Gulf of Mexico Regional News

Facilitators train to help communities find disaster vulnerabilities

Michael Shelton of the Weeks Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, second from right, discusses the Coastal Community Resilience Index on Feb. 22 during a workshop at the Mississippi State University Coastal Research and Extension Center in Biloxi, Miss. Other members of the discussion group include Bill Mahan of Florida Sea Grant, left, David Bryant of Georgia Sea Grant, Cile Guidry of Louisiana Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster (VOAD) and Rhonda Cummins of Texas Sea Grant.

Every community is at some risk of experiencing a natural or man-made disaster. Hurricanes, floods, tornadoes and oil spills are just some of the potential damaging scenarios.

Nearly 50 people who work with communities attended a workshop Feb. 22-23 in Biloxi, Miss., to learn more about the Coastal Community Resilience Index and how it can be helpful to leaders of cities, counties and parishes and lessen the effects disasters have on their communities.

The self-assessment tool is a booklet that community leaders can work through in a couple of hours. It is helpful for the community to have a facilitator who can guide them through the exercise, and this train-the-trainer workshop allowed potential self-assessment facilitators from all Gulf of Mexico states and Georgia to become familiar with the index and its benefits.

Pat Skinner, a disaster recovery and communications specialist with Louisiana State University Ag Center, attended the workshop. She said she thinks the self-assessment exercise could be valuable to communities.

“On the very basic level, they actually see where some of their vulnerabilities are,” she said. “In many cases, they could have made improvements in these areas, but they had not recognized they were related to hazard resilience.”

The self-assessment also could help extension and outreach professionals connect with new audiences.

“It’s an opportunity where an extension person might realize they have programs that could help the community become less vulnerable to hazards,” Skinner said.

The roles of the facilitators can continue long after the self-assessment is complete. They can be a resource for information, programs and funding opportunities for communities. They can also foster dialog between communities.

“This index has great potential for helping communities beyond the Coast to begin to talk among themselves or between communities about increasing their disaster resilience,” said Virginia Morgan, an Alabama state extension specialist with the Alabama Cooperative Extension System and chairperson of the Extension Disaster Education Network.

The training workshop is sponsored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Gulf of Mexico Program, the Gulf of Mexico Alliance Resilience Team, the Gulf of Mexico Sea Grant College Programs and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Coastal Storms Program.

For more information about the Coastal Community Resilience Index, go to http://masgc.org/ri or contact Jody Thompson at 251-438-5690 or jody.thompson@auburn.edu.