The first journal article from our NSF RAPID research project on the socio-technical resilience of Louisiana to the Hurricane Isaac power outage and restoration, which was described in this post, has come out in ASCE’s Journal of Infrastructure Systems. You can grab the article here.
A journal article describing the static elements of the theoretical framework that informs most of the posts of this site has been published by Environmental Hazards. You can grab the PDF here.
Have you ever wondered just what disaster research is and how resilience fits into that field? I had the fortune to be asked by the National Academy of Science and Kavli Foundation to talk about just that topic. You’ll recognize many topics I’ve discussed on ResilScience throughout this video. It’s only 20 minutes long, there …
I have the privilege of speaking at the 50th Anniversary celebration for the Disaster Research Center at University of Delaware. As part of this event, each speaker was asked to write a 1000 word thought piece that the disaster research community could read and comment on in person and on the DRC’s website. Although my paper is posted on their …
The last couple posts I’ve made have had a lot of equations or graphs. I figured it’s time to get back to writing about theory, which is really the motivating reason for creating this website. The scholarly literature has a number of conceptual frameworks of community resilience to disasters (for example, Berkes 2007; Cutter et al. 2008; Norris et al. 2008; Bruneau et al., 2003; Paton and Johnston …
Have you ever had the power go out at your home or your place of work? I think everyone’s hands go up at this question. What’s the longest you’ve gone without power? You in the back: 13 days?! Wow. Personally, I’ve never gone more than a day. I’ve met the people who restore the power …
So far I’ve written one or more posts about representing community resilience conceptually (and many other posts), quantitatively (and this one), and visually (and). I haven’t talked about how one might go about algorithmically representing resilience—loss and bouncing back from that loss. None of those other representations allow you to pose “what if” questions and simulate the answers to them. How fast is …
I just saw this article in Huffington Post about how the role of fat in nutrition has been misunderstood (at least by the public and policy makers) for the past couple decades. Fat does not make you fat and good fat is a critical part of energy production in the body. In fact, fat is the most efficient …
I just returned from a trip to Canterbury, New Zealand as part of a project between the World Bank and EERI, which I mentioned here. The objective of the project is to research how and whether recovery after the February 2011 earthquake reflects the concept of “build back better.” In interviewing stakeholders, we were focused on the three most impacted sectors: …
I had a chance recently to walk around the Rockaways in Queens, NY about eight months after the area was heavily damaged by the storm surge from Hurricane Sandy. Multiple things struck me–most of all how far the area had bounced back with respect to clean up and reconstruction. I noticed two small examples of …