EVERY COMMUNITY AN ISLAND: PREPARING FOR CATASTROPHIC DISASTERS
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Author
Card, Sean
Date
2021-03Advisor
Woodbury, Glen L.
Morag, Nadav
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This thesis is a single-case study of Puerto Rico’s experience with Hurricane Maria and its catastrophic impacts. As the nation faces more complex and frequent catastrophic disasters, practitioners must consider how to build resilience in a meaningful way by beginning with the community. America’s approach to disaster preparedness and response outlined in the National Preparedness Goal (NPG) and the National Response Framework (NRF) has respectively produced “whole community” concepts and a tiered response approach to disasters. However, the NPG has yet to realize the concept of “whole community” fully by effectively integrating community-based actors and other non-governmental entities into disaster preparedness, response, and recovery cycles. The NRF also does not outline contingencies for the collapse of the framework in catastrophic disasters when mutual aid, state, and federal resources become unavailable or insufficient for lengthy periods of time, leaving communities isolated. To examine these issues, Puerto Rico’s disaster impacts are examined via the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s community lifelines as a categorical method of organization. By synthesizing a large body of literature, this study provides disaster preparedness and response conclusions for all lifelines and identifies overarching themes centered upon a need for holistic disaster preparedness, integration of non-governmental actors, decentralization, and redundant critical infrastructure systems.
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