The following resources are just a few featured by presenters and panelists at the 2012 Hazards Workshop. Some are hot off the presses, others have been around for a while, but all come highly recommended.
LENA: Legal Networks Analyzer
If you’re interested in public health legislation and how it differs from state to state, LENA is your girl. Developed by the University of Pittsburgh, this database contains laws governing 42 public health systems. By using the interactive analysis, users can see the variance in the types and amounts of laws meant to guide preparedness and emergency response, compare state information, and access the text of the laws analyzed. Not into public health? LENA does something similar with nuclear preparedness and response legislation, as well.
Drought Planning Toolbox
With and estimated 55 percent of the United States thought to be experiencing some level of drought, it might not be a bad time to check out the Drought Planning Toolbox created by the Colorado Water Conservation Board with an eye toward assisting state and municipal planners. Although some toolbox resources are Colorado specific, there’s still plenty of information to help others prepare for drought, including national drought monitoring resources, local drought planning guidance, climate change information, and financial assistance available for drought response.
Silver Jackets
On the other end of the local water spectrum, the Silver Jackets program has been created to help states deal with flood risk management. With guidance from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, 31 states have formed Silver Jackets teams that use an interagency approach to communicating and managing risk, leveraging resources, coordinating mitigation, and taking down barriers to working together. Visit this website to learn more about the program and how to develop a team in your state.
Rebuild Christchurch
One of the recurrent themes at this year’s Hazards Workshop was the role of community—as opposed to individuals—before and after disasters. This website, created by a group of Christchurch residents, is an example of these community-driven efforts to take charge of response and recovery. In this case, the group created a forum to exchange news of and opinions on rebuilding and to ask questions about hard-to-find reconstruction information.
Making Cities Resilient Toolkit
Another Hazards Workshop theme (for a couple of years running) is resilience. And while we’re still no closer to solving the semantics of what resilience exactly means, many see it as building some sort of capacity to bear hardship before the hardship happens. That’s the tack taken by the UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction when it created this top ten list of things cities can do to reduce disaster risk—including budgeting for risk reduction, investing in infrastructure, implementing risk-compliant building requirements, and protecting ecosystems that naturally buffer risk.
Institute for Business and Home Safety Research Center
If you want to watch a house burn to the ground or blow away in a hurricane but schadenfreude isn’t really your thing, then there’s the IBHS research center website. The site showcases work being done at IBHS’s huge research center, which is capable of creating realistic hazards (including storms that generate up to 8 inches of rain per hour and the wind of a Category 3 hurricane). The center was created to test and demonstrate how small building elements can make a big difference when disaster strikes.