![]() Constant communication with and involvement by Florida’s state disaster recovery coordinator, along with the local recovery groups, was critical to the process. Scriven, who serves as Academia Advisor with the FEMA NDRS cadre, worked with NDRS field leadership, the EPA Sustainability Advisor and the five federal field coordinators to build out and manage projects that the communities decided were their best path to recovery. The Department of Interior works with the impacted state to ensure the protection and restoration of natural and cultural resources, while the Department of Commerce addresses resources necessary for economic recovery.ĭr. Health and Human Services addresses public health, education and social services. Teams from Housing and Urban Development work to get residents into safe living conditions. Army Corps of Engineers, for example, works with the impacted state and local municipalities to restore infrastructure systems, such as roads and water resources. Olivia ScrivenįEMA’s NDRS cadre works on recovery efforts through an interagency partnership with five other federal agencies. We dealt without electricity for about 23-30 days in some parts of the county.”įEMA and Interagency Recovery Dr. FEMA came in and offered assistance to us, and our citizens were able to get water and tarps, and we were able to deliver goods to them. “I was newly elected, wasn’t quite sure of the way to go about putting things back together, but we came together as a board to start putting Calhoun County back together. “We were almost devastated to the point of not knowing whether we would be able to go on afterward.” “We were almost taken back to the Flintstone age on October 10, 2018, by Hurricane Michael,” said Scott Monlyn, current chair of the Calhoun County Board of Commissioners. Calhoun County was especially hard hit and provided a good starting point. After consultation with EPA’s Sustainability Advisor, who had been deployed to the disaster, and meetings with field coordinators from several other federal agencies, all agreed to explore whether CUPP could leverage its resources to aid in the recovery process. In the case of Hurricane Michael, FEMA saw an opportunity for the CUPP program to be used to help communities in the Florida Panhandle to recover and to help rebuild them to become more resilient. ![]() The program was initially designed to mitigate problems of environmental degradation and social justice, but has since expanded to assist in disaster recovery. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), CUPP connects colleges and universities with local communities to provide technical assistance in areas ranging from engineering to economics. The UWF students, supervised by their faculty mentor, were mobilized by FEMA through a program known as CUPP – College/Underserved Community Partnership Program. Hurricane-induced flooding had caused severe damage to homes, especially those in the county’s low-lying districts. Bailey was referring to students from the University of West Florida (UWF) who came to his community in the months following Hurricane Michael to help with a major housing planning effort. “God brought us these kids,” said Gene Bailey, former chair of the Calhoun (Fla.) County Board of Commissioners. This is Part 1 of a story of how the ongoing work of connecting and coordinating institutions of higher education with under-resourced communities and local governments can improve long-term recovery outcomes. Representatives from FEMA’s National Disaster Recovery Support (NDRS) cadre coordinated a federal response that included partnering with college and university faculty and students to provide technical planning expertise – a model CRC has also used for recovery from 2016’s Hurricane Matthew. The most impacted communities, many of them rural and with local governments administratively under-staffed relative to the rebuilding task before them, were in critical need of resources to begin the long road to recovery, many forced to rebuild from the ground up. ![]() In October 2018, Hurricane Michael made landfall in the Florida Panhandle as a Category 5 storm, arriving with peak winds of 155 miles per hour and leaving in its wake more than $25 billion in damages. ![]() Photo by Tori Lynn Schneider/Tallahassee Democrat. Damage is widespread in Blountstown, Fla., and the surrounding Calhoun County in the aftermath of Hurricane Michael in October 2018.
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