Preparing for, responding to, and mitigating compound coastal water hazards for resilient rural communities Grant uri icon

abstract

  • The research team from the Center of Natural Hazards Research at East Carolina University proposes to co-produce compound event information and communication products (e.g. flood maps) with emergency managers, planners, and health officials in 28 coastal counties of North Carolina, making up four regional government councils, and roughly coinciding with the northeast and southeast economic zones. The councils provide an important service to underserved rural communities within these counties, with a focus on communicating state and federal programs and assisting with regional planning. We have three objectives for this study. 1) We will learn from focus groups of emergency managers, planners, and health officials how they currently understand, prepare for, respond to, and mitigate against compound events related to water and what new and novel merged data sets and tools would be beneficial for their operations. 2) We will then quantify the economic and health impacts from recent compound events in the region, with a focus on the past five years. We will investigate the spectrum of storms during this period, from relatively weak systems that produced surprising floods to Hurricanes Matthew and Florence, which devastated counties in our study area. We will examine economic losses and morbidity/mortality longitudinally and in the aggregate, and make comparisons to the expected damages from individual hazards in isolation. 3) Finally, we will return to the same focus groups to report on the research and relate it to their initial perceptions and experiences with the goal of developing best practices.

date/time interval

  • September 2020 - May 2023