Blog Archives May 2020

5/29/2020

We’ve seen it play out over and over again in cities across the world: a disaster occurs, like a tornado, hurricane, or flood, and we witness members of that community rally around each other. Neighbors take in people who’ve lost their homes, businesses provide meals, and some even risk their own lives to save those of others. Stories and videos shared on social media provide a bright spot in the middle of tragedy.
Government organizations and processes play a vital role in making sure a community is further supported by ensuring procedures are put into place before, during, and after a disaster that will help the community recover and rebuild.

Our everyday decisions are governed by processes and routines that assist us in identifying the problem, determining strategies to resolve the problem, evaluating those alternatives, choosing the best one, and then implementing the resolution. These procedures and routines are carried out by organizations that offer consistency, commitment, and confidence in the decision-making process.
After a disaster, these processes and routines may be disrupted or may not be set up to adequately handle the litany of complex post-disaster recovery issues. A defined and shared pre-disaster process for managing disaster recovery activities, along with coordinating with local, regional, state and federal partners, is paramount to community recovery success.

Unlike the tactical incident strategies that are paramount to managing information and resources during the response phase, community disaster recovery is an organic and inductive process. It should foster community unity and an open autonomy that promotes effective decision-making that benefits the majority.

A united community will have a number of both short and long-term benefits.

The net result will be an organization that can assist communities with the immediate evaluation of post-disaster conditions and needs; outreach efforts that inform, listen to, and resolve potential conflict with the community; thorough and unbiased analysis of the benefits and challenges recovery alternatives; processes that will facilitate accurate disaster recovery decisions; and track the implementation of recovery projects and offer corrective actions if necessary.

Committed and structured governance would result in a rational system for efficient and effective long-term community recovery. A defined and open decision-making process will provide organizational legitimacy and improve the quality of decisions being made. Decisions will be made in a timely manner and based on a well-informed organization and public. Independent decisions may appear quick and easy, but often they meet public resistance causing increased cost and project implementation delays, if not project termination.

A committed and structured long-term community recovery structure will prevent uninformed and unilateral decisions and provide an open forum to discuss potential regulatory and budgetary challenges to implementing a project. The organization, as well as the public, take ownership in the decision and ultimately increase the ease of implementing the project.

When these elements come together, a community can recover from a disaster more efficiently and in a way that benefits the community as a whole.

Many organizations and networks are involved in the community recovery process. But the emergency management and public safety professional is still an integral component of community recovery operations. By understanding the potential impacts and possible cascading effects of different disaster types, the emergency management community can proactively identify community organizational networks that will have vital roles and responsibilities, identify organizational gaps in key recovery issues, identify strategies to build organizational capacity where needed, and incorporate these community organizational networks into the broader community recovery strategy.

A successful community recovery strategy must also consider methods and mechanisms to engage the public in important recovery decision-making processes. In a post-disaster environment, social trust in government becomes a symbolic token to a community, can extend the period of a united community, and facilitates an effective community recovery decision-making process that is supported by an established governance structure and an open decision-making process that involves the community.

The result will be a more effective recovery strategy that:

A successful public engagement is not simply measured by the number of public forums or the number of attendees. Instead, it is a more organic strategy that involves the pre-disaster engagement of key organizational networks (identified in step 2) to understand their collective roles and responsibilities in the community recovery strategy. In a post-disaster environment, the objective of the outreach and coordination strategy should be to influence key community organizations and community leaders to generate a momentum for sustained long-term community recovery that is inclusive of the community and void of individual agendas.

This post-disaster objective should be aligned with a public participation strategy that creates a new direct link between the public and the community and governmental decision makers, ensuring that those who make decisions that affect the lives of others enter into dialogue with those affected before making those decisions. Successful public outreach must provide opportunity for interested public and affected stakeholders to participate and voice opposition, support, perspectives, and opinions as the community recovery process evolves.

The inclusion of the community and emergency management professionals into future community recovery planning efforts will result in more informed community stakeholders and the reinforcement of the emergency manager’s coordination role during all phases of emergency management, including community disaster recovery. Understanding these orbits of organizational networks and their community reach will be an important element of the coordination strategy and involving these critical partners in the decision-making process.