Measuring, Monitoring, and Evaluating Post-Disaster Recovery: A Key Element in Understanding Community Resilience

The process of community recovery in the aftermath of a disaster is complex, long lasting, resource intensive, and poorly understood. Insights described here result from an ongoing project that aims to monitor, quantify, and evaluate the process of post-disaster recovery for two events, Hurricane Charley (2004, Charlotte County and Punta Gorda, Florida) and Hurricane Katrina (2005, Harrison County and Biloxi, Mississippi). A mixed-methods approach using statistical data, interviews, and remote sensing-derived data is applied in an effort to understand as well as monitor, measure and evaluate the recovery process and its outcomes. Observations associated with the post-disaster course of moving residents from temporary to transitional, and ultimately permanent housing serves as the focus for this paper. This work represents a discrete portion of a multi-sector project where Economic, Environmental, Housing/Infrastructure, and Social elements of community recovery are explored. Understanding community recovery can inform community resilience-building strategies.