Economic Development Recovery and Resiliency Playbook - Flipbook - Page 78
• Map Your Neighborhood (MYN) and Citizens Organized to Prepare for Emergencies (COPE)96 — Programs like these
encourage community preparedness in a specific neighborhood by bringing neighbors together to plan for how they
can support one another during and afer a disaster. This includes identifying the roles and responsibilities of residents,
stockpiling emergency supplies, identifying those who may need extra assistance, and determining ways to share
information and resources. This will aid the neighborhood in minimizing fatalities during a disaster, having a more
streamlined recovery process, and increasing overall resiliency to disasters.
• Great ShakeOut97 — Campaigns like the Great ShakeOut prepare a community for a very specific hazard by encouraging
them to practice what they should do when the disaster occurs, which lessens the impact of the disaster and reduces
injuries and fatalities; for example, people practice how to “drop, cover, and hold on” to protect themselves during an
earthquake.
• Know Your Alerts — There are ofen excellent resources that a community can use to support their disaster resiliency, but
it is sometimes challenging to ensure they are aware of these resources and how to access them. The City of Santa Rosa
addressed this challenge through its Know Your Alerts98 campaign to educate the community on the various alert and
warning tools used to notify them in an emergency or disaster. It summarizes each of the alerts and warning tools, how
they function, when they are used, and what the community has to do to access the information.
Natural and cultural heritage considerations. Many academic studies address the important roles that natural and cultural
heritage play in community resiliency. New Orleans, Louisiana, ofers an example of how restoring the customs unique to that
community helped build community resiliency and assisted in economic recovery from Hurricane Katrina in 2005. As discussed
in the report Learning from Disaster: Building City Resilience through Cultural Heritage in New Orleans,99 culture accelerates
resilience by strengthening the social capital of a community. Investing in the heritage of a community and developing targeted
strategies to mitigate the impact of a disaster can advance a range of resilience-building benefits.
These benefits include social cohesion and rootedness, economic development, and a sense of belonging, among others. As
the report discusses, in New Orleans, eforts not only focused on recovering the geographic assets within the city, but also on
ensuring that what it means to be a resident of New Orleans was restored as well. While this study provides an excellent example
of focusing on natural and cultural heritage as part of recovery, it is not a perfect example due to noted racial injustices that
happened during Hurricane Katrina and afer, which hindered the recovery process. Nevertheless, focusing on the natural and
cultural heritage of a community during disaster preparedness planning can improve the community’s economic resiliency to
future disasters. It can also aid in restoring revenue-generating services to the community.
Economic recovery considerations. In the afermath of a disaster, critical economic decisions need to be made that will
determine the success of the community’s recovery. In communities that are repeatedly impacted by disaster, it may be
necessary to make changes to the community design to prevent future repetitive loss. This could include altering the land use
and zoning practices in a community as they recover from a disaster. Communities may also prevent people from rebuilding
in areas with repetitive losses through buyout programs, such as FEMA’s Severe Repetitive Loss grant program100 that provides
funding to reduce or eliminate the long-term risk of flood damage under the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP).
In some cases, the disaster’s impact is so significant that it is not economically feasible to build the community back the way it
was, which forces the community to adapt to a “new normal.” Catastrophic-level disaster planning describes this phenomenon
as occurring when the level of damage to a community is so severe that it no longer resembles the community it was predisaster. This presents challenges but also opportunities during the recovery process to rebuild the community better than it
was before. All the elements addressed in this chapter need to be factored into the planning for a “new normal,” especially the
impact it has on the members of the community or neighboring communities.
96
https://socoemergency.org/get-ready/neighborhood-programs/
https://www.shakeout.org/
98
https://srcity.org/3123/Know-Your-Alerts
99
https://publications.iadb.org/en/learning-disaster-building-city-resilience-through-cultural-heritage-new-orleans
100
https://www.fema.gov/pdf/nfip/manual201205/content/20_srl.pdf
97
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CALED | Economic Development Recovery and Resiliency Playbook
