Community resilience


Community resilience is the sustained ability of a community to use available resources to respond to, withstand, and recover from adverse situations. This allows for the adaptation and growth of a community after disaster strikes. Communities that are resilient are able to minimize any disaster, making the return to normal life as effortless as possible. By implementing a community resilience plan, a community can come together and overcome any disaster, while rebuilding physically and economically.

Community resilience planning

A community resilience plan is an action plan that allows for a community to rebuild after disaster. The plan should entail specific guidelines that will aid the community to rebuild both the economy and the ecosystem that the community thrives on. This typically means there are measures in place that a community will follow, such as the :wikt:distribution|distribution of volunteers, and the access to knowledge and resources necessary to rebuild. Adaptability is a key attribute which means prevention can occur in response or before disaster strikes. The :wikt:National Institute of Standards and Technology|National Institute of Standards and Technology has a Community Resilience department tasked with solving this problem. This agency has created a Community Resilience Planning Guide, and its aim is to assist communities with anticipating challenges through a practical application that takes into account the social needs of the community as well as dependencies on the "built environment" - buildings and infrastructure systems. The outline of the six step process is shown below:
The scope of community resilience extends beyond natural disasters and include manmade events. Below are an example of disasters communities face on a daily basis:
  1. Wind
  2. Earthquake
  3. Inundation
  4. Fire
  5. Snow or rain
  6. Technological or human-caused
Infrastructure systems such as buildings, water, electric power, transportation, and communication are all interconnected and interdependent networks or systems. This means that a failure in one network can have catastrophic impact on another system. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, LA on August 23, 2005, it caused network outages in transportation and power networks which led to system failure and impedance in others such communication and emergency services.