ABSTRACT
Community resilience has become the holy grail for emergency managers and policy makers concerned about risks to life and property. It is a goal driven by the needs to reduce reliance upon increasingly scarce federal resources and to encourage the exercise of local responsibility for managing risks posed by natural and unnatural hazards. It is also driven by the necessity to increase local self-reliance in the event that the nature or scale of a disaster may make it diffi cult or even impossible for federal and even state authorities to respond to all communities needing assistance and even for neighboring jurisdictions to share resources via formal or informal mutual assistance agreements. Demand for assistance may far outstrip federal and state capabilities, in other words. Assistance may not just be slow in coming, it may not come at all or may be very late in arriving and communities will have to fend for themselves. This is the kind of scenario that might result from a pandemic, asteroid strike, nuclear attack, and other cataclysmic event or from the cascading impacts of long-term trends such as climate change or earthquake storms. Indeed, some communities in Mississippi and Louisiana did not receive outside aid for a week or more after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in 2005.
