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Jen Horney: Only a few coastal communities
actually have predisaster recovery plans in place.
After the adoption of the National Disaster Recovery Framework,
there was an interest in determining ways that we can measure
the efficiency and effectiveness of recovery.
Now as part of the Costal Resilience Center,
we are going to continue the project.
As many people are aware Texas was impacted by severe flooding
in May of 2015 and one of the most impacted areas was around
the community of Wimberley, near Austin.
Garett Sansom: We're in Wimberly, Texas right now.
We are on the foundation of a house that was destroyed
during the recent major flood.
Tracking the recovery of communities
is very important for several reasons.
If you can properly assess how the community reacted and what
their doing, you better plan for future disasters and you can
better target certain groups for interventions to help them out
during the post disaster.
The Disaster Recovery Tool will
allow statistical analysis to be performed on 79 specific metrics to
look at items such as the financial recovery of businesses,
town meetings held, vulnerability of populations, socioeconomic status.
So its going to help with both social scientists,
the public health scientists.
Its going to help with urban planners, looking at
how communities can be built to help better withstand,
have better resilience for disasters.
Jen Horney: We really engaged in the academic process of
literature review, focus groups, key informed interviews to
try an identify metrics that have been used in the past
to quantify recovery.
One of our goals with the tool is to make it as flexible as possible.
So users can just track one focus area or one theme.
The tool actually links out to
the U.S. Census, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and open FEMA
so that end users can actually just populate
their data with a click of the mouse.
The data thats entered into this tool could actually be
used by practitioners, as part of the development of a
predisaster recovery plan.
In the future we hope that the tool can
inform communities about priorities, gaps, other issues
that they should be addressing in predisaster planning, so that they
can improve their recovery.
For communities, improved resilence is really what recovery should be about.
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