Arthur (Andy) Felts

A Community Sense of Place

April 20th, 2009 - Arthur (Andy) Felts  

CARRI is a team. From the very beginning we have “borrowed boldly” from any team member willing to contribute to the point that today we have very little memory of who had what thoughts and suggestions in the development of our ideas and processes. You can get some idea of the breadth of these team members from our web site.

Blogging is normally not a team sport. The CARRI team has quite a lot to say, however, and this Blog is one more way to give them an opportunity to say it. Today’s thoughts come from Dr. Andy Felts of the College of Charleston.

Andy writes:

“My wound is geography.” So Pat Conroy has his protagonist, Tom Wingo, begin The Prince of Tides. Wingo/Conroy then goes on to describe the beauty that defines what is called the South Carolina “Lowcountry,” a land of vast salt marshes, streams and rivers that twist in labyrinthine patterns as they wend their way to the ocean. Even from Charleston’s peninsula, you can see what Wingo described as the “quiet nation of oysters exposed on the brown flats at the low watermark.” The beauty of this rare place has left its imprint on many people.

When I first began working with John Plodinec and Robin White [other CARRI teammates] and we started talking about the idea of community resilience, I invoked this sentence and described the attachment of people to this area as a sort of “stickiness.” It seems that Charlestonians are simply determined to stay here—come earthquake, high water or war. read the entire article >

Warren Edwards

Resilient Homes are Key to Resilient Communities

April 15th, 2009 - Warren Edwards  

We believe that one of the most important things a community has to do to reestablish itself after a disaster (after saving lives and property to the greatest extent it can) is to get its people back to work. Productive enterprise, as much as any other activity of the community reestablishes the normal rhythms and fabric of the community. Getting all of the segments of the community back to work quickly begins to reconstitute the community’s economic base and prevents long term job loss because of population dislocation. A working community says “we’re back and we’re recovering.”

Key to getting back to work is having some place to live. A resilient community plans and prepares to get its people back into their homes as quickly as possible. People who get back into their own homes even under less than optimal conditions are much more ready to participate in the process of restarting the community.

A CARRI affiliate, The Resilient Home Program, is a coalition of the willing working to improve the life of homeowners following natural disasters. Combining the resources of the Savannah River National Laboratory, North Carolina State University, the US Army Corps of Engineers Construction Engineering Research Laboratory and Clemson University, the Resilient Home team is examining the complete spectrum of ways to get people back into their homes quickly following a disaster. These include: response – stabilizing the home and rendering it a safe interim shelter; rebuilding – rebuilding with available resources in a more durable manner than before the disaster; prevention – protecting the home from the short- and long-term effects of a disaster; and assessment – determining the extent of damage that occurred to the home in a quick and cost effective manner.

Getting people back into their homes is important. You can find more about the Resilient Home Program through a link on the CARRI web site, http://www.resilientus.org/.

Warren Edwards

Resilience Is A Growing Business

April 6th, 2009 - Warren Edwards  

Resilience is a growing business. The number of researchers and centers studying resilience in one way or another has blossomed over the past two years. The number of federal agencies with resilience initiatives or divisions working in resilience policy grows daily. All of these are worthwhile efforts and will clearly help the nation focus on the important task of ensuring that we can better recover from significant disturbances to the fabric of our society no matter the scale or cause. The more we know as the result of evidence-based research and the more that we create policy and procedures for multi-disciplined, cross-sectional response and recovery, the better America will be able to protect itself from large scale disruptions.

Unfortunately, most of the research efforts remain largely uncoordinated. While the numerous conferences, workshops and symposia serve an important function for sharing information, they tend toward examining focused aspects of resilience and do not shed light on the overall state of resilience research nor do they identify research gaps and requirements in a way useful to government, academic, or scientific organizations seeking to sponsor work in resilience.

Similarly there is no federal interagency process for resilience. Nothing better demonstrates this than an examination of the various federal agency definitions of resilience and even the different ways the definitions are expressed and applied within a single agency. Agencies are developing resilience plans and applying resilience resources with no common policy framework to ensure that these resources and organizational efforts are effective. read the entire article >