Disaster aftermathUnderstanding community resilience, recovery in face of disaster
From Puerto Rico to Missouri to California, Americans in recent years have confronted disasters that have disrupted communities and destroyed homes, businesses and infrastructure. A team of engineers, computer scientists, economists, urban planners and sociologists are part of 5-year study examining how communities recover from disaster and become more resilient to future adversity. “Resilience is a community’s ability to prepare for, anticipate and adapt to challenging conditions, and withstand and recover rapidly from disruptions,” says one researcher.
From Puerto Rico to Missouri to California, Americans in recent years have confronted disasters that have disrupted communities and destroyed homes, businesses and infrastructure.
Today, one researcher at the University of Kansas is part of a $20 million, five-year project funded by National Institute of Standards and Technology that enables engineers, computer scientists, economists, urban planners and sociologists to study how communities recover from disaster and become more resilient to future adversity.
“Resilience is a community’s ability to prepare for, anticipate and adapt to challenging conditions, and withstand and recover rapidly from disruptions,” said Elaina Sutley, assistant professor of civil, environmental and architectural engineering at KU.
KU says that Sutley, working with the Center for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning at Colorado State University, just returned from Lumberton, North Carolina, an inland community that suffered extensive flooding in the wake of Hurricane Matthew in October 2016. She was part of a team who interviewed 180 homeowners and completed close to 500 damage surveys just a month after the storm. This first trip, in what will be a longitudinal field study, was aimed at determining various impacts of the hurricane and developing new relationships between physical damage to housing and household dislocation.
“There are five different communities that we’ve studied in depth,” she said. “Lumberton is the only one where we’ve done a post-disaster field study. It was a really interesting place for us to go in and stay. Hurricane Matthew impacted North Carolina; Lumberton is actually a few hours inland. Wind damage was minimal in Lumberton, but riverine flooding caused their disaster. Their levee system was not designed to current standards required by FEMA; once the water flooded over the levee, it got trapped in Lumberton, and the levee wouldn’t allow it to drain. Water was as high as 8 feet in residential areas, and it took about a week for the water to come down.”
