, and we’ve also gathered some of the best scientists across the country as well to help inform that. So we have some partners that help us build out these models as well. And we use a lot of freely available data like the tools from NOAA and from the US Forest Service, and then we also partner with some folks as well to purchase some data that can help input information into our models and help us create these climate risk models for every property across the United States.

Ron Flagg:

Well, as I said, that’s a powerful tool. David, could you share with our listeners Heartland Disaster Helps mission and what that website offers?

David Bonebrake:

Sure. Thanks Ron. So Hartland Disaster help builds on really the great work the Risk Factor is doing, and the First Street Foundation is doing that, Helena just described. So what Hartland does is it’s a free tool in available that 10 state region in the Midwest, and it was a tool we developed at Legal Services Corporation. We were able to launch it late last year, and we really do consider it a game changer for people who are in this Heartland region, which essentially states in the Midwest and then kind of going into the Great Plains and big sky regions of the country. Those are the initial states we’re working with here, but it’s a real game changer in terms of their ability to get information about the types of disasters that they face and how they can better prepare themselves and protect themselves. And I think what’s truly special about the site is in fact, this risk model that we are able to use from risk factor.

So this allows us to create a very simple website where a user goes to the main page, they enter their address or another address in their community, and they get very easy to understand, quantifiable, hopefully actionable information about the disaster risks to their individual property. Along with that, they get information at a general level about what are good preparedness activities that they could take on, including things that are no or low cost, those sort of sweat equity things that sometimes don’t really cost anything other than your time, but allow you to be a lot better positioned should a disaster strike. And so we we’re really excited about it. The typical use case is an individual going there to assess their own property, but it is available for other properties in the community. So for example, if someone is considering renting and may have in the back of their mind a certain property has a flood risk or maybe it’s on the outskirts of town and there’s a wildfire risk, they can just enter the address of that property too and get that same type of information to hopefully help them make better decisions in light of the increasing risk of all these disasters that we’re seeing across the country.

Ron Flagg:

Obviously I have a proprietary interest in saying that Heartland Disaster Help is a terrific website as well and very helpful. I want to pivot to Shirley and Stephanie. I think historically when we think about floods or wildfires or earthquakes or hurricanes, we don’t necessarily think of calling a lawyer to help or legal aid, but in fact, legal aid plays a really critical role in helping people respond to disasters and helping with disaster preparedness. So surely some listeners might not associate states like Nebraska with natural disasters. You don’t get hurricanes and maybe a wildfire here and there, but not as many as in the farther Western states. Could you talk about the disasters that Nebraska faces and how your organization, legal Aid of Nebraska provides services to disaster survivors?

Shirley Peng:

Absolutely Ron. Well, in Nebraska, tornadoes are a big natural disaster. In 2014, we had twin tornadoes in pilgrim Nebraska and we definitely deal with lots of flooding. The last catastrophic flooding happened in March of 2019. Nebraska also has droughts and extreme heat, severe thunderstorms during the summer, straight line winds, winter weather. We just yesterday, the National Weather Service in Omaha issued its first ever snow squall warning and a snow squall is a sudden intense burst of snowfall and gusts winds that leads to white out conditions. So yesterday it caused dozens of crashes on multiple highways. And so there is a lot of natural disasters in Nebraska that we typically don’t think of. And the way that Legal Aid of Nebraska provides services is to just address common legal issues that happen during these disasters. Insurance issues primarily helping survivors submit insurance claims, avoiding public adjuster fraud, negotiating settlements and filing appeals.

But there’s also government benefits that are available for disaster survivors and we help with applying for those benefits, either food stamps, unemployment, disaster loans, housing, and also filing appeals for those denial of benefits or benefit award disagreements between the survivors and the government entity. And then even years after a disaster happens, there are overpayment notices or recoupment notices that we have helped our disaster survivors appeal and fix their recoupment issues. And then we at Legal Aid, Nebraska has a big housing justice project, so we help renters and homeowners with a variety of those housing issues that come up after a disaster, either facilitating negotiations, communications with the landlord or the mortgage company terminating a lease or rental agreement, resolving renter’s insurance claims and recovering personal items from damaged rental units and basically just obtaining disaster assistance in a variety of different areas of law. One of the things that people don’t typically think as a legal issue is document recovering recovery, replacing lost documents such as driver’s licenses, social security cards, EBT cards, birth certificates. We also help with that as well as replacing immigration documents and other contractor fraud issues, debt and finance issues. Those are just a small portion of what we help with for our disaster survivors.

Ron Flagg:

Well, that’s terrific and obviously valuable to the communities you serve. Stephanie surely just shared what Legal Aid of Nebraska deals with around disasters and maybe some of the natural disasters she described are familiar to you as well. Are there unique legal challenges faced by the Native American communities that your organization, Oklahoma Indian Legal Services supports? How does your organization assist them?

Stephanie Hudson:

Oklahoma Indian Legal Services serves tribal members throughout the state of Oklahoma, and we have spent the last 40 years really focusing on tribal members and land issues. Oklahoma has some very unique land jurisdiction involving 39 different tribes, and most of the past 40 years has been spent bringing titles up to date on trust and restricted Indian land. But while we’ve been spending all this time trying to bring titles up to date, tribal members have been going to housing authorities and building homes on those trust and restricted allotments where we’ve brought the titles up to date. And some of those homes are 20, 30, 40 years old now. And with the different types of weather events that we’ve been experiencing here in Oklahoma, we’re seeing more and more tribal members whose tribal homes are being damaged by floods, cracked water pipes and severe coal roof damage with large hail roof damage and window damage with severe winds that are more powerful than we’ve experienced in prior years.

So we’re getting more tribal members and housing authorities contacting us and asking us to assist tribal members who have, I don’t know if inherits the right word. What they’ve done is maybe their parents or their grandparents had restricted or trust Indian land that we brought the title up to date, they built that house, that parent or grandparent has passed away and they’re living in a home that needs repairs, but they don’t have title to the home. So our attorneys, they have a great deal of experience in probates bringing titles up to date. So we have shifted a lot of our priorities from just bringing titles up to date on the Indian land to bringing titles up to date on homes that need repairs. One of the issues that we saw last summer was there was a tornado in a town just east of Oklahoma City, Shawnee.

It’s a town of about 45,000, has a large native population. And what we saw was a number of tribal members who had homes damaged. They wouldn’t go to the marks, they wouldn’t go to the multi-agency resource centers that were set up by the voluntary disaster organizations. What they would do is they would self-help families would get together and they would repair each other’s roofs and they wouldn’t seek out help from the agencies that were available to provide assistance. So what we did was we tried to do some more outreach within that community and tried to incentivize people coming to the multi-Agency resource centers. What we did was we used gift cards to try to get people to come and say, we’ll give you a gift card for gas if you’ll come and just go through the agencies and find out what assistance is available. But we see issues with native members being reluctant to reach out outside of their own families, outside of their own very small communities to seek assistance.

Ron Flagg:

Well, Stephanie, that’s terrific too. And I think your comments as well as Shirley’s underscore the fact that the menu of service offerings that the legal aid programs around the country provide changes and it changes given the needs and the communities you serve and you’ve got to be responsive. And Shirley mentioned a weather phenomenon. I believe it was a snow squall that hadn’t been seen in Nebraska for many decades, and you’ve got to be nimble enough to deal with the problems that the people you’re designed to serve are actually feeling Shirley and Stephanie. With all that you’ve just described in mind, how can our new website, Heartland Disaster help assist your client community in preparing for disasters and avoiding potentially significant civil legal issues?

Shirley Peng:

I think for our clients, they are unaware of their risk in disasters, and the website has this great see your risk little search bar where you just put in your address and then it defines your risk pertaining to a fire risk, flood risk, heat risk, and wind risk. And I think that’s just so important for our disaster clients to know their risk. Then there is a list of what to do to protect yourself and your home and your business on the website that I think is super helpful for our clients and as well as after a disaster, a list of resources in each state that they can contact.

Stephanie Hudson:

Yeah, I agree that the Heartland Help website. It provides numerous resources for our clients to be able to find different types of resources. As I said, our client population, they’re reluctant to go out and try to find assistance. They like to try to figure out things within their own community, and this website just gives a multitude of different types of resources. It gives lots of tips on how to be prepared. One of the pages that I really like is how to deal with heat. Last summer, we had a heat wave and one of our probate clients, we were trying to bring title up to date on the house, his mother’s house that he was living in, and he couldn’t pay the electric bill. And one of our attorneys who was working on the probate, she said, I think I need to go pay his electric bill.

And I said, no, we need to try to figure out some resources for him. We can’t pay everybody’s electric bill, all of our client’s electric bills. We can’t have attorneys starting to do that. So she was able to look at some other resources within the community to get him a bridge to when the probate would be done and he would be able to access some additional funds and get his electric bill caught up to date. But this website gives people ideas on how to deal with heat, how to deal with the effects of wildfire. We have had wildfires here in Oklahoma and rural Oklahoma is another community that they prefer to take care of themselves. Ranchers, they don’t want to seek assistance, they want to just work within their own community. And this website gives ideas on where to get assistance, but it also gives ideas on self-help also, if you’re a type of person who doesn’t want to go get assistance, gives great ideas on self-help also, I just find this website to be extremely useful, a useful tool for our client population.

Ron Flagg:

Well, thanks. And I think both of your comments underscore the fact that the website Heartland Disaster help really empowers individuals to provide themselves self-help, but also empowers legal aid staff to help people. I mean, none of us, I would guess can project precisely what risks any particular property faces. You might be able to guess or generalize, but this is a tool that enables individuals as well as legal aid staff to more precisely identify risks as well as ways to mitigate those risks. Elena, I’m interested in what trends are you seeing with risk factor.com? What does the data tell us about the rates of disasters that are impacting this central region of the country?

Helena Cawley:

Yeah, so there are a few sort of key areas that we’re seeing in this specific area in the Heartland area that we’re seeing some alarming trends over the next 30 years. The first and foremost is with respect to flood risk in the area, specifically, the predominant type of flood risk is really driven by precipitation and that heavy rainfall that we’re starting to see, and that’s increasing over time, is also leading to not just flooding in and of itself, but it’s also overflowing the rivers in certain areas nearby. And so what we’ve seen is that climate change is making a hundred year rainfalls more common. They’re happening. Some research that we’ve put out is saying they’re happening in some places, more like one in 10 year events. So we’re starting to see them happening more and more frequently. And so in areas like Kansas or Arkansas or Oklahoma, we’re seeing heavy rainfalls really increasing the flood risk in those areas.

And then we’re also seeing more severe river flooding along places like the Mississippi River where we recently saw a 1000 year flood event in St. Louis just within the last couple of years. So flood risk is one of the kind of predominant risks that we’re seeing as an area of concern. Another area that we’ve been tracking is with respect to extreme heat. And I know this was mentioned previously as well, and for me, been really eyeopening to listen to my colleagues here to hear about some of the individual stories of how is extreme heat actually impacting the day-to-Day lives and livelihoods of some folks in this area by simply being able to pay for their electricity bills and things like that. And these types of issues are really going to increase over the next 30 years. The Heartland area is in an area that we’ve kind of coined as the extreme heat belt across the United States.

So it’s an area of the country that is expected to see heat indices grow to over 125 degrees over the next 30 years, which currently, and previously we’d only seen temperatures like that in places like Death Valley, but we’re starting to see it move to other areas across the country as well. And with that warming environment, we can see that tropical storms are going to expand more and more inland. So typically tropical storms break down over land, but with a warming environment, these storms are going to hang together longer and they can impact areas like Arkansas and the southern states of the heartland. So these are some of the trends that we’re seeing and trying to make folks aware of as we partner with wonderful organizations like Legal Services Corporation and get our data out on the Heartland Disaster help websites so that people can know their risk and start to plan accordingly.

Ron Flagg:

Shirley and Stephanie, I talked a moment ago and you did about the dynamic nature of legal AID’S portfolio services. How do your organizations prepare for and respond to the evolving legal needs caused by the disaster trends that Helena just described?

Shirley Peng:

Well, we’re definitely doing more work on the probate side in response to the growing needs following disasters. So transfer on death deed clinics. We started those in April of 2022. We did two of those clinics that year, and then three of those transfer on death deed clinics in 2023 with more plan for this year. And then on a broader scale, legal Aid of Nebraska was one of the first disaster relief projects that incorporates legal issues into the disaster framework that already exists in each state. And so right now we’re also mentoring other legal aid programs to establish their own disaster relief projects so that other states are prepared to respond to legal needs elsewhere as well.

Ron Flagg:

We’re going to come back to collaboration in a moment, but a key concept for effective disaster preparedness relief and response is collaboration Stephanie. How does your organization respond to the evolving legal needs caused by these emerging disaster trends?

Stephanie Hudson:

Well, one of the disasters that isn’t a natural disaster, but it’s a disaster that the nation dealt with recently was the pandemic. And we go out into the community, go to community centers and go into community centers and meet with elder tribal members. And during the pandemic, we were not able to get into community centers. We had to meet outside of community centers. So we developed these drive-through clinics where we meet tribal members outside of the community centers. We would have a station set up outside and we would allow them to come drive through and we would provide them legal advice. We did wheel preparation. We provided them with bags, plastic bags that we really encouraged them to put all of their legal documents into because we were scared that they were going to, during these natural disasters, floods, rain events, wind events, that their legal documents would get wet.

So we would encourage ’em to put ’em into plastic bags, then put them into fireproof boxes to protect their legal documents Out of that drive-through legal clinics came a legal services corporation through disaster funding through congressional appropriations or disaster, we were able to fund what we call our native navigator, and it’s a Ford Transit van that we converted into a portable office office on wheels that we take to community centers. Now we meet with clients outside the community centers. We even go to their homes, and a lot of elderly tribal members were able to get wills done outside of their homes so that they just walk out their door, come out into our mobile office, and sometimes our attorneys, they’ll do 3, 4, 5 wills a day just driving from house to house and community to community, getting wills done. But that’s one of the ways that we have been able to use funding from Legal Services Corporation to be able to find unique ways to address not only natural disasters, but other types of disasters. And we plan to use that native navigator if there’s other type of natural disasters, if there’s a tornado, if there is a flood event and a mark is set up, then we’ll be able to just take the native navigator out and go meet with clients right there on the spot in the community where the disaster occurred.

Ron Flagg:

Well, and that is a terrific innovation, the native navigator, the mobile office that you described, and I would add that it’s really an innovation that has become spread throughout the country. It’s tremendously useful during disasters when other communication means, and other transportation means may be difficult, but even in so-called normal times to bring legal services to remote areas of states and territories that are nowhere near a legal aid office, this brings legal aid to where people are, and that’s a key strategy that all of the programs that LSC funds tend to follow. David, I talked a moment ago about how critical collaboration is in disaster preparedness and relief. How do Heartland Disaster help.org, risk factor.com and local legal aid organizations work together to streamline disaster response and recovery in the heartland?

David Bonebrake:

Yeah, I think it’s such an important collaboration and in many ways kind of a new and special one. So LSC has done a lot of work at the national level promoting the importance of civil legal aid with disasters. We’re certainly a funder of many disaster grants to the network of LSC grantees, but we’re able to partner with an organization like Risk Factor, which uses cutting edge data analysis and technology to really offer a service that folks really did not have access to in the past. This level of information about their specific disaster risk. And I think that education and awareness piece is really key, and there’s so much that folks can do with that information to improve their situation and improve and be better ready if a disaster strikes. But we also recognize that individuals, even if they put forth the best effort to prepare, and in some cases many individuals, including many low income individuals, if you’re in a path of a disaster, sometimes you’re going to be affected and perhaps very significantly.

And so having a network of different providers that are a available doing this work on the ground, and as Shirley and Stephanie described now, having these dedicated teams that really bring experience and sophistication to their disaster legal aid work, it is just invaluable because I think at the end of the day, while we can educate people and prepare folks, having that network of organizations available to actually provide more significant help is very important. I would add that I think the site also furthers this mission of increasing awareness of the importance of civil legal aid, as is a group that can help with disaster recovery and an important partner in disaster recovery. A lot of people might come here to learn about their individual risk, but we’re able to share the message that there are organizations out there that can provide them assistance, and if they’re having an issue in their life that feels unfair, it might have a civil legal aid component. And that legal aid is there for themselves, for their families, their neighbors, if they potentially need it at some point in the future. So I’m just really excited about this collaboration. We hope to certainly continue it, but also to see it grow over time. And I really do think it’s sort of a new way that we can approach providing people both information, but then also getting them in the network for more substantial services when they need it.

Ron Flagg:

Well, that’s a good point on which to end. I want to thank Helena Stephanie, Shirley, and David for all your insights into natural disasters and the critical role that civil legal aid providers can play and preparing for disasters and responding to them. And I would encourage our listeners, wherever you’re located, to check out Heartland disaster help.org and risk factor.com to learn more about disasters, preparedness, and recovery. Thanks to everyone for tuning into this episode of Talk Justice, and please subscribe so you don’t miss any of our episodes. Stay Well.

Speaker 2:

Podcast guest speakers views, thoughts and opinions are solely their own and do not necessarily represent the legal services corporation’s views, thoughts, or opinions. The information and guidance discussed in this podcast are provided for informational purposes only, and should not be construed as legal advice. You should not make decisions based on this podcast content without seeking legal or other professional advice.