Research group examines disaster relief

Have you kept yourself prepared for Hurricane Season?

Several tropical storms travel through Florida each year. Those storms leave many people wondering how the results can be avoided, or cause less damage.

After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, it was made apparent to many researchers, specifically UCF faculty members Naim Kapucu, Christopher Hawkins and Fernando Rivera, that something had to be done.

The National Institute of Food and Agriculture funded UCF $387,556 to help aid rural communities throughout the Central Florida region prepare, respond and recover from natural disasters.

Kapucu, the principal investigator and director of the Center for Public and Nonprofit Management and associate professor of public administration, said Central Florida has continuously been vulnerable to many natural occurrences that have disrupted communities, individuals and social-technical systems and functions.

The team of researchers hope to generate an asset-base approach. This would improve community capacity and develop structural data to better the management within emergency response networks.

Researchers from the Center for Public and Nonprofit Management will conduct and analyze research in the 11 chosen counties — Brevard, Citrus, Flagler, Lake, Levy, Marion, Orange, Osceola, Seminole, Sumter and Volusia — to identify the proper strategies needed to minimize the impact of natural disasters.

Each county will have a separate focus group with support from its own research assistants. Documentary analysis and survey data will be taken from citizen groups, faith-based community organizations, business representatives and emergency management agencies.

This project will continue for three years and a portion of the grant money will pay for four students' tuitions to be a part of the research team. Three of the students selected will be graduate students and one will be an undergraduate.

The grant will also cover travel expenses to research conferences that Kapucu and his team members will be attending.

"The most important part is the workshop," Kapucu said. "We have a great combination of people participating and we did a great job on collecting data for the grant we have received."

Kapucu said this grant was highly competitive and called for a lot of criteria, but the grant was given to UCF due to the quality of their proposal.

A conference will also be held at UCF at the end of the second and final year in which Kapucu and co-investigators will invite international experts, local management personnel and community members to share what they have found and receive feedback.

A book will also be published by Kapucu and his two co-principal investigators, Hawkins, from UCF's public administration department, and Rivera of the sociology department.

"Rural communities are spatially isolated and have less economic resources," Rivera said. "Some areas may lack basic communication tools and these are also the areas that are most prone to tornados, wildfires and hurricanes so it is important to build effective disaster management techniques."

Rivera said that once management techniques are put into place, it will lead to stronger rural communities with the knowledge they need to help people stay disaster ready at all times.

"I grew up in a very rural area in Colombia, if we would of had this opportunity when I was living there things would have been handled much differently when it came to wildfires and storms," said Jennifer Castano, a junior digital design major. "I think this project will bring great things to the people who live in not so technologically advanced areas."

Hawkins said that linking the land use and growth policies of Central Florida communities to disaster resilience is one of the core parts of their research.

He hopes that over the years this project will develop useful information that can advance the field of public administration, emergency management and planning as well as being able to provide additional tools for Central Florida communities.