Building Community Disaster Resilience Requires a Process

Yesterday I participated in a session on building community disaster resilience. I provided brief comments as part of the session. My speaking notes are below.

I've decided that resilience has nothing to do with infrastructures and mitigation. It has everything to do with people and their choices. If you can get people aligned with and committed to disaster resilience everything else will fall into place.  

Thus I suggest characterizing resilience as, "For disaster resilience, the social is to the physical as three is to one." With a nod to Napoleon whose quote I have modified here. It is about the people and building a culture of resilience.

See my remarks below:

When you say community people think "city," in resilience you need to think regional. A region is one that shares a common population and resources.

There is a relationship between standards and compliance. When standards become compliance it means doing the absolute minimum possible.

There are plenty of challenges. I believe we are actually becoming less resilient due to technology and use of the Internet. It has allowed:

• Just-in-time delivery
• Elimination of warehouses and stocks of supplies and goods
• Lean manufacturing
• Globalization of supply chains that are subject to disruption
• For the sake of saving money we have wrung out all redundancy in an effort to eliminate duplication.

Building resilience is a process. It has to incorporate a coalition of the willing.

• People and organizations must feel the risks that are around them in the form of hazards.
• They must feel their vulnerability to those risks.
• They must internalize that those risks may impact them and their economic welfare.
• Reasonable actions to decrease risk may have some possibility of adoption.

You can’t force disaster resilience on people and organizations. They have to want it. Facilitated leadership is needed. This is an invitational process.

What we must do is work with those in communities who are willing to participate today, before the rest of the community is ready. Ideally you have: 

• A cross section of people and organizations, public, private and nonprofit, who are participating.
• Look for champions within different disciplines and sectors to represent that community and bring their expertise to the table.
• Need to identify the interdependencies between infrastructures and systems that might not be immediately identified and understood.
• Trust is a critical element of the above. 

Start with information sharing. Move from that to coordinating activities and projects. Establish partnerships where possible.

Finally, have a fully functioning collaboration of willing people contributing to the larger resiliency effort.

Only then will you have the necessary trust in place to establish standards.

Peck away at the effort over time. It won’t be done overnight. This is missionary work with winning people over one at a time. They bring their organizations along with them.

The end goal is to have a product that when others are ready and say, “What is it that we must do to become better prepared and more disaster resilient?” you have an answer for them. Take advantage of teachable moments provided by disasters in other places and at home. 

Unfortunately, most will not ask that question until right after the next big event that impacts them.

Too many times we document lessons observed and not lessons learned.