Guest blog post by Dr. Therese P. McAllister, Group Leader of the Community Resilience Group in the Materials and Structural Systems Research Division of the Engineering Laboratory (EL) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)

Floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, and other hazardous events can and do have a devastating effect on our communities in terms of lives lost, property damaged, and livelihoods disrupted. It can take years for a community to return to normal. Even when they do get back on their feet, the scars can linger for decades more. Ten years later, people are still recovering from Hurricane Katrina.

Planning for communities to prepare for and recover from hazardous events like these—to be more resilient—is complex and requires input from a wide range of disciplines and people. In fact, the idea of community resilience is so new that you won’t find many students studying it or universities offering courses … yet.

Different technical and community experts have their own ways of tackling the problem of reducing risks or the impact of those events. They usually work on their own piece of the puzzle. For example, structural engineers tend to focus on whether a building will protect the lives of occupants, not necessarily its degree of functionality or how a structure contributes to vital services. Community planners may focus on steps needed to provide emergency services after an event occurs. A community may have a plan for land use, emergency response, or community development, but these likely are all separate plans.

At NIST, we think that communities ought to be looked at as a system of systems. By working hand-in-hand with experts and stakeholders from the private and public sectors, we are working on helping communities to integrate these plans so that they all work together. We’re also trying to provide them with access to more and better tools to plan not just for emergency response but for community recovery in both the short and longer terms.

I’m a structural engineer, but I am working with experts in land use, sanitation, and transportation, power, and energy systems. Others specialize in sociology, economics, and business continuity. Some are on the NIST team, or collaborative partners, such as the NIST-funded Community Resilience Center of Excellence at Colorado State University. What brings us together and motivates us is the chance to help communities prepare better and get back to “normal” faster. Our job at NIST is to develop the tools, including the practical planning steps as well as the science, to help make that a reality.

The country learned a great deal from Katrina. In New Orleans—and later after deadly tornadoes across Missouri and again after Superstorm Sandy in New York and New Jersey—I saw damaged and destroyed hospitals and nursing homes, schools, stores, homes, roads and bridges, water supply and treatment plants, and communications and power systems. They were among the many structures no longer fit for use.

Building codes and standards can and do improve the performance of individual buildings and structures that are important parts of the community’s infrastructure—if they meet those requirements set by state and local jurisdictions. What my colleagues and I are doing now with the help of experts and stakeholders across the nation is developing guidance and tools that entire communities can use. Every building, road or bridge, cell tower or pipeline represents so much more than a structure. We have to consider the role each plays in our community—schools to educate the young, hospitals to care for the sick—in order to develop a thoughtful, practical plan for how we allocate resources and deal with the loss of services when those buildings are damaged.

One of our challenges is convincing communities to prepare for hazard events like these when they happen so infrequently, whether they are floods, storms, earthquakes, or human-caused disasters. We want to help communities to better appreciate that resilience should be a normal part of planning. If they do, they may have fewer interruptions, care better for residents, and be able to rebound faster. Planning for hazard events like these could also have economic benefits because businesses are more likely to want to remain in or relocate to well-planned communities knowing they will be better protected and better able to continue operations after a hazardous event.

A more resilient community can be a boon to those around it, too. Hurricane Katrina devastated such a large region that we saw communities unable to help each other to restore power and other services. They were too busy trying to solve their own problems.

This made it clear that we had to think and plan for these types of events on a wider scale. We also realized that putting things back just the way they were is not always the best option.  Recovery is also an opportunity to do it better than the first time.

This fall, we will release our Community Resilience Planning Guide for Buildings and Infrastructure Systems. In preparing that guide, we traveled to communities across the country and reached out more broadly to many stakeholders to collect their input. In addition, we will make sure communities know about it and how to use it. One way to ensure that they have even better tools moving forward and that barriers to community resilience are identified and addressed is through a new Community Resilience Panel on Buildings and Infrastructure System. This panel will meet for the first time on November 9^th at the NIST Gaithersburg, Md., campus.

I’m really proud to be part of this community resilience effort and to know that I can have such a positive impact on communities across the country and possibly even the world. This is what public service is all about to me.