Community Resilience Planning Guide for Buildings and Infrastructure Systems

This is a great example of using available literature to guide your planning efforts on a regional basis. Michael Newman, from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), shared the information below. Too many times the efforts of researchers and the academic community have been ignored. This fact is highlighted by the Recovery Diva in her post about how EM Research Literature -- Hardly Ever Read or Used blog posting.

See what NIST highlights below on a direct application of research and literature:


"The Boulder County Collaborative, a partnership of Boulder County, Colorado, communities formed in response to the catastrophic floods that struck the region in September 2013, has used the National Institute of Standards and Technology Community Resilience Planning Guide for Buildings and Infrastructure Systems to develop and adopt its own resilience design performance standard for community facilities and infrastructure systems. This marks one of the first times that the strategies and procedures in the NIST guide have been followed on a large community scale.

The new Boulder County standard will allow the cities and towns within the collaborative (Boulder, Lafayette, Longmont, Louisville, Jamestown, Lyons and Nederland) to establish long-term “time-to-recovery” goals for all hazards that could affect the county’s building clusters and the infrastructure systems (energy, water, bridges, culverts, etc.) that support them.

The NIST guide, which offers communities a six-step process to strengthen planning for improving community resilience, stresses the need to involve all stakeholders, including vulnerable populations. It provides a practical and flexible approach to help communities improve their resilience by setting priorities and allocating resources to manage risks for their prevailing hazards."

More information on the Boulder collaborative can be found at this link. And additional information about the NIST Community Resilience Program can be found at NIST Community Resilience Program.