Innovative Disaster Recovery Strategies for Interim and Permanent Housing Construction

DESCRIPTION: Sustaining and rebuilding housing infrastructure is crucial for ensuring an effective disaster recovery. That said, FEMA has identified several current gaps in housing response and recovery pertaining to the delivery of transitional sheltering, emergency repairs, temporary housing, case management services, and long-term housing assistance from federal, state, local, and non-profit sector partners. Executing strategies such as developing a state-wide Disaster Housing Task Force and rapidly initiating the construction of temporary and permanent housing are of prime importance for sustaining Community Lifelines, particularly for food, water and sheltering. As noted in FEMA’s Threat and Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment and its 2017 Hurricane Season After Action Report, there is also an urgent need to provide new, innovative trainings for pre-incident preparedness and capability-building to ensure State, Local, Tribal, and Territorial governments’ implementation of direct temporary housing and permanent housing construction complying with federal laws, regulations, and policies.

By incorporating a training model emphasizing the FEMA Community Lifelines construct, the National Center for Disaster Preparedness, Columbia University, proposes to build on its four current FEMA training awards by developing web-based and mobile instructor-led curricula to increase the competency and capability of our nation’s disaster planners and responders when dealing with the aforementioned housing gaps and solutions. Specifically, NCDP proposes to develop 1 mobile instructor-led training (ILT): Planning for Transitional and Long-Term Housing After Major Disasters (Management Level). This mobile ILT, to be offered 20 times in each of the 10 FEMA regions, will be driven by a scenario and toolkit-based curriculum with a focus on the development of a Disaster Housing Task Force and rapidly initiating the construction of temporary and permanent housing. All trainings will run from 9:00am – 5:00pm, for a single day. Additionally, we will develop two web-based trainings, Developing a Disaster Housing Task Force (Awareness Level) and Incorporating Best Practices for Short Term and Long Term Housing Construction Programs (Performance Level), each being 90 minutes in duration. These web-based courses will build on the themes of the mobile instructor-led training, while also including state of the art interactive case studies, online geographic information system (GIS) resources, and downloadable toolkit documents.