The presentations all focused on the work CARRI is doing with the three partner communities of Charleston, South Carolina; Gulfport, Mississippi; and Shelby County/Memphis, Tennessee, as well as the private sector's role in community and regional resilience.

Following the presentations, Congressman Wamp and Congressman Barrett moderated a roundtable discussion on regional resiliency.  Participants in the roundtable discussion were: Warren Edwards; Jason Jackson; Phil May, Region 4 director for the Federal Emergency Management Association; and Ted Fox, director of public works for Shelby County/Memphis, Tennessee, a CARRI partner community.

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 Project Aimed at Making

Communities 'Resilient' in Disasters

 By Bill Poovey, Associated Press

Kingsport Times-News

November 19, 2007 

A researcher working to help communities recover faster from destructive hurricanes and other catastrophic events told a homeland security conference that owners of destroyed homes typically are not back to normal for eight years.

M. John Plodinec, Savannah River National Laboratory's science adviser, said a "Resilient Home Initiative," he is heading, aims to reduce the time that homeowners are displaced by half, to four years, and help communities survive.

Speaking at a meeting of the Tennessee Valley Corridor, an economic initiative started 12 years ago, Plodinec said homeowners in some Mississippi Gulf Coast communities wiped out by Hurricane Katrina appear to be "slightly ahead" of that timetable. He said the pace in New Orleans is slower.

Plodinec was among speakers at a conference on homeland security "regional resiliency." He said he is working to develop an overall recovery process for displaced homeowners.

Robin K. White, a Meridian Institute senior fellow with a background in national security, said three cities - Charleston, S.C.; Memphis, Tenn.; and Gulfport, Miss. - are developing resilience assessments as part of an initiative that will eventually be expanded to other communities.

She said Gulfport is recovering from Hurricane Katrina, Shelby County and Memphis are located on the New Madrid fault that increases the chance of earthquake and Charleston has had hurricanes and an earthquake.

Phil May, southeastern regional director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said the agency and region are better prepared for a catastrophe than before Hurricane Katrina in August 2005.

"DHS has spent hundreds of millions of dollars equipping counties," he said.

May said coastal states have been working on evacuation routes and disaster planning.

He said Southern states seem to be more prepared, possibly due in some cases to communities having backgrounds with nuclear power plants.

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 CARRI:  An Opportunity To Apply and Improve

What We Know About Resiliency

 By Tom Wilbanks, CARRI Research Director

From its beginning, CARRI has been designed to combine community engagement activities with research activities. 

The reason is not that CARRI is a research project.  It is a resilience project.  But research is important in several ways.  First of all, it is important for CARRI to make sure that how it is viewing resilience and how it seeks to assure is based on knowledge and evidence, not just ad hoc ideas.  We want to get it right.  To help with this, CARRI has commissioned a number of summaries of the current knowledge about resilience by leading experts in this field.

CARRI believes that enhancing resilience within the three partner communities depends not only on top-down knowledge on the part of national experts but also on bottom-up knowledge on the part of experts and stakeholders who know each community.  Accordingly, it will be supporting local resilience assessments conducted by local expert teams.  Beyond producing knowledge and information for the community engagement process over the next year or so, these research teams will continue to be available as sources of expertise to their communities over the longer run.

CARRI is convinced that what is learned from these three intense local experiences about resilience and how to achieve it will enrich the knowledge bases available to other communities as they set out on similar paths.  One example may be potentials for innovative private-public sector partnerships.  In this sense, the community engagements contribute knowledge to a wider user community along with advancing resilience within the participating community.

CARRI will be working toward a Web-based decision support tool to assist interested communities in becoming more resilient.  This tool will need a wide-range of expertise in the research community, from specific topics such as evacuation and health care, to threat-specific issues such a s earthquakes and floods, to tool-specific issues such as decision support interfaces, to case-specific knowledge such as the experience of New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina.   Again, connecting with the very best available research will help us to get it right.

The fact is that this kind of interactive linkage between research and practice is very rare.  The final connection between CARRI and research may be to increase our nation's understanding of how to connect research with decision support and action, which could be an enormous extra benefit for society at large.

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 CARRI Participates in ASIS International Chief Security Officer Roundtable in Atlanta

 CARRI News 

November 1, 2007

CARRI Director Warren Edwards was invited to participate in the ASIS International Chief Security Officer (CSO) Roundtable in Atlanta, Georgia in October.  The roundtable included CSOs from almost a dozen large national and regional companies.

ASIS International (ASIS, http://www.asisonline.org/ ) is a world-wide organization for security professionals, which hosts CSO Roundtables for its member organizations several times a year.

Edwards took the opportunity to brief attendees on the CARRI program, and to bring together officials from both Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) headquarters and regional FEMA officials.  Edwards' objective at the roundtable was to inform the industry representatives on the CARRI effort; to foster a dialogue between those representatives and federal officials; and to hear private sector perspectives on resilience and disaster preparedness. 

Edwards' briefing emphasized that CARRI works holistically to build strong community networks and realizes that much of the current work on the concept of resilience is divided into sectors: IT, transportation, energy, etc. There is a need to understand how these sectors affect each other and cascade into each other when they fail. 

CARRI is trying to understand these interdependencies and "operationalize" the concept of resilience at the community level, which also requires an understanding of how the private sectors' capabilities can be leveraged to get a community back on its feet and back in business as quickly as possible.

In wrapping up the session, Edwards reiterated that the CARRI project must continue to connect with the private sector and invited ideas and suggestions to make the process and the effort more inclusive. 

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 Partner Community Briefs

Gulfport, Mississippi

CARRI has added Dr. Tom Lansford of the University of Southern Mississippi (USM), Gulf Coast as the local research liaison for the CARRI-Gulfport Partnership.  Dr. Lansford is the Interim Chair of the Department of Political Science and also serves as assistant dean of the College of Arts and Letters.  Dr. Lansford will be directing an interdisciplinary team to support the CARRI-Gulfport partnership including conducting much of the due-diligence reviews of existing reports, plans and requirements and participant interviews to gather what the Gulf Coast community is already doing to be resilient.

Commenting on his new role as part of the CARRI-Gulfport team, Dr. Lansford notes that "it is a distinct pleasure to be part of such a significant program that is working to capture important lessons from across the community about how to make the Mississippi Gulf Coast more resilient. USM and the broader university community are excited about CARRI's potential to bring about meaningful change in terms of how we prepare for, respond to and ultimately recover from disasters."

In 2008, once cross-community discussions about resilience are underway, Dr. Lansford and the research team will be supporting the information needs of participants and serving as a local repository for the lessons that emerge.  

Shelby County/Memphis, Tennessee

The CARRI-Shelby County/Memphis partnership participated at the monthly Memphis First meeting on November 7^th.  Memphis First is a group of Memphis businesses that have banded together to help themselves and other private sector organizations to prepare and protect Memphis and the surrounding area in the event of a crisis or emergency management situation. Memphis First is sharing lessons learned and best practices, helping businesses and organizations establish continuity plans, and assisting the county EMA in their mission as well.

The CARRI-Shelby County/Memphis partnership also presented a Resiliency/CARRI briefing at the Tri-State Preparedness Conference on November 14^th in Tunica, Mississippi.

On November 30^th, the CARRI-Shelby County/Memphis Urban Area Advisory Group will hold a conference call to follow up on their organizational meeting last month.

Charleston, South Carolina

The CARRI-Charleston Team has had initial high-level meetings with representatives of the City of Charleston, Charleston County, North Charleston, Mt. Pleasant, Dorchester County and Berkeley County.  

CARRI's Charleston Team is also working with the Charleston Metro Chamber of Commerce and Regional Development Alliance.  

An initial organizing meeting of the CARRI-Charleston Steering Committee is tentatively scheduled for the week of December 11th.

The Chamber has added resilience as an overall theme for their February’s ThinkTec conference, with a session focused on Community Resilience for the upcoming conference.

The CARRI-Charleston team has already identified some "successful practices" that are adding to Charleston's resilience. In the city of Charleston, neighborhood councils that greatly improve communications between the city government and the citizens are flourishing.  

Charleston County has maintained a vibrant "Project Impact" for eight years that is bringing together people from local government, private business, and non-governmental organizations. Project Impact does great work in spreading the word to the Charleston community about vulnerabilities and ways to mitigate them.  It also has developed into a strong network of professionals involved in response and recovery at the working level, which should serve the community well in times of stress.