| “Often, this can be the first time this group of people is sitting in a room together when there isn’t an emergency.” | |
| Tracie Sempier, Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Consortium | |
The first step in creating communities that are resilient to natural hazards, such as hurricanes, is to assess strengths and weaknesses so that local leaders can take action to better prepare for a future event. Coastal resource managers in Mississippi and Alabama have developed an easy-to-use tool for Gulf Coast communities to examine how prepared they are for storms and storm recovery.
“This is a simple and inexpensive method of predicting how well a community will be functioning after a disaster,” says Tracie Sempier, the coastal storms outreach coordinator for the Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Consortium, who helped develop the tool for the Gulf of Mexico Alliance (GOMA).
The Coastal Community Resilience Index is an eight-page questionnaire that can be completed in one to three hours by a facilitated group of community leaders using readily available information. Asking mainly “yes” or “no” questions, the index covers six areas that need to be strong in order for communities to be able to bounce back after a disaster.
To ensure the tool’s effectiveness in diverse communities, it was extensively tested throughout the Gulf region. Managers in South Carolina and other areas are already looking to see if the index would be applicable in other regions—and for other natural hazards.
Extensive Evaluation
The idea for a Gulf-wide vulnerability assessment tool was born out of an informal needs assessment conducted in 2006 by the GOMA resilience team.
The index was developed by staff members at Louisiana Sea Grant and Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant with funding from the NOAA Coastal Storms Program and GOMA. The draft index was piloted in 16 communities across the Gulf before it was released early this year. “We wanted to get as diverse feedback as possible,” Sempier says.
Facilitator Training
The next step, Sempier says, was to train facilitators from around the Gulf to help communities complete the index and address weaknesses.
In February, 45 people attended the first of three regional trainings funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Gulf of Mexico Program and GOMA.
Each Gulf state had at least two people at the training. Those participating in the training included staff members from Sea Grant and extension programs, national estuary programs, and national estuarine research reserves.
“We wanted people who already have contacts with local communities and have knowledge that will help communities implement mitigation actions,” says Jody Thompson, the Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Consortium’s regional outreach coordinator for the index. “The intention is to not only help communities complete the index, but to help identify some next steps the community can take to address other hazards, such as impacts from climate change.”
A database is being kept of the communities that conduct an assessment and their mitigation efforts. Since February, assessments have been conducted in Alabama and Florida.
“So far, the resounding response has been that this works for them,” Thompson says.
Team Building
A community can request an assessment, but Thompson says most often, a facilitator will initiate an assessment.
The facilitator will then work with a community to determine the people who should be part of the assessment team. These can include emergency and floodplain managers, coastal managers, local officials, such as the mayor and planning and public works directors, transportation officials, and even nonprofits and area business leaders.
Creating Scenarios
Once assembled, the group works together to complete a paper-based version of the index.
The first step is for the team to create a hazard scenario. “We usually have them start with a storm that they remember,” Sempier says. “We then ask them to create a future storm that would be 50 percent worse than what they have seen.”
Imagining something worse than Katrina is “pretty challenging for the folks who went through that storm, so we just ask them, ‘what would something worse look like?’” she says.
Anticipating Impacts
Using the created scenario, the assessment team then answers questions about potential impacts in six areas—critical facilities and infrastructure, transportation, community plans and agreements, mitigation measures, business plans, and social systems.
“A lot of the effectiveness of the tool is the process they go through,” Sempier says. “Often, this can be the first time this group of people is sitting in a room together when there isn’t an emergency.”
At the end of each section, scores are added up that equate to low, medium, or high. The facilitator then helps lead a discussion about what the community can do to bring up lower scores. Thompson notes that the scores are “intended to guide the discussion. They are not intended for comparison between communities.”
Building Strength
The session ends with the facilitator providing links to resources and information that match up with the community’s needs.
A supplementary tool to help communities assess their resilience is an interactive online mapping tool developed by the NOAA Coastal Services Center that helps identify critical facilities and roads within a county or city flood zone. The map can be accessed at www.csc.noaa.gov/criticalfacilities/.
Facilitators will follow up with communities after a year to complete a second assessment and determine how well the communities are working to address weaker areas. “We’re hoping the follow-up assessments will help us figure out needs so that we can push additional resources to them,” Sempier says.
Both Sempier and Thompson think the tool would easily translate to other states and regions. Both North and South Carolina Sea Grant programs have already expressed interest in adapting the index, and the Extension Disaster Education Network (EDEN) is interested in adapting the index for inland areas and for other natural hazards.
“We are so willing to share all that we’ve done and our experiences with this,” Sempier says. “We are eager for other communities to try it.”
To view the Community Resilience Index and related support tools, go to www.masgc.org/ri/. For more information, you may contact Tracie Sempier at (228) 818-8829 or tracie.sempier@usm.edu, or Jody Thompson at (251) 438-5690 or jody.thompson@auburn.edu.
