What happens when the power goes out in your community from major storms? Do you have a generator with fuel, food, water? Do you have a place you can go? What is your community doing to be prepared?
Organizations that build and operate recreational facilities filled with pools and gyms are uniquely positioned to play an important role in the climate-adjusted planet that we now inhabit. These community assets are immersed in communities and already serving the local population. They are known to be safe places with helpful staff, trained with life-saving skills, and are typically known as the local safe place to go. They have large rooms (gyms, studios, etc.), showers, toilets and are often designed to accommodate those with physical disabilities. They are already acting as a place to gather in good times. This article challenges you to think about transforming these community assets to be available when times start to get bad.
As I walked through the streets of Manhattan in October 2012 in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, I witnessed a community reacting to the impact of a terrible hurricane and reaching out for community assets and facilities to mitigate the acute shock of the impending storm and the flooding that ensued. The New York YMCA staff shared their facilities across the city and worked alongside first responders as they mobilized large generators and at one location relocated stranded seniors to their large recreation center. They worked tirelessly to help those vulnerable people as the City worked to bring back services and recover.
Earlier this year, I met with the YMCA facility leaders who manage the YMCA Community Recreation Centers in Houston, Texas only days after Hurricane Harvey’s floods receded. They described the stages of community response; from the initial scramble to locate staff and assess the property damage, through to the reopening of the recreation centers to the local community. I was once again struck at the dedication and creativity that emerges in these horrendous situations. Once the facilities were deemed safe, they were reopened to their communities to help dry out, charge phones and allow the communities to gather in a safe space. At one location, the YMCA recreation centers was opened to families of first responders to allow them to sleep, shower and know their families were safe as they ventured back into the areas hardest hit to save lives.
Each community that has suffered a climatic event, including Fort McMurray, Alberta and the communities around Florida, all have these stories buried in the background – each of these communities were able to come together to heal, connect and find strength and to eventually recover.
My role at the YMCA of Greater Toronto includes leadership of the facility management teams for the existing properties and development of the new ones in our community. I have access to the facility leaders of other large YMCAs in North America and we share these stories to learn and enhance our ability to prepare and respond. These same lessons learned are applicable for municipal leaders as well as other owners and operators of community assets.
One theme that emerges in each situation is the immediate loss of power. In hurricanes, these communities lose their power from falling trees and flooding. It can take days and weeks for the crews to respond, and these communities are often stranded. In most cases, the municipal water is still flowing from the hardened water treatment plants and the natural gas is pumping as these critical systems have redundancies in place.
In each community, there are some businesses and residents that have generators, food and water on the ready, but this is not the norm. Those who are most vulnerable include persons with physical and mental disabilities, the aging population, families with young children, and those without homes. In urban settings with tall buildings, people can become stranded in the upper floors as the water won’t go above a certain height without local pumps and are forced onto the street without access to water.
In late 2014, the YMCA of Greater Toronto and the City of Toronto agreed to work together and facilitate the sharing of YMCA community assets in a proactive manner with the City. The strategy is quite simple, the City will help place a generator into the seven large YMCA Health and Fitness Centers as well as provide support to make these locations operate in cohesion with the City’s emergency planning. The City would lend the capital funding to the YMCA to achieve this goal.
The challenge became, how to design and install a generator in a financially viable way in these YMCA Centres of Community. The answer that has been developed is a Combined Heat and Power (CHP) generator, a very efficient generator that creates electricity onsite. This CHP technology is the heart of the technical solution that allows the building to always have electricity when natural gas is present and it is coupled with solar photovoltaic (PV), battery storage, electric vehicle charging and a smart control system to make it all work together and provide the power to run these community assets.
The CHP generator runs as a secondary source of electricity for the building; also known as Co-Generation or Cogen. The YMCA designs and builds a generator that will run 60 to 75% of the building’s electrical systems in the event of a power outage – enough to keep the doors open and building safe for occupancy during a blackout. This meets the critical resiliency goal of proactively powering those buildings independent of whether the local distribution company is able to deliver electricity.
The reason this technology is financially viable is based on the efficiency of how it works. Picture the engine of your gas-powered car – as the engine runs it gets really hot, as do the fumes coming out the tailpipe. The CHP generator used in these buildings are large gas-powered engines that powers a turbine to make electricity and it burns natural gas (cleaner than gasoline and much cleaner than diesel.) The CHP generator is covered with a jacket filled with fluid that takes the heat away and keeps the engine cool. It also directs the fumes from the “tailpipe” into a heat-exchanger that captures the heat and transfers it to the cooling fluid. The heated water that emerges from this “cooling system” is the HEAT, in the Combined HEAT and power.
As you look at a recreation center, it has a lot of places to put the hot water. The pool water, the hot tubs, the showers, the laundry and the sinks. There are also hot water heaters and other mechanical systems in the background. All of the systems are typically being heated by boilers or furnaces that use natural gas or electricity. Once a properly designed CHP Generator is placed in the building, the HEAT that is recaptured can be directed to those hot water systems and save the energy that would have been used. Thus, there is a positive financial return for all of that gas and electricity you don’t need to use. The trick is to size the CHP Generator to the amount of HEAT needed in the building to make the payback effective.
With the addition of solar PV on the roof, battery storage, electric vehicle charging all managed through a smart-metering and management software, these systems optimize the necessary energy and payback while reducing the greenhouse gases. This has been a long road of learning, designing, educating and securing the funding to initiate this work and more information will be shared as these plans move into implementation.
The real excitement begins when you start engaging with your community and start the dialogue about what services and resources already exist, what is needed and what kind of synergies can you create.
- Are there some grocery stores in the neighborhood that will have spoiling food that can donate it for displaced residents?
- Are there specific groups in your community that need special support that you can work to accommodate? Vulnerable populations are disproportionally at risk when the power goes out and they are often stranded in their homes.
- How will you interact with the local municipality? How will the emergency services and community agencies respond and work together?
- What risks exist for your building in a flood?
- What is the capacity of your building? What type of support can you and should you provide? Define the equipment and supplies that are relevant for basic support and any special capabilities that your local community will need.
As you start to develop the framework of your strategy through engagement with your direct residential and business community, the local municipality and emergency management services, your potential role will emerge and a strategy can be developed. There is a huge appetite for proactive thinking. Partnerships will form. Funding will be found.
Become a lighthouse in your community when your community goes dark and be part of the change that is needed now. This is happening today – you are living on the climate-adjusted planet, so start planning for it.