Retirement communities need to be prepared for all kinds of emergencies. LifePlan communities (CCRCs) are generally required by state regulations to have backup generators for their skilled nursing areas, for example. But climate change, among other factors, is making the need for emergency preparedness more urgent.

A retirement community that can survive and bounce back from all kinds of problems—earthquakes, fires, grid outages, floods—is said to be “resilient”. Resilience requires planning. In this post, I will report on the resilience planning that is going on at one retirement community that is ahead of the curve, Rose Villa in Oregon. There are lessons for the rest of us in the work that Rose Villa is doing.

Rose Villa has just completed Phase 1 of a 5-phase plan extending through 2040. The basics of the plan are laid out in the attached “visual summary” that Rose Villa developed. Although many aspects of the plan are specific to Rose Villa’s campus and geographic location, the principles are the same everywhere.

I’ll provide a basic overview of Rose Villa’s “Resilience Action Plan”. For more detail, consult the attached file.

A definition. The Resilience Action Plan (RAP) starts out by defining what resilience means for the community.

“A resilient campus is defined by its ability to maintain:

  • Stability of its operations,
  • Safety of its community, and
  • Sustainability of its built environment.”

These three elements form a common thread throughout the RAP.

The threats. Rose Villa’s location in coastal Oregon is partly responsible for the threats that the RAP emphasizes. Rose Villa is in a seismically-active region, the Cascadia Subduction Zone, with a 37% chance of an earthquake of magnitude 7.1+ in the next 50 years, so surviving an earthquake is a high priority.

In recent years, wild fires have threatened Rose Villa, and residents have had to deal with heavy smoke, so air quality and fire protection are also high priorities. In addition, flooding and grid outages have become increasingly frequent in the area, as they have in many parts of the US. And of course, there could be another pandemic.

The RAP is designed to deal with all of these threats. It sets priorities and specifies the sequence in which various improvements are to be undertaken.

Ultimately, Rose Villa wants to become self-sufficient enough to be able to survive without outside electricity, food, water, or sewage treatment for several weeks. That’s an ambitious goal, and the RAP outlines a plan for getting there.

Setting priorities. To determine which elements to prioritize, Rose Villa constructed a grid showing various issues and classifying them according to their likelihood and their severity. For example, a fire is low likelihood but high severity. A one-day power outage is high likelihood but low severity. Based on these classifications, the RAP shows which problems are considered top priority. At the top of the list is a “multi-day outage in summer or winter”. Next are “a BIG earthquake”, “a multi-day outage in spring or fall”, and “wildfire smoke”. A copy of the full grid from the RAP is shown below.

Rose Villa’s classification of potential threats by likelihood, severity, and priority.

Based on these priorities, Rose Villa developed a set of goals for each aspect of its preparedness. The goals are spread out over five phases, from 2022 (now complete) until 2040. The first two phases, lasting two years (2023 and 2024), involve developing and refining goals, strategies, timelines, and cost estimates. After that, the implementation begins, starting in 2025.

In the RAP, the goals are broken out into six categories, specified as follows:

  • “Emergency response: Emergency supplies are fresh and fully stocked & residents and staff are educated about Response plans.
  • Structural resilience: All buildings meet code for safe evacuation at a minimum, and [at least one safe refuge] is retrofitted for immediate occupancy.
  • Energy resilience: Rose Villa reduces campus energy use by 50% and has microgrid(s) that power critical loads for >2-3 weeks without the grid.
  • Water resilience: Rose Villa reduces campus water use by 25% and has >4 weeks of backup water supply and sanitation in an emergency.
  • Fire/Air resilience: Goals to be further discussed and confirmed in Phase 2           
  • Guiding documents: Capital Improvement Plan and Facilities Maintenance Plan align with and fully support the phased resilience goals.”

Each of these goals, and the planned schedule and steps for getting there, is explained in greater detail in the RAP. You can get a sense of this by reading through the attached presentation. As the RAP points out, many of the required steps will benefit Rose Villa even in the absence of an emergency situation. These goals are remarkable for their specificity and scope. I wonder if there is any other retirement community with comparable plans.

It will take a long-term, dedicated commitment from Rose Villa’s management and residents to achieve what this plan lays out. I will be very interested to learn about the progress as Rose Villa moves into the next phases.

In the meantime, this plan holds out a sterling example of the kind of work every retirement community should be doing. Our threats and our priorities will be different, to be sure, but the process we need to go through will be much the same.