Despite a growing literature on disaster resilience, our understanding of what makes rural areas resilient remains limited. Existing literature mainly focuses on urban areas and characterizes rural areas as more vulnerable than urban areas without recognizing the possibility of rural resilience. Furthermore, there is a lack of robust and consistent indicators focusing both on the vulnerability and resilience of rural areas. This study is advances scientific research on disaster resilience in rural areas. The specific aims are to (1) develop an innovative, multi-faceted, place-based vulnerability and resilience index with an exclusive focus on rural areas (called the Rural Vulnerability and Resilience Index or RVRI in short); (2) identify the consequences of vulnerability and resilience in terms of disaster recovery (in the context of the 1993 Midwest Floods, 1996 Southern Plains Drought, and the 2005 Hurricane Katrina); and (3) develop policy options for rural areas on enhancing disaster resilience.
The Resilient Rural America project significantly enhances the abilities of policy makers and practitioners by providing new knowledge of how disaster vulnerability and resilience change over time and across rural areas in the U.S. It will help them tailor policies to reduce the vulnerabilities of each rural area and make more informed funding allocation decisions at the state and federal levels to reduce disparities in preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation capacities.
The main purpose of this project is to enhance our understanding of what makes rural areas in the U.S. resilient in the face of disasters. Existing studies of disaster recovery focus on urban areas and characterize rural areas as more vulnerable than urban areas without recognizing the possibility of rural resilience. This study seeks to fill this gap in our knowledge by studying rural resilience. To this end, we studied long-term recovery processes following three major disasters: the 1993 Midwest Floods; the 1996 Southern Plains Drought; and 2005 Hurricane Katrina in the state of Mississippi. The overall project was led by a team from Florida International University, and they are still analyzing the results from all three disaster cases. This particular report covers only the work of the research team from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which contributed the study of the recovery following the 1993 Midwest Floods. Based on analysis of economic data for rural counties throughout the area affected by the 1993 floods, we selected two representative counties for detailed study: Randolph County, Illinois, and Allamakee County, Iowa. A total of eight communities in these two counties were affected by the flood. Through existing reports, research in the local public libraries, review of contemporary news accounts, interviews with community leaders, and meetings with focus groups of residents and business owners from the eight communities most affected, we were able to write accounts of the processes by which the two counties recovered from the floods. We also developed working hypotheses of the factors that affected successful recovery. Although the FIU team is not yet finished with systematic analysis of all the interview transcripts from all three disaster cases, we can offer some preliminary conclusions based on our research in these two counties. In both Randolph and Allamakee County, resourceful citizens and widespread community involvement were critically important factors leading to recovery. In two communities in particular, the community-level response was so strong that it greatly facilitated rapid cleanup and recovery within months. The two case study counties are characterized by relatively homogeneous populations, and many of the residents have longstanding family connections in the area. These deep ties provide social cohesion and support networks that ease the process of recovery after disaster. In two of the communities, however, a strong sense of heritage has had a perverse effect of maintaining a sense of attachment to homes in floodprone areas, despite repeated flooding over the years; even so, the strong social ties have made these communities resilient, as they have been able to rebuild after numerous floods. The low density of rural areas appears to provide some advantages in resilience to flooding, in that there are many available building locations on higher ground, For example, after the flood in Randolph County, extensive floodplain buyout programs were able to move households to safer nearby locations that permitted social ties to continue to exist. In all the communities, interviewees frequently cited the resourcefulness of rural residents and their ability to solve problems without waiting for assistance from government officials or professionals from outside the community. In Randolph County, strong local leadership contributed to effective access to state and federal recovery assistance. This is not necessarily a rural characteristic, but it also demonstrates that even rural places with minimal governmental institutions have the capacity to organize a strong community and governmental response to disaster. In summary, for this flood disaster--which directly affected parts of many communities while leaving other parts completed untouched--deep social ties in these communities appeared to facilitate the process of recovery. The same might not be true of rural communities that are more completely devastated by disaster nor of communities with greater inequalities or ethnic minorities.
