Disaster Resilience A National Imperative (2012) / Chapter Skim
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5 Building Local Capacity and Accelerating Progress: Resilience from the Bottom Up
5 Building Local Capacity and Accelerating Progress: Resilience from the Bottom Up
Pages 117-158
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From page 117... ...
. the disaster." Iowa citizen, 2011 5 Building Local Capacity and Accelerating Progress: Resilience from the Bottom Up National resilience emerges, in large part, from the ability of local communities to plan and prepare for, absorb, respond, and recover from disasters and adapt to new and diverse conditions such as economic growth and decline, technology innovations, and rising sea level.
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From page 118... ...
that collaboration between the private and public sectors can enhance the disaster resilience of a community. Indeed, the National Research Council has released a number of recent reports that spotlight the role of private–public partnerships and collaborative organizational structures in strengthening community resilience to disasters (NRC, 2005a, 2006a, 2009, 2010, 2011b)
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Community Coalitions to Foster Community Resilience Teaming up to take proactive steps to manage risks -- such as a resilience private–public coalition -- embodies several preconditions for successful adaptation by a community facing a major disturbance or stress. In their interdisciplinary review of the resilience literature, Norris et al.
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In addition, given the high percentage of critical infrastructure owned by the private sector, failure to include businesses in emergency programs could have grave consequences for the community. In this sense of using coalitions to best advantage to increase disaster resilience, local emergency management programs also have to be aligned and synchronized with higher-level plans and programs in government.
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For example, in the case of Hurricane Katrina, churches around the country assisted their counterparts in New Orleans and Mississippi. Universities did the same, taking in students from the affected region for the fall semester, often at no charge.
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, the health department developed a Community Communications Network consisting of over 150 community organizations to relay information to the people they serve. Stronger relationships developed with many of these organizations, leading to the formation of new groups who were ready to mobilize, such as a Somali Health Board of ethnic community leaders.
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Their evacuation planning was coordinated through the church and the local radio station directly through community initiatives. Because fishing was a main source of income, Hurricane Katrina significantly affected a large segment of the community's livelihood, and after the storm, the community collectively decided to work together to rebuild, sharing with the community building and carpentry skills that some community members had developed back in Vietnam.
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promotes disaster preparedness among grassroots groups and social services agencies serving vulnerable populations, by providing them with dual-use tools. CARD, for instance, has transformed the traditional Incident Command System into a leadership course that improves the skills of nonprofit organizations at managing resources and relating to other agencies on a day-today basis (Schoch-Spana et al., 2008)
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For example, local coordinators for government-sponsored programs such as FEMA's Project Impact, preparedness coordinators for local health departments, and dedicated staff and institutional champions have been suggested as key ingredients for successful collaborations for resiliencebuilding activities (Roussos and Fawcett, 2000; Tierney, 2000; Avery and Zabriskie-Timmerman, 2009; Orians et al., 2009)
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. Whether a governmental entity or a nongovernmental group is the final accountable entity for integrating individuals, communities, and businesses to increase community resilience, any resilience-focused collaboration is necessarily a part of consistent support for the legal authority of emergency management agencies.
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Instead, as Chapter 3 outlined, resilience requires that local infrastructure leaders come together to assess the status, vulnerability, and interdependencies of their holdings; set performance metrics for individual components and entire systems; and develop plans for enhancing the infrastructure's ability to withstand failure and for speeding the resumption of operations during disaster response and recovery (Box 5.4)
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and city departments with a coordinating role (e.g., Public Works, Emergency Management) ; state, regional, and private-sector entities operating or regulating lifelines that serve the city (e.g., CalTrans, AT&T, Bay Area Rapid Transit)
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In both rhetoric and practice, the Port of Los Angeles exemplifies locally based efforts to enhance resilience. Source: Port of Los Angeles, 2011.
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. A major problem for those evacuated before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina was the absence of medical records indicating major health problems and medications taken routinely.
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So, too, does a capable and comprehensive public health emergency preparedness system. Strong health agencies at the state and local level, backed up with federal support, serve as the coordinating backbone for this system that also incorporates individuals, businesses, and civil society groups (IOM, 2008)
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State and local health departments continue to work hard at enhancing the full range of preparedness capabilities including biosurveillance, medical countermeasure dispensing, emergency operations coordination, emergency public information and warning, and medical surge management (CDC, 2011c)
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Privacy issues are clearly of critical concern in these discussions, but as the post-Hurricane Katrina problems in helping patients with chronic illnesses demonstrated, the need for this information is vital. In summary, public–private coalitions are essential for the development and execution of plans to strengthen the resilience of a community's critical infrastructure.
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From page 134... ...
The coalition is coordinated with assistance from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. The number of facilities includes 65 hospitals and acute care facilities, 400 outpatient centers, and 73 emergency medical services organizations, in addition to participants from public safety, emergency management, public health, medical societies, and hospital associations.
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Individual preparation included earthquake kits, family communication plans, emergency lighting, etc. In Bel Air, neighbors got together and each home had a red flag and green flag.
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136 DISASTER RESILIENCE: A NATIONAL IMPERATIVE TABLE 5.3 Communication to Build Resilience: What and How Communication Strategy Strategy Implementation Construct narratives that promote Frame communities as problem resilience solvers, individuals as capable responders Construct narratives that reinforce social bonds, helping, and cooperation Maintain social memory of disasters Use evidence-based strategies for Ground strategies in communication and public education communities Communicate risk Test and evaluate efforts Leverage social aspects of Promote social interaction communication to strengthen ties and Improve community use of social involve community media networks Improve quality, value, and trust in crowd-sourced information Strengthen communication networks Create multipronged, to ensure access to information interconnected communication networks Ensure equity in access to information Construct Narratives that Promote Resilience Increasing national resilience will require more than just improving communication structures and processes. To create a culture of resilience, public education and communication are important to help shift the way that Americans perceive themselves in relation to disasters and ensure that the lessons learned from our history with disasters stay active in the public's consciousness.
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Following the tragic mass shooting at Virginia Tech in 2007, Ryan and Hawdon (2008) describe how the faculty at the university accepted the administration's frame that the shooting had been an attack on the larger university community, and this in turn guided them to assume greater BOX 5.8 Strategies to Keep Social Memory Alive Annual or periodic commemoration events held by community organizations, FBOs, schools, and municipalities; Collections of oral histories from survivors, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's "Pandemic Influenza Storybooka" and the "Voices After the Deluge" research by the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill;b Inclusion of local disaster histories in school curricula; "Digital stories" that capture people telling their personal experiences in disasters, captured on video for viewing on YouTube, Vimeo, or other websites; an illustrative example are personal stories about Hurricane Katrina captured in the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank;c Exhibits at local history and natural history museums and libraries such as museums in Cedar Rapids (Figure)
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argue that preserving the social memory of disasters is important for resilience to take hold; they point to vital lessons about evacuation that were lost after Hurricane Betsy in 1965 that could have prevented some of the losses during Hurricane Katrina (see also NRC, 2011a; Colten and Giancarlo, 2011)
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. To alleviate communication gaps, public educators and communicators should also examine the preexisting understandings and beliefs about disasters, hazards, and response and recovery measures held by targeted groups in comparison to experts and emergency management (Morgan et al., 2002)
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. Similarly, leaders of nonprofit organizations in the Mississippi Gulf Coast advocated for messages that empower individuals to care for themselves and others, rather than those based on fear, based on their experiences helping their communities recover from Hurricane Katrina (NRC, 2011a)
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These networks can play a very important role in strengthening community by providing new ways to interact, but at the same time their lack of ties to geography may weaken local communities by diverting some of their attention elsewhere. Nevertheless, it is clear that efforts to strengthen communities and their social networks must include these new media.
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Efforts to strengthen communities and their use of social media, and to develop the social hierarchies that can foster trust, can do much to improve the quality, and thus increase the value, of crowd-sourced information during disasters or other traumatic events. Strengthen Communication Networks to Ensure Access to Information Two different mechanisms may improve communication networks to ensure access to information for resilience: (1)
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. Dense communication networks contribute to community action because individuals tend to confirm information across multiple sources and within their social spheres before determining courses of action (Wood et al., 2011)
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. Zoning and Building Codes and Standards to Strengthen Community Resilience Building codes set the minimum requirements for infrastructure and are established through a hierarchy of national, regional, and local governments.
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Additionally, the federal government constructs its buildings to meet a set of federal codes, and maintaining a balance between federal and local codes and standards is also challenging. For example, an NRC report found that "designs for federal buildings were inappropriate to local conditions and resulted in costly difficulties during construction that could have been avoided had local building code provisions been updated to reflect the model codes" (NRC, 1989b, p.
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. However, except where federally owned property or interests are involved, the federal government has little role in establishing local building codes and standards, or zoning laws (see below)
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. The new master plan for development in New Orleans even contains a chapter dedicated to community resilience and has, as one of its goals, a broad and encompassing community standard of resilience with respect to flooding and other hazards.9 This zoning code also explicitly recognizes the valuable role of natural defenses to natural disasters.
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Consequences of a Lack of Building Code Enforcement and Zoning Provisions Despite widespread availability of codes and zoning guidelines and agreement by most officials that these governance tools benefit community resilience, many unsafe buildings still exist and many communities continue to allow development in hazardous areas. The major reasons that municipal and state jurisdictions find it difficult to enforce building codes and zoning laws include the lack of resources or number of qualified personnel to do so, pressure from developers to grow communities, and lack of political will to manage land use through zoning (Burby, 1998)
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Higher minimums for building codes may be another mechanism to increase the visible, direct links between building code and standard enforcement and resilience. The current minimum requirements prescribed by building codes, while laying the groundwork for resilience, do not provide adequate design guidance for resilience.
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Second, the economic impacts of changes in building codes or zoning laws are not tied well or directly to the receipt of disaster relief. Would such explicit ties make communities more receptive to implementation and/or enforcement of building codes and zoning laws?
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A truly robust coalition would have at its core a strong leadership and governance structure, with a person or persons with adequate time, skill, and dedication necessary for the development and maintenance of relationships among all partners. Recommendation: Federal, state, and local governments should support the creation and maintenance of broad-based community resilience coalitions at local and regional levels.
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The adoption and enforcement of this framework at the local level should be strongly encouraged by the framework document and accompanied by a commitment from state and local governments to ensure that zoning laws and building codes are adopted and enforced.
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2009. Building Codes Illustrated: A Guide to Understanding the International Building Code.
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In Emergency Management: Principles and Practice for Local Government, 2nd Ed. Washington, DC: ICMA Press, pp.
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2002. Parameters for an Independent Study to Assess the Future Benefits of Hazard Mitigation Activities, Prepared for the Federal Emergency Management Agency by the Panel on Assessment of Savings from Mitigation Activities, Multihazard Mitigation Council.
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NRC, 2011b. Building Community Disaster Resilience Through Private-Public Collaboration.
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Submitted to the Federal Emergency Management Agency by the University of Delaware Disaster Research Center. Available at http://www.udel.edu/DRC/archives/Documents/Project%20Impact/projectreport42.pdf.
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2010. Vulnerable populations: Hurricane Katrina as a case study.
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