Stabilization: The Missing Piece in U.S. Disaster Management Strategy

In the wake of recent disasters, most notably Hurricane Helene, the way our system is set up it is designed to restore infrastructure, downtowns and housing to their previous states. This leaves in place previous vulnerabilities. Furthermore, it may be too early to make such permanent decisions in some cases.

What is missing from the current process is a stage focused on stabilization – a period that provides temporary solutions and work arounds to problems and allows individuals and community decision makers more time to take stock and plan their long-term recovery.

Stabilization is a central stage for how we manage disasters at an individual level. Let’s use a car accident as an analogy. Once an accident happens, the EMTs, police, and tow trucks arrive to manage the scene of the accident. The next stage is that they take you to a hospital and your car to a shop. This is the stabilization stage – you get diagnosed, you get a cast or a brace and the insurance company provides you a loaner vehicle.

These mechanisms allow individuals to take stock of their situation. They have time to decide if they want to repair the car or buy a new one. They have time to arrange how they want to handle work and their physical therapy. In short, stabilization is a vital part of how we manage personal disasters.

In contrast, right now many communities are experiencing a “chasm of death” in the period between when the emergency response and relief starts to wind down and recovery processes start to get institutionalized.

One month after Helene, deadlines for FEMA publica assistance pre-applications are already approaching. At the same time some communities are only in the beginning stages of restoring services. Many responders, particularly those in small towns, must wear multiple hats, leaving little to no time to think about planning for the future. Everyone is performing some kind of triage to understand their immediate needs. LC Clemons, the Institute for Sustainable Development’s (ISD) field representative and founder of Force of Nature Solutions, notes, “the urgent is what is important right now.”??????????????????????????????????????????

In western North Carolina, the Catawba River, the French Broad River and their tributaries washed out downtowns at the same time that the storms overwhelmed many critical services. ?Helene combined with other storms to dump 40 trillion gallons of water in a week. Restoring systems to their former state might not even be possible.?

Rethinking Our Response: What Could True Stabilization Look Like?

A true stabilization process would involve several key components aimed at fostering resilience and recovery in communities impacted by disasters. These would include:?????????????

• Once the emergency response winds down, providing community leaders with briefings about who their state and federal liaisons are, what they can expect, checklists they should follow, and support systems they can utilize.
• Implementation of pre-determined temporary waiver rules and guidance for vendors who have lost their plant, property, and equipment. For example, to enable restaurants to operate food trucks for a set period, or to allow RVs and temporary housing in designated lots.
• Post-traumatic stress and burn-out counseling
• Systematic third-party impact assessments
• Immediate funding mechanisms such as turnkey community-level insurance policies that can be tapped swiftly. The current model is for communities to spend money and then be reimbursed 80 or 90 cents on the dollar, which is a totally different proposition fiscally and psychologically.

To be sure, there are valid concerns that temporary fixes could become permanent solutions that degrade local quality of life. I personally saw this happen in Haiti, and examples of jerry-rigged housing can be found in Puerto Rico, Louisiana, and other places along the Gulf Coast. Therefore, safeguards must be built into the stabilization process to ensure that temporary measures do not hinder long-term community functionality, aesthetics or quality of life.

In short, stabilization is an important sub-discipline of disaster management that needs to be more intentionally managed and supported. If we want recoveries to be driven by the people and communities who know their own interests best, we need to develop more temporary support mechanisms to give them more time to make weighty, consequential decisions about their long-term future recovery and development. We do it at a personal level; we should be doing this at the community level too.