What 'Build Back Better' really means:

 Guest post by Alex Vezina:

When the levees broke during Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in August 2005, a common line during the recovery process was to “build back better.”

Since then and especially now, with U.S. President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan, this concept has returned to the public forum.

Here is what the phrase Build Back Better actually means, including some of its assumptions that may not be immediately obvious and should be considered before adopting such a strategy.

At its basic level, the idea behind building back better is that when the time comes for public and private infrastructure such as dams, hospitals, housing, roads and bridges to be demolished and replaced, it is important, quite literally, to built back better.

Older buildings that do not meet modern building codes, for example, are unsafe to live in by modern standards, given the possibility of collapse.

When replacing them, it’s important they meet higher building code standards than they did when they were first constructed, and thus are more resilient to severe weather and natural disasters in future.

One aspect of building back better that is often overlooked is that it does not generally anticipate a crisis before the infrastructure collapses.

Being reactionary in nature, a build back better policy waits for the crisis to occur and then builds back on the rubble.

In other words, it requires the infrastructure to fail before improvements occur.

Ever hear the saying, “It’s going to take somebody dying for things to change around here?”

That’s build back better.

So, why would people wait for a crisis to occur before addressing the problem. Does build back better not go far enough?

In many cases, following a crisis, things aren’t actually built back better. They are built back to the way they were pre-crisis.

In the case of Hurricane Katrina, the problem was a funding allocation issue and what the Army Corps of Engineers was allowed to do in making repairs.

This illustrates how difficult it can be to allocate extra federal resources to a state or province (see British Columbia’s recent flooding) to improve on public infrastructure.

If various levels of government are simultaneously involved in building back better, what one level of government wants may come into conflict with what another will allow.

In those cases, contractors may not be allowed to make the new infrastructure more resilient that it was.

A common argument justifying this attitude is: “If it was good for ‘x’ number of years and didn’t break, it will be another ‘x’ number of years before it breaks again.”

In other words, the problem wasn’t that the infrastructure was inadequate before it collapsed, the problem was created by the hurricane or flood.

Emotionally, many people want to agree with such thinking.

It is much easier to blame the hazard like the storm, or the flood, or the fire, or the virus, than to assign fault to the vulnerability of the public or private infrastructure.

The culprit thus becomes the wrath of nature, as opposed to faulty or outdated engineering that failed to protect the public from the wrath of nature.

It can be even harder to separate the process from the personal, which leads to people getting stuck on the issue of who was to blame.

Simple narratives of good versus evil and punishing those deemed responsible when infrastructure collapses during a natural disaster are generally more interesting than the often-lengthy analysis required to build back better.

It also costs money and time, which are no small issues.

As society grows and advances, so too does the strain placed on the public and private infrastructures that support it.

Inevitably, with the passage of time, they end up being used at a level of intensity for which they were not originally intended, requiring more money just so they don’t break, as opposed to being improved.

Thus, at any given time, most infrastructure will be operating at near maximum stress, all needing more money and resources just not to break.

Small wonder that waiting for things to break before fixing them, as opposed to upgrading them before they break, is so common.

In the process of improving things that break, difficult choices often have to be made to take resources away from something else, already at the brink of breaking.

And the cycle continues.

— Alex Vezina is the CEO of Prepared Canada Corp. and has a graduate degree in Disaster and Emergency Management. He can be reached at info@prepared.ca.