Building Community Resiliency
Ask any Long Islander, “How long were you out?” and they’ll be able to tell you immediately the length of time they lived without power during Superstorm Sandy in 2012.
With all her destruction, Sandy brought into focus the importance of community resilience in disasters, including what we can and should do to become resilient and to prepare our built environment, our communities and ourselves.
Resiliency can be thought of in two ways—physical infrastructure (such as the electrical grids, waterways, bridges, levees) and community resiliency.
Since the storm, local officials on Long Island have made efforts to fortify their physical infrastructure. Exemplars include Nassau County’s "Living with the Bay," a $125-million-dollar project designed to help protect the built environment and serve as a pilot program for other areas of the country with similar topography. In 2013, Governor Cuomo announced $72 million dollars to elevate and “harden” the electrical grid on Long Island. These are just two examples of the types of projects that are designed to improve the ability of our physical infrastructure to withstand disasters. But even as the built environment and the 16 critical infrastructure sectors within it are being redesigned and reinforced, the second part of the equation must be attended to. Individuals and the communities they live in must be educated on strategies they can use to take a more active role. We can and should take action to build true community resiliency.
What does community resilience mean? Adelphi University has been examining this concept since 2011. As residents of Long Island, we have been instructed to assemble "to-go" kits for a disaster. This is an essential step for individuals. However, to build community resilience we need to bridge the gap between packing a personal to-go kit and fortifying the electrical grid. Preparing for disasters is a dynamic process that includes building significant public-private partnerships, outreach and involvement of residents and their neighborhood units and focusing efforts on the most vulnerable in our communities. Just as the physical infrastructure is constantly evaluated and strengthened, so must our communities’ plans be pro-active, practiced and reviewed, especially with the public at large.
The Center for Health Innovation (CHI) has been offering programming to meet the needs of Long Island communities. These include symposiums on the continuum of care in emergency situations, issues of first responders and our most recent one focused on both physical infrastructure and community resiliency. CHI is in the process of awarding two competitive community resiliency training grants. The grants include funding for experts to assist in the development of a definitive community resiliency program, including helping to identify and develop the public-private partnerships that are essential to success. Through these grants we hope to help individual communities become stronger and learn more about the capabilities and needs here on Long Island, identifying what jurisdictions need to do to become more resilient.
As disasters become more frequent and more devastating, Adelphi University’s CHI is seeking to address critical questions as: What are the best ways to integrate emergency preparedness into community and personal health and wellness? How can we use social media to inform the public and facilitate the social re-engagement of people after a disaster? How will people know when they are ready and how can we incentivize communities and individuals to become ready? What policies will work to help communities function better before, during and after a disaster?
Building resiliency is essential for survival on Long Island and equipping our residents and communities with the tools and knowledge to do so is a vital need. We are prepared to help people in this process, and by doing so we hope to change the stories of Long Island disasters to ones that demonstrate how a community can recover and rebuild more quickly together. As Long Islanders, we must view Superstorm Sandy as an opportunity to alleviate such devastation from occurring in the future.
Dr. Elizabeth Cohn is director of the Adelphi University Center for Health Innovation (CHI) in Garden City, NY. Dr. Cohn leads the Center for Health Innovation (CHI) that formalizes an interdisciplinary approach to healthcare. CHI provides a foundation for creating community partnerships and leadership with the goal of meeting current and emergent healthcare needs. She has a strong background in public health, research, community engagement, and community health. Dr. Cohn, a Robert Wood Johnson Nurse Faculty Scholar, holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University and completed a summer fellowship and the National Institutes of Minority Health and Health Disparities of the National Institutes of Health.
Meghan McPherson is coordinator of the Adelphi University Center for Health Innovation (CHI), and program coordinator and adjunct faculty for graduate programs in emergency management. Ms. McPherson has over a decade of experience in emergency management and is credentialed as a Certified Emergency Manager. She has worked in both the public sector, for New Hampshire's Governor's Office of Energy and Planning, and in the private sector for James Lee Witt Associates in Washington, DC where she was twice deployed to the Gulf Coast to support the recovery efforts following Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana.
