When you eat, breathe, and sleep disaster, it can be easy to forget something simple—most people don’t. Attendees at the Natural Hazards Workshop last week were reminded of that fact as they listened to tales of how three communities grappled with what was, for them, the unimaginable.

We weren’t planning for it at all,” said Administrator Gretchen Neggers, of the Town of Monson, Massachusetts, about a rare tornado that ripped through the small town last June. “Throw us three feet of snow—we're good, we can handle that.”

Neggers painted a picture of the bewilderment many small communities must face in the wake of such an unexpected event. While there were no deaths, the destruction was significant. Town offices, the library, the police station, and the senior center were all destroyed. The town’s volunteer emergency manager was on vacation.

Enter the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which outnumbered the small town council and staff and blitzed the community with their business-as-usual disaster expertise.

“We learned in the first few days that there was a need for local leadership,” Neggers said. “FEMA came to help, but we were a little confused about all the stuff FEMA did.”

While the nuts and bolts of federal disaster assistance were getting sorted out, it became clear that what people needed to recover was each other. The first town meeting was less about getting information and more about being together in the same space, Neggers said. Since the disaster, group activities such as yoga and tai chi have became popular.

“People just wanted to be together and do things that made them be well again,” Neggers said.

The need to reestablish community was equally important for Joplin Schools following the May 22, 2011, EF5 tornado that killed seven students and one teacher, said Assistant Superintendent Angie Besendorfer.

Almost immediately after the storm, school district staff began trying to account for their students using the school auto-dialer, Facebook, Twitter, radio announcements, e-mail, text messages, and even going door-to-door where they could. In five days they had accounted for almost everyone.

Once their students were located, the schools set out to be a place of normalcy and provide help for kids and families reeling from the destruction. Even though the district had lost its administrative offices, it recognized the importance of getting the actual schools—all of which had been damaged—back on line as soon as possible.

“We knew we were not going to be satisfied with a field full of trailers,” Besendorfer said. “It was a child’s only junior year; it was their only second-grade year—it couldn’t be a temporary education.”

That attitude is similar to the advice given by Bob Dixson, mayor of Greensburg, Kansas, which was 95 percent destroyed by an EF5 tornado in 2007. Since then, the town has been largely rebuilt using sustainable building practices. Dixson told the audience that it was important for morale to take action and celebrate every success of recovery.

“You’ve got to be engaged, don’t wait for some agency come to save you,” he said. “You pull yourself up by the bootstraps and you keep going.”

Because of the near-complete devastation, Greensburg's residents literally had little left but each other. The dynamic created a unique process where the whole of the community became deeply involved in the rebuilding. This isn’t merely the magical effect of surviving disaster, Dixson said.

“In the midst of disaster, all it does is magnifies where you are as a community,” Dixson said.

While the statement hearkened to many Hazards Workshop conversations on how to create a resilient community that—like Monson, or Joplin, or Greensburg—could weather the storms of outrageous fortune and thrive, the Mayor reminded the audience that for all the study and planning and thought given to natural hazards, ultimately it's individuals that truly make the difference. “You’ve got the answers, but that’s academia,” Dixson said. “And we can do all the pre-planning of the manual, but when a 210 mile-per-hour wind comes along the manuals are gone. What you’ve got to rely on is your human spirit.”