Assessing Factors That Impact Community Disaster Preparedness and Communication

• In Event: Influence of Disaster on Public Policy

Abstract

Local communities are on the front lines in responding to natural and social disasters, such as floods, tornadoes, and pandemics. Although state and federal governments can support recovery, the preparation and immediate response to natural disasters rely heavily on local governments. The ability to implement sustainable and equitable development, disaster preparedness, stakeholder management, and public communication are instrumental in their ability to promote timely and effective recovery, thereby saving their communities’ lives and livelihoods. Yet, local communities and governments are often plagued with challenges created by low pluralism, limited community representation in decision making, and non-collaborative infrastructure. These challenges have the potential to create a wide gap between communities in terms of their ability to prepare, respond and recover from natural disasters.

Considering this, our research seeks to understand what steps county and local administrators have taken to prepare for natural disasters and communicate with their constituents during times of crisis. Specifically, we compiled original data from local disaster preparation and communication plans, documents put together by local emergency planning committees (LEPCs) and community emergency response teams (CERTS), and interviews with local government workers and interested publics. This study compares disaster preparation and communication plans for seven counties in Iowa and the municipalities and other government entities within them, selected to vary in key demographic characteristics and recent disaster experience. We include Mills and Freemont counties, which experienced historic flooding in Spring 2019, and Johnson and Black Hawk counties, which experienced tornado damage in Spring 2020. To address inclusivity in disaster responsiveness, we include relatively ethnically diverse Buena Vista and Crawford counties in our pilot sample. Additionally, we include Shelby County, which has been ranked as the second most resilient county in the United States.

Counties and municipalities are heavily and directly involved in emergency management and serve to coordinate response implementation by state and federal authorities, yet remain understudied. Comparing counties and audiences in Iowa provides a unique opportunity to explore fine grained variation in pluralism, community representation, and decision-making infrastructures. We situate our study in Iowa due to the variety of both natural and social disasters that the state routinely faces (e.g., tornados, floods, and health issues); stakeholders (e.g. agricultural and industrial interests, health care workers, educators and students); and county and local demographics (e.g. density, immigrant populations, and income levels). Often, those most affected by disasters and emergency have the least amount of influence in planning for them. Because of the relative frequency of localized natural disasters and the variation in social and economic contexts across counties, Iowa provides a unique opportunity for developing metrics for evaluating county level disaster preparedness plans. Additionally, as we have seen from our current health and economic crises, Iowa plays an important role in the national supply chain for a variety of goods and services and is often in the political spotlight as an exemplification of “middle America.”

Preliminary research and analysis indicate that all counties and many municipalities may have basic response plans in place, however these plans often meet minimum federal requirements and are not easily accessible to the public. Additionally, only the counties with relatively large metropolitan centers include specific communication and information dissemination components. Smaller and more rural areas tend to rely on specific individuals with local knowledge and contacts to coordinate in the moment of a natural disaster rather than set up institutionalized positions and formalize communication and action plans. With additional analysis, we also expect to find that, even in areas with large immigrant populations, few response plans address the need to communicate quickly across ethnicities and/or languages. In addition to population size, urbanization rates, and wealth, the presence of particularly active individuals in roles of power and influence – for example, city managers who go above and beyond their basic minimum duties in office – make a critical difference in the degree of pre-disaster planning. Finally, we expect even for entities with disaster and/or communication plans, for those plans to be at least partially out of date. Our next step is to evaluate the quality of these responses and understand what effect the variation in response planning has on immediate response and longer-term recovery.

Authors

• Elise Pizzi, University of Iowa

• Kylah Hedding, University of Iowa

• Kajsa E. Dalrymple, University of Wisconsin, Madison