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9
Open Meeting Discussion
During the final session of the workshop, the committee, the presenters, and
the attendees convened in a single large roundtable in which everyone was invited
to comment on issues associated with national resilience to hazards and disasters.
Below are examples of some of the points made by individual participants during
this last session.
Preparing for Hazards and Disasters
• Reliability, durability, sustainability, and operational readiness can be
seen as guiding principles for critical infrastructure.
• Resilience implies the existence of systems to maintain health, such as
electronic medical records and accessible primary care.
• Metrics to gauge levels of resilience and progress toward preparedness
goals could be helpful.
• Many public facilities exist that could be repurposed for disaster pre-
paredness and recovery.
• Many kinds of disasters occur and many forms of resilience exist,
including psychological resilience in the face of great uncertainty and
stress or loss of community.
The Politics of Resilience
• The short-term perspectives associated with politics frequently make
it difficult for politicians to address long-term issues, including many
issues associated with resilience.
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76 INCREASING NATIONAL RESILIENCE TO HAZARDS AND DISASTERS
• It can be difficult for politicians to tell people who have lived in a loca-
tion for decades that they cannot rebuild there. Politicians seek to man -
age risk, but they are subject to many constraints.
• Despite the great needs for expenditures on national resilience, state and
federal budget deficits and popular calls for reductions in government
spending point toward greater constraints on budgets in the future.
Self-Sufficiency in Disasters
• Many valuable responses to disasters are based on the initiative and
resources of individuals and communities, not governments.
• Individuals and communities could benefit by being more self-sufficient
to achieve desired levels of resilience (as the Vietnamese community
has exemplified). Because some areas cannot be completely evacuated,
people may need to be prepared to live through disasters.
• Despite the need for greater self-sufficiency, the resources of government
are irreplaceable in many respects. Balance between nongovernmental
and governmental solutions and between local and national solutions is
important.
• Government has a responsibility to protect vulnerable populations
and communities and help them become less vulnerable and more
self-sufficient.
• Greater self-sufficiency may help free resources for people who need
higher levels of outside care.
• A community can be resilient yet contain many individuals who are not
resilient.
Creating a Culture of Resilience
• Government can help create a culture of resilience through education
and the provision of appropriate resources.
• Multiple ways exist in which government can provide preparedness
information.
• Education can benefit from the enhanced awareness of disasters made
possible through modern communications.
• Training teenagers to provide assistance during disasters is a valuable
way of enhancing knowledge about resilience in young people. Teen-
agers also can help educate younger children about resilience in disas-
ters, including in families that do not speak English at home.
• Cultural change is possible. For example, the construction industry
used to accept some loss of life as inevitable in its business but does not
accept such losses today.
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77
OPEN MEETING DISCUSSION
• Promoting healthier communities through education and clinical access
may help to raise the overall resilience of those communities before,
during, and after a disaster.
Toward Better Public Policy
• The question of who pays and who benefits from resilience is integral
to improving public policy.
• Disasters are more usefully interpreted in terms of responsibility, not
in terms of victimhood—who is responsible for recovery and in what
ways?
• Even where entire communities need to be relocated, cultural traditions
and community cohesiveness can remain intact.
The Future of Resilience
• Although Katrina was one of the largest and most catastrophic events
ever to hit the United States, resilience is also important for the smaller
and more frequent disasters that will occur in the future.
• In the future, many communities could be geographically far flung and
linked by communication technologies. How will the nature of resilience
to hazards and disasters change in such a world?
• The rise of sea level and other effects of climate change could radically
change the susceptibility of many communities to hazards. What plan-
ning for the possibility of such changes is occurring today?
• A fundamental constraint in resilience is the inability to imagine every
kind of disaster that could occur.
• Uncertainties associated with the natural world inevitably bring uncer-
tainties to planning for resilience.
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