SCC-CIVIC-PG Track B: Knowledge-to-Action: Enhance Community Disaster Preparedness and Resiliency through Physical and Virtual Drills

This project will use a community capabilities approach (CCA) to achieve disaster preparedness and resilience that complements a community capitals framework (CCF) which focuses on the community’s availability of resources. A CCA framework focuses on the policies and plans that communities have adopted and implemented to “absorb, recover from, and more successfully adapt to adverse events”.

The CCF is based on the fundamental framework of emergency management - hazard mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. To operationalize this vision, the objective of this project is to establish a transdisciplinary cross-sector knowledge-to-action network (KTAN). This network will co-develop new community-university partnerships (CUP) to enable evidence-driven solutions that foster evacuation preparedness and, thus, community resilience.

This broadening of participation allows the project team to (1) hold virtual KTAN workshops to co-design physical reality/virtual reality (PR/VR) drills and resilience programs; (2) develop quantitative metrics of preparedness; and (3) create inclusive activities that focus on population segments. This project will (1) yield significant societal impacts to engage community leaders, members, emergency responders, local and state emergency managers (EMs)/incident commanders (ICs), and researchers; (2) achieve interdisciplinary integration of social, engineering, and computer science to spark novel ideas at the intersection of them.

This project bridges existing gaps in connecting theoretical frameworks and emerging tools to help identify and assess the gaps in community preparedness and resilience programs. This project specifically uses a combination of PR/VR drills to validate indicators of evacuation preparedness through a new CUP. The project team has two goals: (1) develop an appropriate technology for PR/VR drills that tests the effectiveness of evacuation plans/procedures and, thus, identifies gaps in them; (2) conduct a survey of EMs/ICs to collect data on authorities’ decision-making times, distributions, and EMs’ past experiences in drills and actual evacuations to determine how drills can be designed more effectively to test plans.

The key innovations are (1) the new cross-sector KTAN that translates theoretical research into actionable programs; (2) the use of PR/VR drills to assess the effectiveness of plans/procedures; (3) the innovative use of a phone app and pre/post surveys to collect participants’ movements and risk perception changes; (4) the inclusion of residents and visitors at hotels, special facilities (e.g., schools, hospitals, nursing homes, jails), and vulnerable groups (e.g., people with disabilities, low-income, and tribal communities); (5) the accurate estimation of evacuation time estimate (ETE) components. This project will foster interdisciplinary collaborations and develop new CUPs to enhance community disaster preparedness and resilience.

This project is in response to Track B - CIVIC Innovation Challenge - Resilience to Natural Disasters a collaboration with NSF and the Department of Homeland Security.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.