how to figure out community flood resilience
How do you measure disaster resilience? That can be a tough question to answer. Check out the chart below. I’m not a big believer in how “this one thing” can be the answer, but educating ourselves on different tools will be helpful.
On the column for “44 Sources of Resilience” there is one that jumps out at me. That would be, “Flood Exposure Awareness.” There are repetitive losses in property damages to individual homes due to floods. I’m not thinking of those people, rather it is the folks who don’t understand the risks they are taking based on where they choose to build or live. Like the 100-year flood plain chart I shared recently, people are sometimes just plain “risk stupid.”
Back to my four stages of denial about disasters that I have shared repeatedly:
It won’t happen
If it does happen, it won’t happen to me
If it does happen, and it does happen to me, it won’t be that bad
If it does happen, and it does happen to me, and it is bad—we don’t have to worry we’ll all be dead anyway
As to item four. I read once that only about 2% of a population die in a catastrophe. So, don’t plan on being dead, plan on being alive! You will want a place to live.
