Like so many other disasters before it, Hurricane Ian has destroyed the social, political, and economic fabric of communities across the State of Florida. After a catastrophic even such as Hurricane Ian, it often takes years for a community to resume to normalcy and decades, if ever, to return to pre-disaster conditions. Although unfortunate, disasters do provide the unique opportunity to improve a community’s pre-disaster conditions. However, a community’s future is intimately dependent upon the ability to champion the recovery process, sustain social unity, and maintaining an open decision-making process built upon transparency and democracy. These conditions are important elements in a community’s recovery momentum and offer conditions that serve as a foundation for successful long-term community recovery and improvement.

In this ten-part blog series, I will present evidence-based attributes that contribute to a community’s disaster recovery success. These findings are based on over a decade of research and case study analysis of over one hundred presidentially declared disasters.

Our everyday decisions are governed by processes and routines that assist us in identifying the problem, determining strategies to resolve the problem, evaluating these alternatives, choosing the best alternative, 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 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 and 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 that fosters community unity and an open autonomy that promotes effective decision-making that benefits the majority. The disaster process goes through a period called ‘Communitas’ where disaster-stricken communities take on a shared identity of “disaster victim” and establish a sense of equality between community groups that otherwise take opposing views. During this period, conditions are optimal for community unity, empowerment, and agreement. Research has shown that social trust in government becomes a symbolic token to a community, can extend the period of ‘Communitas’, and facilitate an effective community recovery decision-making process.

A united community will strengthen the potential for agreement on difficult disaster recovery issues and facilitate a sustained commitment between otherwise divergent parties. Building a mutual understanding between conflicted parties will reduce controversial engagements and increase efforts to resolve issues collaboratively with a shared understanding and respect. A community that maintains a sense of unity will enable community recovery decision-makers to be increasingly sensitized to the public concerns. A united community will begin to see the long-term recovery organization as a trusted and focal agent, elevating its status and maintaining its credibility and legitimacy within the community.

The net result will be an organization that can assist communities with the immediate evaluation of post-disaster conditions and needs; outreach efforts that will 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.

ISC is working with communities to ensure the equitable distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine. Vaccine Hesitancy is a significant factor contributing to low uptake in COVID-19 vaccinations and ISC aims to ensure that everyone can get vaccinated.

Vaccine Hesitancy is a behavior “Influenced by a lack of trust in the medical community, concerns about vaccine safety, efficacy, necessity or convenience and other issues related to vaccination” (Nabet, Gable, Eder, & Feemster, 2017).

These concerns are widely shared within Black and Latinx communities, and their problems are historical in nature. The impacts of past medical experience and overall treatment of Black and Latinx communities have led to the vaccine hesitancy seen today.

ISC is working to ensure that Black and Latinx communities are provided with the information they need to understand the importance of vaccinating against COVID-19.

Our efforts include vaccine education, equitable distribution, vaccination events targeting specific communities, and partnerships with organizations that promote equitable healthcare access. However, we cannot do it alone.

Local agencies and organizations also play a major role in promoting vaccines. Localities can host vaccine events and promote vaccination within targeted areas to ensure vaccine uptake in communities with the lowest vaccination rates.

To get back to “normal,” we all need to ensure that everyone has access to the COVID-19 vaccine. ISC is working to make this a reality and will continue to work diligently for healthcare distribution and ensuring access to the vaccine within all communities.

For over 25 years, I have had the honor to work with communities during their darkest days and helped them overcome the obstacles of disaster recovery. My passion in helping communities after disaster provided me with opportunities to work with leaders in public administration, emergency management, and other disciplines to identify those actions that are most important in spearheading disaster recovery success.

These important disaster recovery actions not only help to maximize vital Federal disaster assistance funding but also serve as a catalyst for rebuilding a resilient future.

Our team at ISC was honored to have Dr. Paul O’Malley, superintendent of schools for Butler School District 53 in Illinois, join us for a webinar to discuss how schools can look back on the past school year and ahead to the future as public and private schools systems continue to recover from the pandemic.

During this unprecedented pandemic, Dr. O’Malley continues to be instrumental in implementing proactive and innovative mitigation strategies to reduce the spread of COVID-19 in his schools. During this webinar, Dr. O’Malley talked about the challenge of balancing the need to offer a first-class educational experience while ensuring the safety and well-being of students, staff, and the community at large.

Two weeks ago, the world marked the 20th anniversary of September 11, 2001. While the devastation, pain, anger, and fear can feel just as powerful as they did that day, there are also opportunities to reflect and learn from these events.

In the decades since, stories of great bravery, determination, courage, and survival have emerged, highlighting the power and resiliency of the human spirit. Thousands of people banded together that day to help each other, often risking their own safety. Many of them, as we know, were first responders – some of whom made the ultimate sacrifice. But there are also stories of regular people stepping up to rescue survivors.

When the attacks began that day, it’s estimated that there were about 500,000 people in Lower Manhattan. When the second plane hit the South Tower, people began trying to leave Lower Manhattan en masse – but there were a number of barriers in their way. The rail system had halted service and roads were congested by people trying to leave the area, including cars that had been abandoned. People were left to travel on foot, in all directions. Many of them ended up at the water’s edge with nowhere to go.
And that’s where the ferry boat captains stepped in.

During a catastrophic event, individuals and small groups will engage in pro-social emergent behavior – they’ll launch search and rescue efforts, find ways to help, come together to organize resources, etc. On the organizational level there will be grass roots groups emerging to deal with the immediate need and lack of resources. Established organizations will also exhibit emergent behavior by showing some degree of adaptation in their activities, roles, and structure. All of these actors will become part of a new, dynamic, emergent network exhibiting both strengths (e.g., meeting emerging needs, filling gaps, providing the ability to adapt and react rapidly) and challenges (e.g., coordination with government). It is proportional to the size of the disaster.

On 9/11 the events unfolding were unprecedented, rapidly changing, and not immediately identified. As such, a great many people – like the ferry boat captains operating that day – stepped up to deal with the crisis.

As the ferry boat captains saw that people leaving Lower Manhattan were lining up at the river’s edge, chaos ensued as people tried to jump aboard the boats, threatening to overturn some of them, and even jumping into the river to escape the dust and debris from the Towers. The captains soon realized that they could help but they had to get organized. They began communicating with each other and the Coast Guard to get evacuees safely onboard their vessels and away from shore.

At 11 am, the Coast Guard issued a radio call that resulted in a “massive convergence of a flotilla of ferries, tugs, workboats, dinner cruise boats, and other assorted harbor craft” (Identifying, Leveraging, and Empowering the Emergent Behavior of Individuals and Groups when Catastrophe Strikes, FEMA [note: we’ll link to the report here]). That resulted in further organization, with captains relying on their existing communication to talk to each other, and the organized systems (the Coast Guard, harbor police, etc.) granting them permission to execute.

From the same FEMA report, it’s clear that the amazing rescues that happened at the water that day were the direct result of “regular” people coming together:
Boats from all across the horizon converged onto lower Manhattan. Boats made trips all day long, transporting evacuees from lower Manhattan to safety across the rivers. Some boats displayed hand-made signs indicating their destinations so that evacuees would know where to stand in waiting. As multiple boat operators worked out the details of picking up passengers, a landward support network developed, with waterfront workers and maritime personnel directing passengers to an appropriate area where they might find a boat to take them to a destination close to home or to where they might find other transport. Apart from the evacuation, a number of vessels remained in service for several days, providing hot meals, a place to rest, or shuttling supplies (Kendra and Wachtendorf, 2007).

Although the US Coast Guard did suggest that some tugs go to particular docks, no organization or official was in overall charge of the various emergent evacuation activities. Who went where, where evacuates were disembarked, or how long any vessel operated were decisions made independent of any authority.

The nature and characteristics of both individuals and groups exhibiting emergent behavior have been well documented. Understanding the types of people who may become involved after a catastrophe helps predict how, when, and where emergent groups and networks may manifest themselves. Individuals can emerge with the goal of supporting responders or help find loved ones. Emergent groups engage in new tasks, operate with a sense of urgency and function in response to constantly changing conditions. Sometimes these groups disband after their tasks are accomplished. Other times, they develop an ideology, a formal group, or become part of an officially sanctioned group.
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Emergent behavior is instrumental in facilitating positive outcomes and building resiliency through a united community. It is important to make early efforts involve emergent individual and group behaviors during disaster response operations. By doing so, emergency management officials will create trust, commitment, and unity with survivors and key community stakeholders. More importantly, it will create a healthy environment that welcomes emergent individual and group behaviors during the recovery phase.

The heroic story of the New York Ferry Boat Captains in response to 9/11 is just one of many stories of how the emergent behaviors of individuals and groups play a vital role in response to a disaster. In fact, although this phenomenon may not be coming recognized by disaster and emergency management practitioners, the research on this topic by social scientists dates back almost 60 years.

Whether it is the Cajun Navy’s response to Louisiana flooding, or Occupy Sandy’s relief efforts after Hurricane Katrina, or the use of Facebook groups to unite families after the Japan Tsunami, we continue to see the influence of emergent behaviors on disaster response and recovery operations and must incorporate this evidence-based knowledge in future emergency planning and preparedness efforts.

Saturday, October 23, 2021, was national Make a Difference Day and a number of team ISC members and their families showed up to help!

Jazmine Cureno, Consultant, spent Make a Difference Day volunteering with the Red Cross in her community in California. The event partnered with the local fire department and gas company to provide free smoke detector installations to homes located in vulnerable areas. The goal of this event is to prevent home fire fatalities by providing smoke alarms that will warn people of a fire hazard in their home. Jazmine’s team went into five homes and installed a total of 15 detectors.

Another ISC team in Houston, TX volunteered with the non-profit Attack Poverty. Attack Poverty’s mission is to “empower people to attack poverty in their life and community by strengthening under-resourced communities through spiritual growth, education, revitalization, and basic needs.” Before joining ISC, Tim Bell, Managing Director of Technology, worked for them as a Community Liaison and Project Manager just after Hurricane Harvey hit the Houston area to help hundreds of families recover and rebuild.

ISC team members Dina Burrell (along with her son Tommy Burrell the 3rd and his son Tommy Burrell the 4th), Joe Folh, and Tim Bell, assisted Attack Poverty with their efforts to repair or replace homes for the disadvantaged. Specifically, they were helping Mr. Flores. Mr. Flores is elderly, and his home had been damaged by storms. It was in such bad shape that it was actually sinking into the mud. Two months ago, Mr. Flores came down with COVID-19 and was hospitalized. He’s currently in rehab and recovering.

Mr. Flores’s home needed to be demolished and replaced. Habitat for Humanity provided the design and initial help building the foundation and framing. Then Attack Poverty took over to finish out the home.
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The ISC team was tasked with painting and leveling some of the soil around the new ramp and porch. It was a fun and rewarding day for all of them – and they are very proud of Tommy the 4th, fondly nicknamed “T4”. He has already asked Dina of he can come back again to help!

The stress of the disaster and managing the recovery process continues long after the event. Even after the initial three months of the emergency period, many organizations are learning that even a trip to the dentist seem more preferable than dealing with FEMA and all of their bureaucratic requirements.

The important thing to know is, that it isn’t too late to make corrective actions. In fact, it’s better to make these changes and improvements now before you get even further down the road to recovery. Too often, communities and organizations learn the hard way that these challenges and issues just compound themselves and grow at an exponential rate.

With that, here are 12 actions you can take to improve your disaster recovery progress after the emergency period.

12 Actions to Successfully Recover from Disaster After the Emergency Period