Developing A "Living Laboratory" for Examining Community Recovery and Resilience After Disaster

Texas A&M Research Foundation, College Station TX

Investigators

Abstract

This research builds upon several existing research initiatives along the Texas coast to provide a "living laboratory" for examining community recovery and resilience after a disaster. The Texas coast is quickly becoming the fastest growing area in the United States, exposing potentially millions more people to the adverse impacts of meteorologically-based disasters. Most recently, Hurricane Ike made landfall overnight on September 12, 2008 near Galveston, Texas. Prior to Hurricane Ike, the Texas Coastal Communities Planning Atlas documented the physical, environmental, regulatory, and social development patterns present along the Texas Coast (see coastalatlas.tamug.edu). Data collection under NSF Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) CMMI-0901605 provided immediate data on impact, dislocation, and early repair and rebuilding decisions. These data provide baseline measures for the proposed research measuring community recovery at multiple scales over a two-year period. Using the original sample, the researchers will establish a series of panel studies of households, housing units, business owners, businesses, and business structures to track recovery trajectories and adaptive learning. A geo-coded parcel-level dataset allows us to aggregate units to draw conclusions at multiple scales. In addition, the researchers will, through participatory observation analysis, qualitative interviews, and documentary analysis, track policy changes by county and city governments to assess adaptive management and social learning. The disaster research community has called for increasingly systematic and quantitative approaches to modeling the impacts and recovery processes following a disaster, with greater attention to measuring recovery at multiple levels, to better model community resilience. Systematic identification of the key decisions made by public authorities regarding disaster preparedness, response, recovery and mitigation planning and policy development is also needed to assess a critical dimension of resiliency associated with adaptive learning. The synergy of this research with existing projects provides the ability to do just that - to quantitatively model the dynamics of the built, regulatory, and social environment from pre-hazard event to community response, learning, and recovery - each of which are key dimensions in resilience. Findings from this research will leverage existing outreach tools to further knowledge that will enable local communities and professionals involved in the design, regulation, and management of the built and natural environments to construct communities that are more socially and physically resilient.