hazard reduction & recovery

Editor’s note: Texas lawmakers heard Shannon Van Zandt, professor of urban planning, describe the significant housing difficulties low-and moderate-income people face as they recover from devastation caused by August 2017’s Hurricane Harvey.

Municipalities are more responsive to natural disaster plans that focus on a single threat, such as flooding, than they are to comprehensive resiliency strategies, according to a study evaluating how U.S. cities are adapting to the impacts of climate change.

As tens of thousands of Texans undergo a long, difficult recovery from Hurricane Harvey, numerous faculty and students initiatives at Texas A&M University are helping individuals and communities learn how to emerge from the damage and mitigate the effects of future disasters.

As Harvey’s record-setting rainfall inundated coastal Texas, expert researchers in natural disaster planning, recovery and sustainability at Texas A&M, through analysis and numerous media interviews, described how land development practices exacerbated the flooding and prescribed actions to mitigate future disasters.

Walter Gillis Peacock, director of the Texas A&M Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center, is one of 15 experts serving on a committee established by Congress to review efforts to reduce life and property loss from windstorms, the nation’s costliest natural hazard.

City planning staff in Norfolk, Va., a coastal city of 243,000, have identified weaknesses and inconsistencies in their community’s natural hazard plans with a scorecard developed in part by Texas A&M disaster researchers.

Texas A&M University researchers are collaborating on an NSF initiative aimed at identifying links between the U.S. food distribution system and the nation’s energy, water and transportation networks that are most likely to be disrupted in a natural disaster.

Texas legislators are investigating the benefits of RAPIDO, a pilot program developed with recommendations from Texas A&M Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center, that dramatically reduces the time it takes to rebuild homes destroyed by natural disasters.

Urban planners can assess whether a community’s hazard plans target its most vulnerable areas with a scorecard developed in part by planning researchers at Texas A&M.

Undergraduate students interested in careers as planning or sociology researchers sharpened their research skills in summer 2015 with help from Texas A&M faculty during a 6-week Research Experience for Undergraduates program.

Interdisciplinary groups of faculty and students in five U.S. universities will pair with counterparts in The Netherlands in a research project led by Sam Brody, professor of urban planning, to determine how to reduce the impact of coastal flooding.

A research team from Texas A&M’s Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center is working to identify best practices in pre- and post-disaster planning in communities recovering from a variety of natural and man-made disasters.

Texas A&M’s national prominence in disaster planning research is evidenced in the February 2015 Journal of the American Planning Association special issue in which four of the publication’s 10 articles were penned by Texas A&M faculty and former students.

An elite group of urban planning researchers from Texas A&M University have been selected to play an integral role with scientists from 11 universities in a nationwide initiative aimed at helping communities prepare for and recover from natural disasters.

Procedures to create resilient communities — places that avoid, absorb and recover quickly from natural disasters — are detailed in a new book co-authored by four urban planning educators at Texas A&M’s College of Architecture.