Those familiar with the Natural Hazards Center know we’re a small shop with a big appetite for bringing useful information to hazards practitioners and researchers. From time to time, that mission means we need to tighten our belt in one area so we can beef up in another. With that in mind, this week we offer you a svelte DR with news of a couple of sizeable new offerings.
The 2013 Colorado Flood Notebook. We’re excited to roll out this new portion of the website, which is based on a plan devised long ago by Natural Hazards Center founder Gilbert White.
In 1994 White laid out a plan to study the next big flood on Boulder Creek. The original plan, called the Boulder Creek Flood Notebook, was an outline for field study and data collection that would culminate in a pamphlet to help practitioners, policymakers, and community members better understand how their decisions can reduce or increase the impacts of flooding.
Fast forward nearly 20 years and we find not only Boulder Creek, but a large swathe of Colorado, inundated by flooding of a magnitude not even White had imagined. So rather than a pamphlet on Boulder Creek, we’ve re-envisioned White’s directive in a website that exploits the wealth of resources and the rich multimedia available to us today and which tells the story of the floods from many different angles, disciplines, and viewpoints.
Take a look at the site to find pictures, webcasts, maps, social media accounts, and other electronic resources available on the floods. You’ll also find traditional research reports and firsthand accounts by emergency managers, flood experts, and others in the trenches during the event. You’ll even learn a little about Gilbert White and the passion that earned him the moniker of Father of Floodplain Management.
Be aware, though, that what you see will not be the only thing you get. The website as it currently stands is only the tip of an iceberg of information our librarians and researchers have collected on the floods, and we anticipate much more to come. Recovery is just beginning and this story is far from over. We’ll be updating the site continuously with new details, including analysis by floodplain professionals, personal experiences of business owners and residents, and a bevy of Quick Response Reports.
Eventually, we hope this online notebook will grow into a one-stop shop for all the lessons learned from this event. We hope you’ll help. If you have anything to add to the site, be it professional insight or personal experience, please let us know. Although we didn't get the flood Gilbert expected, we’re we're doing our best to stay in the spirit of what he wanted—a way for practitioners and everybody else to get their head around what worked and what didn't.
The 39th Annual Natural Hazards Workshop. At the same time we’ve been striving to bring you the new 2013 Colorado Flood Notebook, we’ve also been working to put together the agenda for our time-honored Natural Hazards Workshop.
The Workshop, which will be held from June 22 to June 25 in Broomfield, Colorado, is designed to bring researchers and practitioners from many disciplines together for face-to-face discussions on how society deals with hazards and disasters.
Our 2014 program is structured to do just that—we’ll have sessions on a range of topics, including educational options in the hazards field, changes in the emergency management profession, new guidelines for post-disaster recovery planning, public participation in hazard-related programs, and children in disasters. Plenaries will touch on the Colorado Floods, multisectoral collaborations, and really big disasters. We expect that these sessions will generate the kind of lively discussions for which the Workshop is known.
The Workshop is an invitation-only event, so please take a look at the website and let us know if you need an invite.