Blended

Create a Post-Disaster Recovery Plan

Using data for real coastal communities, students will identify infrastructure and social vulnerability characteristics in areas affected by tsunami or storm surge, consider response and recovery needs, and develop rebuilding strategies and plans for future events.

Objectives:

• Gain an understanding of the disaster management cycle and its application.
• Identify and compare policy options for preparing for and responding to immediate coastal hazards such as tsunami and hurricane storm surge.
• Develop a post-disaster recovery plan for a specific place using a menu of policy options.

Note: You will need to download the worksheet to complete and submit your assignment to be graded.

Files

Download the Worksheet (Microsoft Word 2007 (.docx) 23kB Sep7 16)

Summative Assessment Rubric (Microsoft Word 2007 (.docx) 19kB Sep7 16)

Submitting your Assignment

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Assignment

Creating a post-disaster recovery plan is an important task for communities or governments during the mitigation phase of the emergency management cycle. In order to create the plan, it is necessary to hold a post-disaster recovery planning forum. In this activity, you will learn the steps of creating a post-disaster recovery plan. This activity is primarily based on the guidebook for creating a post-disaster recovery planning forum published online by the University of Oregon's Community Service Center.

Before introducing the activity, let us refresh the goals of the post-disaster recovery plan. A post-disaster recovery plan helps us understand the priorities for recovery activities, establish partnerships with stakeholders before the disaster happens, identify internal and external resources, and develop and implement pre-disaster mitigation activities. In addition, a post-disaster recovery plan identifies existing policies, plans, and strategies that are important for mitigation or recovery activities.

It is also important to recognize that the plan can be applied to various geographic scales – that is, community, city, county, state, national, and international scales. Identifying the scales before making the plan helps participants clearly understand the geographic regions that the plan applies to.

In this activity, let us assume that we are developing a post-disaster recovery plan for Sarasota County, Florida. Located in southwestern Florida, Sarasota County faces the threat of storm surge and other kinds of coastal hazards.

In order to create a post-disaster plan, the forum includes several tasks, or steps. The guide suggests the seven tasks listed below and in the menu. Each task also has several sub-task steps, which we will discuss as we work through each one. Please enter your responses in the worksheet that you downloaded.

• Task 1: Build the forum organizing team
• Task 2: Identify and invite forum participants
• Task 3: Collect community based data
• Task 4: Facilitate forum session 1
• Task 5: Develop Draft Strategies
• Task 6: Facilitate Forum Session 2
• Task 7: Develop Post-Disaster Recovery Plan