Community Resilience Has Many Faces…Part 2

<p>The research project on community and regional resilience at the School of Government aims to help communities think differently about how they prepare for disasters and how they can become more resilient, providing data and information that can spark realistic conversations about a community’s future.  This blog looks at some of the main elements that determine resilience and vulnerability in North Carolina’s counties. Previous blogs, Strengthening Resilience in North Carolina’s Communities and Community Resilience Has Many Faces…Part 1 referred to a set of measurements that have been developed for resilience and vulnerability for every county in the United States. These look at four dimensions: economic, social, infrastructure, and environmental. This blog looks at the infrastructure and environmental dimensions, and sets out to answer the questions: what do these mean and how can they be measured? How do the four measures come together to describe community resilience?</p> <p>Infrastructure Resilience and Vulnerability. The most obvious and immediate impacts of a disaster are often the damage done to roads and bridges, and the failure of facilities such as dams and levees. From an engineering standpoint, resilience is an expectation that physical infrastructure can be quickly restored to normal functioning based on acceptable standards of design, construction, and maintenance. There are also human and institutional factors that play into consideration of a more broadly-defined idea of infrastructure resilience and vulnerability. Thus, infrastructure resilience, in addition to adequacy of roadways, includes medical capacity, meaning ready access to a hospital with emergency facilities, availability of first responders, and the level [...]</p>