CIVIC-PG Track B: Creating the West Virginia Flood Resilience Framework for comprehensive disaster response and long-term community recovery

West Virginia University Research Corporation, Morgantown WV

Investigators

Abstract

Community resilience is the ability of communities to withstand and mitigate the stress of a disaster and is a key component of long-term recovery from natural disasters such as floods. Community resilience requires effective pre-disaster planning and coordination of the complex network of actors involved in disaster response. Every county in West Virginia (WV) has a high risk of flooding and these risks are compounded by increasing frequency and intensity of precipitation, aging infrastructure, and high levels of socioeconomic vulnerability. This project is a collaboration between academic researchers and civic actors and will identify lessons learned during response and recovery efforts to a major flood in 2016 in WV. This flood devastated several small towns, killed 23 people, and caused over $1 billion in damage across the state. In 2022, some communities still have not made a full recovery and lessons from the 2016 event have yet to be clearly identified or incorporated into local or statewide planning. Project findings from this Civic Innovation Challenge (CIVIC) project will be reported back to communities and policymakers to be used in future planning efforts, as well as to procure funding to increase resilience. The team will build on insights from the planning grant to develop a Stage 2 project to create the West Virginia Flood Resilience Framework (WVFRF), which will be a comprehensive online toolkit to empower communities with the knowledge they need for coordination and capacity building to prepare for future floods, which will have broad application to flood-prone communities across the US. The goals of this project are to determine the gaps in organizational capacity, cross-organization coordination, and flood risk knowledge that need to be filled for more comprehensive flood response and long-term flood recovery in WV. The team will integrate findings from a county-wide survey, Participatory GIS (PGIS), and focus groups in two case study sites with different levels of socioeconomic vulnerability that impacted success of long-term recovery to provide a comprehensive understanding of gaps in flood response and recovery. As a result of a novel integration of quantitative, qualitative, and PGIS methods, the project will have insights for scholarship on building resilience to natural disaster in socioeconomically vulnerable communities while also presenting a unique transdisciplinary model for community-engaged research that centers co-production of knowledge and creates a comprehensive approach to disaster response and recovery. This project is in response to the Civic Innovation Challenge program—Track B. Bridging the gap between essential resources and services & community needs—and is a collaboration between NSF, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Energy. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.