Community Spirit
Allison Graham
“Community Spirit” is one of those clichés that rolls off the tongue but what actually is it?
Well, when certain challenging events happen in a local area you can see ‘community spirit’ come alive in front of your eyes. It is simply pragmatic support, be it emotional, financial or practical. People show up for each other as the emphasis shifts from the individual to the commonweal.
My own wee community of Strathard faced a challenging time this weekend with the prolonged torrential rain leading to localised flooding, more widespread in impact than I’ve seen in 25 years here. We are pretty prepared as a community for flooding with river monitor pages bookmarked, tide and weather forecasts studied, a dedicated Flooding Facebook page, and well-established flood defences readied in increasingly quick time. This weekend’s flooding however threw us a few curve balls.
Two domestic kerosene tank spills from impacted properties brought a new, longer-term dimension to our community’s needs as we now had a health alert from NHS. In addition, our only supermarket, the Co oP has been closed while the considerable damage is assessed and made good. One of our three local pubs, which is another key employer, as well as a much-loved home from home for locals and visitors alike, was also majorly impacted for the second time in 10 years, having survived the Covid challenges of the last few years.
On Saturday I took a call from the Council Resilience team telling us the village hall had been allocated as a refuge centre for those impacted and asking what our need was for equipment to be delivered to the hall where I’m a trustee. The main road to the hall was already flooded and closed to all but emergency services vehicles so our local heroes, Trossachs Search and Rescue arranged to collect and deliver the equipment. As I headed up to our village hall, on foot, to help deliver hot food to emergency service teams, the smell of Kerosene was overwhelming as I approached the garage where emergency services were stationed, lights flashing. I mused over previous Saturday evenings spent watching Casualty, and how preferable that was to now feeling like we were starring in an episode!
Supplies went in and out all weekend and continued through Monday and Tuesday as we all kept an eye on the weather as more rain was forecast. We liaised with two neighbouring village halls to make sure that supplies got to all those who may need them across Strathard.
Our main issue, when the floods come, apart from people, property and business impact is communities being cut off by flooded roads for prolonged periods.
Local residents and businesses have all been amazing at sharing what they have our friends from the wider Stirling community, whom we worked with during Covid support - they came through again! I picked up a huge donation on Monday night of surplus supplies from Stirling Community Food as their fridges and freezers were full from an earlier big donation they had received.
We are a Food Waste Warriors Village in Aberfoyle so normalising food sharing to eliminate waste and to make a variety of fresh and preserved foods available to all of our community is our goal. Our Community Food Larder and Fridge was established as a result of our experience in Strathard Helpers of food sharing during COVID-19. We usually get collections 5 days from local CooP and we’ve had donations from residents and other local businesses. Past date salad even goes to local chickens and they give us eggs - now that’s the circular economy really at work!
While our local CooP is closed, other local businesses have stepped up their available supplies, like our Community garage shop and BenView Garden Centre. Community Council have organised DRT taxis to Callander shops for those without transport.
The worst situations always surface the best of our communities.
So what happens when the storm is over?
Community volunteers hearing faint praise after the event can fall flat when what was actually needed was proactive support from those who could/should have listened and worked with our communities to support their identified risks. Another favourite post-event soundbite is “Lessons must be learned”. The question from communities is, “When?”
Talk is cheap, especially when it’s talk under a media spotlight. It’s what happens when the media cameras move on that matters. I believe that we should never waste a crisis, its an opportunity to reflect, learn and iterate. To be better prepared for future risks, taking mitigating where possible and having robust contingency plans with clearly communicated triggers where appropriate.
To quote GAME OF THRONES, ‘winter is coming’ so how prepared are our communities? Had this weekend’s flooding happened in winter months, with the addition of frozen ground or snow melt, cold temperatures, potential power outages and an already overstretched NHS it would have been a disaster on another level. As winter in Scotland happens every year between November and February, it is hardly an event that government at all levels can’t realistically prepare for surely? We certainly plan to locally within our capabilities.
Almost two years ago Glasgow hosted COP26 where world leaders met, made promises and smiled for the cameras. This weekend many areas of Scotland felt directly the extreme weather impact of the continuing failure of global leaders to deliver on the big actions and not just deliver the big talk. In perspective, the global south has by many factors of scale, more extreme weather events, more often, than us, without the capacity to respond as we can. They also don’t contribute a fraction of the greenhouse gasses that we, the developed north do.
So while local, national and global politicians and policymakers prevaricate, posture and largely play politics, who deals with the impacts? Communities. It turned out this weekend that not a great deal of thought has gone into this or lessons learned from previous weather incidents.
Storm Arwen, was a mere two weeks after the COP26 great and good had packed up their stalls. It should have been a call to action across Scotland for resilience planning, prioritising at-risk communities, transport links, supply chain contingency as well as risk mitigation of flood defences. This weekend has shown that some efforts have been made, kit bought and flood defences installed but clearly, there are many lessons still to be learned and it must be a process of continual learning as nature continues to surprise us and as climate becomes more unpredictable and extreme. To borrow from a well known phrase, "Don’t shut the expensive floodgates after the forecasted storm has started" must be one lesson the people of Perth’s South Inch find incomprehensible that it even needs to be learned!
As these communities recover from the devastating effects of flooded properties and facilities, they and other communities must demand a seat at the decision-making table to ensure that this time lessons ARE learned and the precious commodity of community spirit is not exhausted on impacts that are either preventable or can be mitigated against with clear co-designed resilience planning. After all, it's good to talk but it's even better to do.
