Planning is essential even before a disaster strikes because it shapes how communities are prepared and guides post-disaster decisions and investments. In this article, we hope to help you understand the significant factors that local government considers while devising a pre-disaster recovery plan for a community.
DISASTER AVERSION AND PREPAREDNESS
Disaster prevention and mitigation refer to actions undertaken to avert or alleviate adverse consequences in the short and long term. They include many activities that fall into political, legal, administrative, and infrastructural measures.
It is essential to educate vulnerable communities, i.e., those who are most likely to be devasted in case of an impending disaster, and to create distinguishing lifestyle and behavior changes to minimize their disaster risk.
The characteristic feature of disasters is that they strike suddenly; by this virtue, we cannot see them coming. We may predict a disaster, but we cannot stop it. The best way to go is to be prepared for it before it destroys everything we have.
The motto behind preparing for disasters is to avert and lessen the damage and losses they cause. All civic bodies of administration and essential services, like fire brigades, hospitals, police, etc., must be trained and prepared to deal with such calamities.
The efficiency, coping capacity, government stability, organization, quality of the concrete jungle, and preparedness of a society determine the impact a disaster will have on it. The complicated nature of calamities poses various life-altering challenges; population displacement is significant.
For instance, the number of displaced populations in Haiti, Japan, Pakistan, Libya, Africa, and Syria is incredible, credited to all of these reasons and more. Understanding the impacts caused by disasters and knowing what to be prepared for becomes extremely important.
Complete knowledge of the social implications of disasters creates a base of contingency plans to lessen the occurrence of adverse outcomes.
Pre-planning for a disaster considerably improves debris management and decreases expenses. The interagency approach in planning the development activities reflects a holistic disaster management and recovery strategy.
- Identifying required equipment and its suppliers
- We are identifying sites for collection and storage.
- An adequate method is in place to segregate hazardous materials.
IMPACT OF DISASTERS ON THE SOCIETY
The socioeconomic impact of disasters can be felt across generations and over time. Humans have learned from our mistakes about calamities like tornadoes, earthquakes, hurricanes, and wildfires and now have better approaches to deal with their possibilities.
It is still important to note that while preparing for a disaster may lower the number of casualties, it wouldn’t eradicate that number. Understanding the risks and their causes is vital in dealing with disasters. Depending on the degree of damage, the extent, and the magnitude of the disaster, it can take days to months to recover. Communities take time to adapt to their changed social settings.
Community leaders need to assess the collective impact of disasters on a community and arrange external aid as needed. Analyzing a disaster’s impact plays a crucial role in distinguishing those segments of society that have been gravely affected.
The primary stakeholders in such a scenario are those who’ve been affected and who have the advantage of local knowledge and understanding of the soil they live on. Their experience can be very well channeled into the community’s recovery.
Natural disasters can prove extremely harmful to public utilities. Roads might be flooded, electric poles uprooted, infrastructure wrecked, and communication lines broken. In such a scenario, reaching you becomes challenging for first responders. You might get stuck at home with no electricity, little food and water supplies, and no way to communicate with anybody outside for several days or even weeks.
Like the domestic scenario, hospitals would function with limited resources, and patients might have to be transferred to other viable hospitals, which might be between cities. Due to these circumstances, schools are shut down for extended periods, and thus, the education of children and the livelihood of many are threatened.
When buildings collapse, people lose their sources of income. Worse, they get trapped beneath the rubble and face mortal danger. When homes are destroyed, people are forced to migrate and start afresh in a stranger city. The damage causes trauma that is physical, emotional, psychological, and financial all at once
Some social impacts present themselves over time, and thus, they aren’t easy to evaluate. They include socio-demographic, socioeconomic, psychosocial, and socio-political effects. Irrespective, the extent of damage done needs to be identified with utmost urgency; otherwise, the social fabric is threatened to tear unalterably, which might cause long-term disabilities to the affected households, communities, businesses, and society.
Psychologically, disasters tend to take a massive toll on people. They have to witness traumatic experiences that will give them goosebumps for a lifetime. They may see their family and friends getting devastated, homes getting crushed, and sustaining injuries themselves; they even undergo irreversible loss of possessions and property.
They have PTSD, flashbacks, and nightmares, and all this takes time to recover. Minorities in every country suffer the most since they do not have adequate resources to protect themselves in the first place.
Disaster displacement relates to conditions when a large segment of the population is compelled to leave their place of residence in the event of a disaster to evade its immediate and anticipated typical dangers. It falls under the category of the direct impact of any calamity. When their homes are destroyed, people are forced to move to foreign places, sometimes even crossing international boundaries.
The term used for such people is ‘environmental refugees,’ which is relatively new given the increase in their number. This sudden migration causes dangerous strains in their lives and the host country’s functioning. Slums are developed, resources are scarce, and they don’t have access to primary healthcare, education, and hygiene. The largest continent, Asia, undergoes displacement regularly. Countries with the highest numbers of individual removals consist of Bangladesh, China, India, the Philippines, and Vietnam.
REACTION TO DISASTERS
Before calamity occurs, Planning and planning determines how society will respond to the disaster. However, after the calamity strikes, rehabilitation and recovery planning detPlanninghether the community will stand back and find a new normal. The phases after the disaster have occurred are:
RESPONSE PHASE
As soon as it strikes, the immediate reaction to the disaster begins the response phase. It encompasses both immediate response (relief) and medium-term response. The main objective that must be achieved in this phase is to re-establish the functionality of essential services and systems. People who’re trapped, lost, and unidentified or bodies that need to be extracted are all done as soon as possible.
The need of the hour is to ensure that people’s basic needs are met and that those with severe injuries get medical help. This phase needs a sense of urgency and fast response to save the lives of those still possible. It lasts a few days, after which the focus shifts to supporting the survivors and rebuilding infrastructure—the relief phase of disaster transitions into the recovery phase.
RECOVERY PHASE
This is a relatively slow, more stable, and systematic phase in response to a disaster—the affected population witnesses a period of transition and makeshift arrangements to meet their basic needs. The recovery phase is a relatively stable period of change for the affected population. They resume their daily lives, returning to their routine and activities. However, affected people may not have yet recovered entirely, but there is a “new normal” in the community.
RECONSTRUCTION PHASE
This phase aims to achieve society’s long-term goals by building permanent physical structures to replace all the temporary arrangements of the recovery phase with something concrete. Tents and trailers are converted to residential, commercial, and essential buildings. Social structures and other cultural aspects are also examined.
As permanent housing is rebuilt, the social fabric of communities is strengthened. Educational means are revived, children return to school, and adults have renewed opportunities to improve their livelihoods and restore their family economies. Life can finally begin to feel stable once more.
Society has historically almost always been able to revive itself after a calamity. The mechanisms and methods of achieving this may differ worldwide, but these phases are fundamental to every recovery road.
DISASTER DEBRIS MANAGEMENT
Disaster debris management is the concept of utilizing usable debris for productive use while disposing of the unusable part in an environmentally friendly way. The debris management process consists of the following key features:
1. Recognizing the type of debris.
2. Distinguishing its possible usage.
3. Planning efficient debris collection and processing
4. Phased implementation of debris collection and processing activities
Removing debris becomes necessary to expedite the recovery process of the geographic region affected by the disaster. In the long term, methods must be innovated to ensure that wastes, construction, etc., do not pose a future threat to human and environmental health.
There are various kinds of debris after a disaster has occurred:
· non-toxic materials like construction residues (steel, wood, concrete), biodegradable stuff (trees, shrubs, soil), and general wastes (household belongings or trash),
· harmful solid and liquid waste streams, electronics appliances, industrial hazardous wastes.
· crushed but recyclable debris streams
· ash-laden, water-logged, or biologically or chemically contaminated wastes
By understanding the type of debris, authorities can develop a suitable debris management plan that ensures the waste is cleared sustainably.
SHELTER AND HOUSING
Shelter typically refers to temporary provision created with the help of partial building materials for people whose homes are rendered unhabitable and unsafe by disasters and conflicts. The primary objective of shelters is to ensure that individuals have the agency to set up temporary means of survival through small-scale inputs immediately after a disaster.
The more concrete and durable solution is permanent housing. Here, the primary motive is to bridge the gap between what the affected community lost versus what they have now. It acts as a safety net for displaced families. In both of these scenarios, however, the goal is to serve the urgency of affected families to have necessities: a safe living space. While the shelter is a quick, ad-hoc, short-term intervention, housing is more futuristic and stable.
After highlighting the significance of shelters in a post-calamitic scenario, it must also be noted that ensuring such shelters has been one of the most significant challenges for governments, humanitarian agencies, and, most importantly, survivors. Shelters are the primary security source for those affected by diseases and the climate.
They include plastic sheets, tents, prefabricated units, public community buildings such as leisure centers, university halls of residence, worship, sports venues, and private rentals. Utmost and thorough research must be conducted to choose the location of a shelter congregation, for the duration of people’s stay there is unknown.
The shelter that has been provided must allow them to access all aspects of a dignified life—education, livelihood, healthcare, religion, and leisure; otherwise, it is no better than an open prison. Demographic wants and needs must be taken into consideration while designing said shelters.
Housing is essentially the next step after shelters, wherein the state aims to provide a more long-term and permanent solution to the plight of those whose houses were snatched by the disaster. Housing complexes have to be built in a safe and healthy environment to ensure that the residents have all the resources needed to move forward in their path of healing.
Expert engineers and architects support a more complex and comprehensive process within a disaster context. This process is often referred to as reconstruction or rehabilitation housing. The plan involves repairing and reconstructing viable damaged infrastructure or brand-new construction of full / semi-homes to provide sustenance to the affected.
Housing is a result of all disaster rehabilitation activities. However, its attributes, such as design, materials, and function, vary from culture to culture. Thus, there is a need to integrate individual choices in shelter building while collectively recognizing public health and livelihood access requirements. National and local Government policies, involvement of non-governmental agencies, dependence on the market mechanism, and various socio-demographic and socioeconomic factors shape this process.
CONCLUSION
As mere humans, we cannot control how or when disasters strike. However, we can ensure that they take away significantly less of us every time they do. When threatened with such situations, all forces, be it the military, national administration, local civic bodies, or your neighbors, have just one idea in mind: survival.
Those who are fortunate enough to achieve that must be treated with sensitivity and consideration in society, for they have endured a lot and given every bit of support to recover. To be better equipped, all the plans mentioned above, phases, and steps must be studied at length, both by authorities and individuals.
Our ancestors have taught us that precaution is always better than cure. We hope to have highlighted that and taken it a few miles ahead by suggesting post-disaster measures for a more equitable society.