From the Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience, this new handbook on recovery (148 pp) from Australia. This website has other resources on recovery as well.
Always good to see how others approach recovery. Thanks to our colleagues down under!
New Buildings Rise in Flood Zones. One in eight new residential projects in New York is being built along the riskiest waterfront. The buildings may be resilient, but what about the neighborhoods?
I do not usually print cartoons, but this one in the Wash. Post speaks to our concern with disasters. I provide the link here to avoid any copyright infringement.
Interesting adjustment to the high fire risk in many western states. See: Fourth of July Fireworks Cancelled.
This Tiny Country Says It Can Beat Climate Change . Hurricane Maria turned Dominica into a foreign-funded laboratory for stormproofing an entire nation. Progress so far is hard to see. Some background:
Maria inflicted $1.3 billion in damage, equal to 225 percent of the country’s annual economic output—more than twice the corresponding figure in nearby Puerto Rico. It destroyed or severely damaged almost half the island’s 29,000 buildings, along with much of its power and telecom infrastructure; the island’s towns remain pockmarked by the husks of ruined homes, its forests littered with half-toppled trees. As many as a third of residents have fled.
From the Conversation: 3 Reasons Why the U.S. is Vulnerable to Big Disasters. An excerpt:
The factors are many and diverse, but three major ones stand out because they are within the grasp of the federal and local governments: where and how cities grow; how easily households can access critical services during disaster; and the reliability of the supply chains for critical goods.
For all three of these factors, the U.S. is heading in the wrong direction. In many ways, Americans are becoming more vulnerable by the day.
Update: My fellow blogger Eric Holdeman has added a few more items to the list in his blog posting.
Article in HSNwire: Lessons from Extreme Weather Events; What Disasters teach us About Resilience.
From the Atlantic magazine: It’s (Mostly) Not FEMA’s Fault. “The problems blamed on emergency managers are often caused by the shortcomings of other governmental bodies, both before and after disasters.”
This article reinforces the points made in the June 21 posting on this blog, which cited a study documenting the failure of many Gulf Coast states to take the needed steps to mitigate known problems.
From the HSNewswire, this article on a new, 48pp. report: Houston and H. Harvey – the lessons
Recovery Diva 