Lucy A. Arendt - Böcker

Today, governmental efforts at long-term community recovery from a natural disaster consist primarily of rebuilding the physical artifact of the community. This entails reestablishing vital community services and infrastructure and creating housing to replace that which has been lost. While restoring the built environment of a disaster area is essential, alone it is not sufficient to achieve complete recovery. Long-Term Community Recovery from Natural Disasters presents what the authors have learned over two decades from more than two dozen community disasters in and outside the United States. Based on their experiences, they provide a set of practical, cost-effective steps for both reducing the consequences of extreme natural hazard events on communities and for facilitating community recovery. To achieve long-term recovery, it is essential that we understand how communities develop and/or decay in the absence of an extreme natural hazard event. Then, by recognizing how these events disrupt "normal" development and change, we can determine which parts of the community have to become reestablished or made more functional so that the community can achieve long-term viability. The authors explain how this appreciation of community dynamics and the consequences of extreme natural hazard events enables us to identify those critical points for policy intervention at appropriate levels of government. The combined practical and philosophical insight presented in this book will be valuable not only to policy makers but to scholars as well.

The negative consequences of natural hazard events are staggering and growing. Governments are acting to increase community resilience, reduce losses, and facilitate recovery, but these actions do not always yield anticipated consequences. This book is a compelling interdisciplinary analysis of California’s efforts to ensure that acute care hospitals survive earthquakes and continue to function in the aftermath. The book weaves together several threads essential to understanding the effectiveness of public policies intended to reduce the consequences of natural hazard events: public policy design and administration, the hazard mitigation investment decision made by targeted organizations, and contextual dynamics. "A terrific study of shortfalls in the implementation of risk-reduction policy -- highly readable, full of insights, and very policy relevant."  Peter J. May, Donald R. Matthews Distinguished Professor of American Politics, University of Washington, Seattle USA "This is an exceptional book by three of the leading hazard mitigation researchers and must reading for both scholars and practitioners in the field."  William A. Anderson, National Research Council, National Academy of Sciences.