Warren Edwards

An Ideal Federal Program

January 18th, 2012 - Warren Edwards  

My colleague, John Plodinec, recently suggested that resilience has become a movement (CARRI Blog, “Resilience – One Movement, Many Voices,” December 19, 2011). If so, there is no better example of the movement beginning to take hold in some parts of the federal government than the publication in December of FEMA’s Whole Community Approach to Emergency Management” (www.fema.gov/about/wholecommunity.shtm). Not only does it mark a significant, practical milestone in the federal government’s acceptance of resilience as a policy but it is also the example of an ideal federal program for a new era.

By formulating the Whole Community Approach, FEMA has created a meaningful shift in the doctrine of national emergency response. FEMA has recognized according to Administrator Fugate that, “a government centric approach to emergency management will not be enough to meet the challenges posed by a catastrophic incident. That is why we must fully engage our entire societal capacity.” This movement from government as the focal point for meeting the nation’s challenges to the mobilization of American society to find new, innovative and much more collaborative ways to solve societal problems is a tremendous step forward for any federal agency. In the area of making resilience practical, FEMA is clearly in the lead.

FEMA has two critical roles in national emergency management. It is the responder of last resort. It brings the power of the federal government to situations where local, state and regional capabilities are not sufficient to meet the crisis. This is the way that the agency is most often viewed and the way it operates much of the time. But FEMA also has an equally critical role to facilitate, encourage, provide expert knowledge and set goals and standards for local and state emergency managers. The Whole Community Approach acknowledges that second role in a very helpful but non-intrusive way. . It does not prescribe, set unrealistic national goals or try to force its ideas into a single inflexible template. It does not provide funding that may not be sustainable and can never reach all communities. Instead it offers core principles, key themes and pathways around which communities may organize, assess, plan and take action to solve their own challenges. It exemplifies the ideal federal program – leveraging the power of the federal government to assist communities in identifying challenges, taking ownership and finding local solutions.

By itself, FEMA cannot foster truly resilient American communities. True resilience in communities encompasses all aspects of community life. Resilient American communities are resilient in their economy, their social capital and their various infrastructures. This standard of resilience is well beyond FEMA’s charter.

In the federal government, FEMA has taken the lead. It has taken the first practical steps to turn rhetoric into reality; to give the movement a real, useful shove forward. Other federal departments and agencies need to think about creating their own “ideal” federal programs.

John Plodinec

A Path to Economic Recovery and Resilience

November 10th, 2011 - John Plodinec  

Just over a year ago, I wrote about what a more resilient economy might look like (see Recovering from the Great Recession – What Might a More Resilient Economy Look Like?). I talked about a value-driven rather than a consumer driven economy. That post begged the question, though – how do we get there from here? In the next few paragraphs, I’ll try to outline an answer to that.

Before I do, however, my disclaimer. I am clearly not an economist (I’m not sure that’s a disqualification, since the economists are all over the map on how to recover!). Further, politicians will be making the most crucial economic decisions over the next few months, and they are clearly not economists (not to mention their roles in getting us into this mess in the first place).

Our national economy is in what economists call a liquidity trap. In a liquidity trap, there is relatively little investment because those with money are very risk averse. Consumers don’t spend, businesses don’t hire, and everyone looks at the economic glass as half empty. And that’s what we’re seeing right now – individuals and businesses are paying off their debts, individual debt is at levels not seen since the early 1990’s; those who can are saving at rates not seen since the 1970’s; and businesses are sitting on their cash (and not borrowing) rather than investing in new products and jobs.

The two antipodes of the debate over how to fix our economy – escape the trap – are characterized by the “Spend, Baby, Spend” school and the Tea Party’s call for government austerity. The Spend, Baby, Spend school is epitomized by economists such as Paul Krugman, who vehemently believe that our federal government should be spending more, much more, to spur demand for goods and services. This group points to our nation’s crumbling infrastructure as a place where investment would create jobs, creating demand, and facilitating economic recovery. At its core, this view sees lack of demand for goods and services as the problem that needs to be addressed.

The Tea Party-ers, on the other hand, see the size of our government as the core problem. In this view, a smaller government, with fewer regulations and lower taxes, would put money back into people’s hands to spend on goods and services, thus jump starting the economy.

You’ll notice, however, that neither view really addresses the core problem – how we get out of the liquidity trap. Or, said a little differently, how do we help businesses, in particular, become less risk averse so that they will invest the cash they are now sitting on in new equipment or new jobs. Framed this way, it seems that government spending per se is somewhat irrelevant to getting out of the trap. Recovery will come only when people have confidence once again that there is a secure future. That’s not to say that government spending is unimportant, just that stimulus spending doesn’t really seem to be the right answer.

If this is true, then what should government do to put us on the road to a resilient economy? Simply put, governments should do those things that will remove uncertainty from people’s minds and those things that will make people more confident in their futures. In this light, it seems that we need to take some of the medicines prescribed by both schools of thought to help bring us out of our national malaise.

We need to recognize that the current pace of regulation creation is creating great uncertainties for businesses and individuals. In the first two years of the present administration in Washington, we created more regulations than we did in eight years of the previous administration. Further, whether we like it or not, small businesses are already telling us they won’t be hiring in the near term because of the possible impacts of health insurance reform (and those impacts won’t be fully known until 2014 at the earliest!).

We also need to recognize that our national debt is unsustainable – if we continue on our present path, we as individuals eventually will end up paying exorbitant amounts in taxes to support intolerably high interest rates to service both our national and personal debt. We as individuals or investors or business owners recognize this and are saving at almost unprecedented rates to provide our own safety nets for ourselves.

However, we also have to recognize that the government must continue to make investments that will help us to have a more certain future. We must invest in our infrastructure – not to stimulate spending but to ensure that we can continue to move goods, people, and information where they are needed. If we don’t, we will spend far more to respond to and recover from the disasters that will expose our infrastructure’s fragility.

We also need to heed the lessons we have already learned about what went wrong and put regulations in place that address the root causes of those problems. The current regulatory framework for the financial industry has much that is wrong with it; recently passed legislation is likely to drive smaller community banks – who in the main were not at fault in getting us into this trap – out of business. This will make it more difficult for entrepreneurs and small businesses to get the capital they need to start up or expand their businesses, i.e., will make our economy even less resilient. Meanwhile, many of the more speculative financial sectors remain unregulated even though they were prime actors in our economic tragedy (and are doing nothing to help us recover).

We must provide a safety net to those of our citizens with special needs. Not because of their vulnerability but as an investment in their future and in ours. The safety net should be focused on outcomes – for example, living healthier and more productive lives – rather than means, for example insurance. Just as with our physical infrastructure, if we don’t make these kinds of investments we will spend far more to respond to and recover from the human tragedies that will result.

I don’t think it requires a rocket scientist (or a Ph.D. economist!) to see a path to recovery. It only requires a clear recognition of where we are as a nation, and then some common sense actions to move to where we need to be. We have to cut government spending and the pace of regulation, but we also need to invest in ourselves and take actions to prevent us from falling in the same trap again. At its core, we have to restore our confidence in ourselves if we are to recover. Neither school of thought, neither political party, can or will be successful unless they grasp this simple truth – this is the only path to economic recovery and greater national resilience.

John Plodinec

Resilience for Dummies: What is Community Resilience

November 8th, 2011 - John Plodinec  

I read a lot – if I don’t have a newspaper or a magazine or a journal article to read, I’ll read cereal boxes. Or I’ll get on the internet and find something there. In doing this, I’ve discovered a new phenomenon – the proliferation of books “X for Dummies” – Puppies for Dummies, Stained Glass for Dummies, Relationships for Dummies. All designed to help the neophyte learn enough to at least be unafraid of the subject and willing to take basic actions. For those like me, whose ignorance is legion, there is even a website – dummies.com – where you can find basic help on almost any topic.

So, over the next few months, I’m going to be writing Community Resilience for Dummies – detailing what this neophyte has learned about community resilience in a way that I hope others can use. As we in CARRI have talked to people about resilience it has become clear that – like sustainability – resilience is a word in danger of losing its meaning because it is being used by so many in so many different ways. So I’ll start by talking about what community resilience is.

As do so many others, we at CARRI have our own definition of resilience:

A community’s ability to anticipate risk, limit impact, and bounce back rapidly through adaptation, evolution, and growth in the face of turbulent change.

In fact, on the CARRI website, you’ll find a document that compares and contrasts many of the definitions.

Most people who are using the term resilience are doing so in a crisis context – a crisis being anything that strains the community’s resources. While resilience may be an inherent trait of a community, its resilience is only seen in how well it recovers from the crisis. As a community evolves over time, it may become more or less resilient. Thus, in these parlous economic times, most communities have become less resilient toward natural disasters or human-induced crises due to dwindling resources – both human and financial. Those communities that have maintained their same level of resilience (and the few that have enhanced it) have generally done so by finding ways to adapt to the financial crisis they face.

Adaptation is the key to resilience – it’s the ability to turn disaster into opportunity; to create social capital to augment finance; to form partnerships to replace or repair needed infrastructure when no one entity has enough money to fund projects. Greenburg, KS’ response to the devastating tornado that hit the town is an example. Prior to the 2007 storm, the town was in danger of dying. It used the opportunity provided by the devastation to attempt to create a different and more sustainable Greensburg.

Mayor Tom Tait’s (Anaheim CA) “Hi, Neighbor” campaign is an example. It recognizes that in the event of an earthquake, one’s neighbors are the real first responders, and should be the enduring support structure for individuals and families. The campaign seeks to build up the “social capital” of Anaheim’s neighborhoods.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey provides another example. It has formed a public-private partnership to fund and operate a replacement for the Goethals Bridge that links New York and New Jersey. This type of arrangement would have been unheard of even five years ago; now, it represents a very innovative way for a community to do what’s necessary with less.

Thus, while resilience is not a uniquely American trait, this ability to make lemonade when you’re handed lemons is embedded in the American spirit. And it doesn’t take a dummy to see that our resilience is being tested as never before. In the next post in this series, I’ll begin looking at what makes up community resilience – starting with leadership.

John Plodinec

Searching for Resilience: A Walk in the Woods

October 20th, 2011 - John Plodinec  

I read an interesting article recently that crystallized several other thoughts for me. The paper – with the somewhat dry title of Resilience as Resource-based Design of Anticipated Situations (www.resilience-engineering-asso.org/ACTES/2011/Papers/13.pdf) – is couched in the language of safety and risk, but takes a very different approach to identifying resilience than I’ve seen before.

The authors start by talking about traditional safety and risk management approaches. To paraphrase the authors, these approaches have inherent limitations:

• They are based on analysis of failures. They do not reflect either that risks can emerge from “normal” situations, or that some of the greatest risks may actually be unanticipated surprises.
• They seek to mitigate without considering either the real gap between intended actions and real capabilities, or that coping with crises is dependent on “the strategies, initiatives, tinkering and ingenuity brought by individual and collective skills in real time.

The application of these to emergency management seems straightforward and very appropriate.

The authors then go on to quote a definition of resilience by Hollnagel:

The intrinsic ability of a system to adjust its functioning prior to, during, or following changes and disturbances, so that it can sustain required operations under both expected and unexpected conditions.

I’m not a big fan of defining resilience – too many have spent too much time in what becomes an unproductive exercise in navel contemplation – but the authors put legs under this one by trying to determine how anesthesiologists make decisions both in routine cases and in complex ones. Their conclusions are worth noting because they seem to apply so well to the relationship between the federal government and local community leadership.

• Resilience – in addition to vulnerability assessment – involves consideration of local resources and capabilities.
• Decisions are designed to empower those coping with crisis, and not to control them.
• Organizations should be structured so that local standard practices can be shared.

While some may argue about the conclusions, what was striking to me is the very different way of trying to find resilience. Most of the resilience literature focuses either on vulnerability or on case studies of past disasters. What the authors have done is look at behavior – both in routine and unexpected situations – to try to find clues to resilient behavior.

Thus, if we are trying to judge the resilience of a tree to a high wind, we may walk through the woods looking at one that has fallen and try to judge the cause and how to prevent it from falling. Or, as the authors have done, we can study the forest, during both calm days and those with brisk winds, and see how each tree adapts in its own context.

As we were putting the Community Resilience System (CRS) together, one of the strongest sentiments expressed by our Community Leaders Group was that the CRS had to improve normal operations as well as easing the transition to a new normal. This paper not only agrees with that, but shows that understanding how the community functions in normal conditions is a key to understanding its resilience to a crisis.

In other words, watching how trees bend and sway in the wind can often tell us more about the resilience of trees than exhaustively researching why one fell.

Arthur (Andy) Felts

Joplin, Missouri: An encouraging story of resilience

August 18th, 2011 - Arthur (Andy) Felts  

One of the things that leaders who have reflectively seen their communities through disasters have consistently said is that people want to feel like life is getting back to normal. It makes sense. Immediately after a disaster there is often a sense of euphoria—people are glad that loved ones and neighbors have survived unharmed. For all, whether they have suffered a loss or not, it is in the human spirit to rise to the occasion.

But then the grind of recovery comes. I remember in Charleston seeing debris truck after debris truck after debris truck for several months. I remember getting several flat tires from roofing nails that were blown off roofs.

I remember the task of cleaning up my office building after it took several inches of surge water. Many thought the College of Charleston should shut down for the semester. But President Harry Lightsey defied those faculty and staff, and the College reopened a mere week and one-half after Hugo. The College’s buildings were largely ok—some with water damage and blown out windows and others with stripped roofs. Getting the College of Charleston kids back on the city’s streets was a remarkably fresh breath of normalcy.

In yesterday’s (August 17th, 2011) New York Times, there was a remarkable story. I quote the reporter, A.G. Sulzberger in the story:

JOPLIN, Mo. — When the red brick schools here were reduced to rubble by a deadly tornado three months ago, local leaders announced a goal that seemed like a longshot: the new school year would start on time.

But on Wednesday the city made good on its promise, and students reunited for the first day of school, marking the end of a difficult summer as they streamed excitedly into makeshift facilities that replaced the 10 schools damaged or destroyed by the tornado on May 22.

As they exchanged standard so-good-to-see-you-again greetings — the boys slapping hands, the girls embracing — juniors and seniors swapped schedules and marveled at the modern touches of their new high school, built in just 55 days inside a recently vacant department store at the back of a shopping mall. Outside, residents of a local retirement home lined the streets to welcome them.

 What could make life seem more normal than kids going back to school in the fall? With effective leadership, Joplin was able to achieve a “longshot.” Going for a reopening of schools likely took some priority over other things that needed tending, but such are the choices we have to make in planning recovery.

It is a remarkable story that gives me heart in the ability of communities to be resilient. Joplin has given us all a clear message about what is important in being resilient, and we should both take heed and applaud them. A difficult summer notwithstanding, the community has likely turned the recovery corner.

Arthur (Andy) Felts

Social Capital: A necessary but not sufficicent condition for a resilient recovery

July 8th, 2011 - Arthur (Andy) Felts  

There is a growing (and welcome) recognition amongst many disaster recovery researchers on the importance of social capital in rapid and equitable recovery. This is welcome because all too often disaster mitigation and recovery strategies have ignored this important dimension of our lives.

Welcome as well is a recognition that some actions taken during emergency response may actually erode social capital. Before Hurricane Hugo, in the Charleston region, there was one vehicle access point to Sullivan’s Island and the Isle of Palms. That was the Sawyer Bridge—a drawbridge that was literally spun off its balance point by Hugo’s winds.

Residents of Sullivan’s Island and the Isle of Palms were denied boat access to the island by National Guardsmen. The argument was the islands were overrun with snakes (an unlikely event since a surge would have swept them inland) and that structures were unstable and dangerous. The latter point is valid, but in many other areas throughout the region that actually were harder hit that the two islands, residents could not be stopped from entering because they had multiple points of access. I walked down King Street in downtown Charleston two days after the Hurricane when the street was littered with broken glass and everything from pieces of metal roofs to downed street lights.

From a risk analysis standpoint, the issue was one of someone stepping on a nail or getting cut from a sharp object. I do not question the good intentions of emergency managers here—rather only whether or not they factored social capital into their decision. Some individuals had a chance to sift through their wrecked homes and salvage things that were personally valuable to them. After several days of rain and weeks of being denied access, much of what they could have recovered was no longer recoverable.

Social capital is about holding on to a sense of place and that includes connections to the past. This is why it should be included in our analysis of community resilience.

But at the same time, by vaulting social capital to the forefront, I wonder if there is too much of a backlash.

In the social sciences, we speak of “necessary” and “sufficient” conditions for something to happen. A sufficient condition is one that in and of itself is enough to cause something to happen. A necessary condition is just that, but not sufficient to cause something to happen. Water in the atmosphere is necessary for rain, but not sufficient in and of itself. It needs other factors—temperature, etc. to make rain occur.

In terms of resilience, we should see social capital as necessary. Absent strong bonds to community and place, both created by social capital, community resilience will be seriously degraded. But social capital is not sufficient in and of itself to create community resilience.

Aside from social capital, communities need access to resources for effective and efficient recovery. Resources can come in many forms—help from outside volunteers, insurance, donations, government aid, savings accounts, etc. But these are not sufficient for recovery absent a resolve on the part of community members to stay and rebuild.

In addition, a community whose infrastructure is in bad shape before a disaster will have recovery hindered no matter how much social capital they have.

Recovery is about time in a very important way—how quickly a community can rebound from a disaster. Strong reserves of social capital are necessary, but so are access to resources. So is ensuring that a community’s infrastructure is maintained. There are a lot of necessary parts of recovery. None, alone, are sufficient.

John Plodinec

Community Resilience and the Problem of Scale or There are Horses for Courses

July 7th, 2011 - John Plodinec  

In March, I had the pleasure of attending the Resilience 2011 conference where Brian Walker gave an excellent talk that got me thinking about community resilience and the problem of “scale.”  

If we think of a community in terms of a hierarchy of size or inclusiveness (individuals < families < neighborhood < community < state < country), we can see that a crisis can occur at any one of these levels.  If I’m having serious trouble with my kids, which is not a national crisis,  it’s up to me and my family to resolve it.  Conversely, the national debt is a national problem – I can’t solve it at my level (no matter how much I’d like to!).

Walker points out that in eco-systems we tend to focus on the scale of the problem but pay insufficient attention to the levels above and below.  Conversely in communities, we too often ignore the scale of the problem and waste precious resources by trying to solve problems at the wrong scale.  Thus, flooding is best controlled at the community level (or perhaps at an even higher level).  However, I must decide how and where to rebuild if a flood has destroyed my home. 

Poverty provides a good illustration of the problem of scale.  While it is clearly in a community’s (and a country’s) best interest to eradicate poverty, we must recognize that being poor is an individual and family condition – it has to be solved at that level.  The ineffectiveness of most of our federal poverty programs over the last forty years seems to indicate that we’ve been trying to solve the problem at the wrong level.  The relative success of the welfare reform enacted in the Clinton era implies that the proper role for higher levels in problems such as this is to facilitate problem solving at the appropriate scale either through providing resources or by removing barriers.

The myriad of urban renewal initiatives undertaken by our major cities provide more examples.  These efforts attempted to fix blighted neighborhoods by tearing them down and building anew, i.e., imposing a solution from above.  In most cases, this resulted in increases in crime, AIDS and other anti-social behavior with no real improvement (except cosmetic, and that only temporarily) in the neighborhoods themselves.  Initiatives that have focused on solving this problem at the neighborhood level have had much greater success (e.g., David Gershon’s work in Philadelphia).     

For me, these thoughts on the problem of scale thus resolve themselves into thoughts on setting appropriate goals.  Too often, we have seen initiatives started with much fanfare that ultimately failed because their goals did not reflect the scale of the problems they were to solve.  We should not try to “end poverty” but rather help people to avoid or quickly get out of being poor.  We should not attempt “urban renewal” but rather help neighborhoods make themselves safer, cleaner, prouder.  We should worry less about “health care” and more about living healthier lives.  In other words, don’t give out fishes; make fishing poles available and make sure there is someone in the community who is willing to teach how to fish – matching the scale of the solution to the scale of the problem is a hallmark of a resilient community.

John Plodinec

The Seven Ingredients of Community Resilience

June 29th, 2011 - John Plodinec  

Last week I read an interesting article by Karen Reivich on the resilience of children. I was struck by how relevant her seven ingredients were to communities.  So, with apologies to her for my modifications – the Seven Ingredients of Community Resilience. 

The first ingredient is trust.  For children, this means being aware of their emotions and being able to share them with people they trust.  For communities, it is building trust so that everyone can speak honestly and openly about their values, their hopes, their concerns and their community.

The second ingredient is impulse control.  Resilient children have developed a “stop and think” mechanism that helps them overcome the urge to act on their impulses. (Some of us are still working on that!)  Resilient communities recognize that, after a disaster, there is a tremendous urge to get back to normal life quickly.  Thus, these communities develop a vision and goals and sometimes even an action plan prior to a disaster to guide the thousands of individual actions that their members will take after it occurs.

Resilient children and resilient communities both have “realistic optimism.”  They are able to recognize that things are less than perfect, but nevertheless have an upbeat belief that things will get better.  For both children and communities, this optimism breeds health, effectiveness, and the ability to look at things honestly – what Nikos Kazantzakis calls “staring into the abyss.”

Closely allied with realistic optimism is the fourth ingredient – self-confidence.  Both resilient children and communities are aware of their strengths and of their ability to use them.  They both recognize that they can not only cope with adversity but can effect change as well.

The next ingredient is empathy – the ability to make meaningful connections with others.  Anyone who has followed the work of Rick Weil looking at recovery after Katrina recognizes that community connections – both the strong ones inside the community and the weaker ones to the outside world – may be even more important for recovery than material resources.

Just as realistic optimism and self-confidence are closely aligned, so are the last to ingredients – reaching out and flexible thinking.  By reaching out, Reivich means a willingness to try new things.  For communities, this implies an openness to innovative approaches to solve wicked problems.  Flexible thinking is the ability to look at things from different perspectives.  For communities this implies not only a willingness to consider new ideas, but an innate interest in getting the whole picture, not just that from the leader’s perch.

Mix these ingredients with a generous amount of community involvement and bake in the passion of people who care about their community.  All in all, a good recipe for a resilient community.

Arthur (Andy) Felts

Where are the Feds?

June 22nd, 2011 - Arthur (Andy) Felts  

It seems virtually certain that the next federal budget will have significant cuts to Community Development Block Grants, commonly referred to as “CDBG.” Some have called for the elimination of the program, arguing the federal government can no longer afford it.

Created in 1974, CDBG has given local governments throughout the US Billions of discretionary dollars that the communities have used primarily to improve infrastructure. Money could be used, for example, to do curbing and guttering in a low-income area or to provide beautification projects for blighted downtowns or improve the storm readiness of housing. As a block grant, the money could be used in an array of projects contributing to community development.

Over the thirty-five years plus that the feds have given CDBG grants, communities have come to rely heavily on the resources for infrastructure improvement. But with the federal government in the midst of suffering the worst budget woes in its history, it is all too tempting to cut programs that do not directly impact its own activities.

Why do I write this for a CARRI blog? There are two reasons.

First, and perhaps most importantly, CARRI has always taken the position that in the event of a disaster, communities will likely be more on their own than they think they will be.

After the recent tornado onslaught in Mississippi, some residents who accepted FEMA trailers were distressed to find out their community zoning laws banned new trailers. This was for good reason. Trailers don’t perform well in high wind. So, being on your own can also means that you may not get what you want or need. After Hugo, Charleston was inundated with donated clothing. There was truckload after truckload of winter garments that came in—at a time when the temperature was hovering in the 90s.

Researchers have consistently shown that the expectation of government aid exceeds what can or will be done. Most may remember the painted sign on a New Orleans home after Katrina that asked plaintively, “Where’s FEMA?” The good news is that FEMA was there. The bad news is that FEMA was there in a way that could never hope to meet expectations.

Second, given the state of the federal government’s budget, it is unlikely the money that locals have come to rely on for infrastructure improvement will ever be restored. Communities will no doubt not take up the slack by raising taxes, so the rate of crumbling of our infrastructure will accelerate.

Resilient communities cannot spin yarn into gold. But they can and should plan on recovering from disasters by using what little yarn they have in strategic ways that are thought out in advance. They can also be clear on how much they can actually get from outside governments and volunteer organizations. The CARRI Community Resilience System (CRS) can help them do that and point the way to how they can plan to recover from inevitable disasters.

Arthur (Andy) Felts

Lessons Learned

June 6th, 2011 - Arthur (Andy) Felts  

As Joplin, MO begins the gruesome task of turning from disaster response to recovery, there will be undoubtedly a lot of writing about lessons learned.

We at CARRI have always held that sometimes, for good reasons, emergency managers have taken actions that delay recovery. One such instance we discover is that those who know/think they lost loved ones were not being given access to their bodies.

The doctors and morticians were being careful, I know. But in the midst of being careful, they were preventing people from having closure and moving on. Thankfully, they revised their way of dealing with grieving relatives. Rather than rely on DNA testing, they decided to allow people to identify relatives by a distinguishing mark or feature, such as a tattoo. A good and wise move.

DNA testing could have taken days/weeks. In the meantime, the painful process of recovery and healing would be stalled for many as they awaited confirmation when all it would have taken is describing something distinctive—guess I’d be the guy with the big belly! Remember, humor, even in disaster is important.

But now the questions—all worthy of research and recounting—about recovery will come forth:

Did Joplin have a debris management plan in place? How many small businesses had business continuity plans in place? How about the destroyed hospital, did it have a business continuity plan?

Answers to these, and many other ones are exactly what CARRI is working on to help communities self-assess their resilience. Timing everything in this case. Too bad Joplin could not have been a ‘test’ CARRI community.

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