Pre-Disaster Recovery Planning Guidance

+Step 1: Form your pre-disaster recovery planning team.

Pre-disaster recovery planning requires a multi-disciplinary and cross-sectoral team with local and regional resilience and disaster recovery expertise. As such:

• The size and composition of the team will vary by the community; in some places, a small team that includes core staff members will be sufficient. In others, the team might include a more diverse group of members from across local government and other key stakeholders.
• Utilize a wide variety of external partners at the county, state, and federal government and non-governmental organizations who will be essential to your recovery should a disaster occur.
• The pre-disaster recovery team should be led by a recovery plan coordinator, likely a local government staff person with experience managing multi-departmental planning processes (i.e., town administrator, city manager, emergency manager, and/or planning director). This person(s) should be able to commit the time necessary to organize the team and serve as its primary point of contact.

Note that the pre-disaster recovery planning team is not the same as the post-disaster recovery planning team that your community will form in the event of a disaster, although there will likely be overlap.

*For more information on forming a planning team, see Step 1, Activity 2 of the Community Readiness and Resilience Toolkit and use the planning team tab in the Pre-disaster Planning Workbook.

+Step 2: Determine the scope, timeline, and budget of your planning efforts.

You will need to define the scope of your efforts based on the existing conditions, vulnerabilities, opportunities, needs, goals, and aspirations of your community. Defining the scope of your pre-disaster recovery planning efforts will determine your path forward to successfully execute this project and ensure that your community continues to thrive. This includes scheduling your planning efforts, determining the budget you have available to support this work, and identifying where and when you should engage with the broader community in supporting these efforts.

For more information, see Step 1 of the Community Readiness and Resilience Toolkit. In addition, use the project schedule, project budget sheet, stakeholder mapping, and community engagement plan tabs in the Pre-disaster Planning Workbook.

+Step 3: Inventory your community’s existing plans.

Disaster recovery does not take place in a vacuum; your pre-disaster recovery plan should be informed by the “everyday” plans that guide your community’s growth and development. In this step, you will create an easy-to-access list of your community’s local plans and do some basic summary and analysis.

Create a list of the applicable plans or strategies in your community that will be important in disaster recovery (i.e., Comprehensive Plan, Local Hazard Mitigation Plan, Emergency Operations Plan, Continuity of Operations Plan (COOP), Continuity of Government Plan (COG), Economic Development Plan or Strategy, Housing Study, Climate Change Resilience Plan, among others). Be sure to briefly describe the recovery areas that are covered by each plan. For example, an affordable housing strategy includes information about the local housing market that might be important for housing recovery decision-making.

For more information, see Step 1 Activity 1 of the Community Readiness and Resilience Toolkit. In addition, use the community plan tab in the Pre-disaster Planning Workbook to support you in your inventory.

+Step 4: Create a pre-disaster recovery ordinance.

If you have not already done so, be sure to develop a pre-event recovery ordinance, which can improve your community’s disaster recovery capabilities and recovery outcomes. A pre-disaster recovery ordinance will outline necessary authorities, authorize critical actions, establish coordination bodies, and clarify various legal provisions, among other functions. This ordinance can serve as either a forerunner or supplement to a comprehensive pre-disaster recovery plan or framework.

Use the model recovery ordinance to support you in this step.

+Step 5: Understand your community’s vulnerabilities and risks.

There are many ways to assess your community’s vulnerabilities and risks to current and future changes. Depending on your capacity or need, you may choose to define the current and future risks and vulnerabilities of your community using scenario planning exercises, or at a deeper level with a full vulnerability and/or risk assessment. The goal is to define the current and future potential shocks, stressors, and cascading impacts that your community could experience.

Need additional support? The Colorado Resiliency Office (CRO) helps communities to understand and define their vulnerabilities and risks to current and future shocks and stressors. If you would like assistance in your resilience or scenario planning work, be sure to connect with your DOLA Regional Manager here.

For more information, see Step 3 of the Community Readiness and Resilience Toolkit. Also, use the disaster profiles tab in the Pre-disaster Planning Workbook. In addition, for more clarity on current and future shocks and stressors, use the shocks and stressors, assess vulnerability, assess risk, risk matrix, and vulnerability specific templates in the Pre-disaster Planning Workbook.

+Step 6: Understand your community’s capacity and capabilities.

Now that you have identified and explored the hazards that have the potential to disrupt your community, you’ll be able to identify the skills, resources, capabilities, and other aspects of community recovery capacity your community may need to draw from in the event of a disaster. Knowing your capacity and capability needs will help you to understand how prepared you are for recovery. Moreover, by identifying capacity gaps you can place special emphasis on the most pressing capacity development needs in the weeks, months, or years you have before the next disaster strikes. What this looks like will be different for every community, and might involve such things as identifying and engaging with key stakeholders and partners, enabling staff training, purchasing equipment, technologies, and supplies, establishing financing mechanisms, and other capacity enhancements.

The general concept for a capacity assessment is to walk through a hypothetical recovery process, listing likely resource and activity needs and assigning actual community resources that exist to address them. FEMA’s National Preparedness System offers some guidance on how your community can frame the capacity assessment, using eight Core Capabilities, which include: Planning, Public Information and Warning, Operational Coordination, Economic Recovery, Health and Social Services, Housing, Infrastructure Systems, and Natural and Cultural Resources. For more information on capacity assessment, see the FEMA pre-disaster recovery planning guide (starting on page 43).

Another good way to structure a capacity assessment is to measure capacity against the five recovery areas used by the State of Colorado, which include: Community and Economic, Housing, Infrastructure, Health and Human Services, and Cultural and Natural Resources. These can be revised to fit the local context of your community. For more information go to the CRO Resource Center.

For support, use the Community Capacities tab in the Pre-disaster Planning Workbook and Pre-disaster Recovery Plan Template to create your own.

+Step 7: Develop pre-disaster recovery actions and identify priorities for building recovery capacity.

Now that you have described your community’s disaster risk and vulnerabilities, as well as evaluated your community’s capabilities, it is time to start identifying specific pre-disaster recovery actions and priorities. This will ensure that you are building resilience before a disaster occurs to reduce the impacts of future events and build capacity for recovery. It will also help you identify where and how to implement strategies or mainstream them into other planning efforts. The application of individual resilience strategies will depend on the key concern being addressed, the sector the action applies to, and the existing planning efforts and resources available to the community.

Reassessing your community’s overarching resilience goals and vision will help guide your efforts. In addition, broad community engagement, continued engagement with your team of technical advisors, and other community experts will support the innovative, effective, and equitable actions your community needs to prepare for a disaster before it occurs.

In addition, you don’t have to start from scratch. Resilience strategies and actions are being developed by communities across the state, country, and world. This broad list of seed strategies will give you a foundation to start from when thinking about which strategies will work best for your community. Do not be afraid to lean into this larger network. But be sure to look across your community and broader region for synergies to the planning work you are doing. Not all of the pre-disaster recovery actions you identify should make the final cut into the plan. Evaluating your list of resilience actions based on specific criteria will ensure that you are using a systematic approach to making recommendations for their integration into your plan and their ultimate implementation.

For the detailed process on how to develop general resilience strategies, see Step 4 of the Community Readiness and Resilience Toolkit. Also, use the strategies and actions tab in the Pre-disaster Planning Workbook for support on this step. From there, be sure to include them in the Pre-disaster Recovery Plan Template.

+Step 8: Develop your plan.

To chart a clear path towards implementation, you should integrate priority resilience strategies/actions into a pre-disaster recovery plan and get buy-in from leadership and the broader community.

The list of final actions that make it into your plan may be a combination of programs, policies, or projects that you and your local and regional partners intend to implement. Community engagement is crucial at this stage. Therefore, when you have developed and prioritized your list of pre-disaster recovery actions, publish a draft version of your plan(s) for public review. Providing ample opportunity for community members to provide input into the plan will ensure that their voices are heard and that their input is integrated into the final product. In addition, be sure to solicit feedback from neighboring jurisdictions, the county, and additional organizations relevant to decision-making in this area. After you have provided the public an opportunity to comment, make suggestions, and identify potential changes to your draft plan, integrate those changes and finalize your plan.

*For more information, see Step 4, Activity 3 of the Community Readiness and Resilience Toolkit. In addition, be sure to use the Pre-disaster Recovery Plan Template as your base model plan. For support, be sure to use guidance provided by the FEMA’s Pre-Disaster Recovery Planning Guide for Local Governments. *

+Step 9: Adopt your pre-disaster recovery plan.

After you have finalized the plan, present your final materials to your jurisdiction’s leadership so that the plan can be formally adopted. Be sure to communicate regularly with leadership throughout the process so that they are aware of where you are in the planning process, can help you solve potential challenges, and ensure that there are no surprises after you have invested time, money, and energy into your pre-disaster planning efforts.

*For more information, see Step 4, Activity 3 of the Community Readiness and Resilience Toolkit. In addition, be sure to use the Pre-disaster Recovery Plan Template to support you in your work. *

+Step 10: Develop an implementation plan for your pre-disaster recovery plan actions and implement your pre-disaster recovery plan actions.

This process builds upon the work completed in the previous steps and helps to establish a clear, equitable, and actionable path towards the implementation of pre-disaster recovery planning actions in your community. Developing an implementation plan can be as detailed as you would like. For example, you could create a standalone document highlighting the specific steps your team should take for implementation. Or, your team could work from the tab called “Action Implementation” in the pre-disaster recovery planning workbook. This process helps you identify implementation details (e.g., project lead, funding source, timeframe, etc.) and select action leads and potential supporting partners (which you will have already done using the pre-disaster recovery planning workbook tab called “Strategies and Actions”).

During this phase, you will also need to convene your recovery implementation team. This may be where you further define leadership roles that support recovery procedures and protocols as well as define post-disaster decision-making, policy setting, and operations. You will also need to develop your post-disaster planning structure during this step. This often involves working with local and regional partners to develop a long-term recovery group, specifying coordinator positions, and a variety of other tasks. For more information on this specific process, see Step 4 (pages 49-59) in the guidance provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Pre-Disaster Recovery Planning Guide for Local Governments.

Implementing pre-disaster recovery actions requires dedicated support from a team, some of which you will already be collaborating with as a part of this process. When thinking about the composition of your community resilience implementation team, consider involving the same representative groups including the core planning team, advisory committee, and various community stakeholders; however, it is likely essential to expand your outreach to include additional community groups, businesses, departments, non-profit organizations, non-governmental organizations, and more. To organize details for your implementation team, use the “Implementation Team” tab in the Pre-disaster Recovery Planning Workbook.

Now that you have prioritized actions, developed a timeline for implementation, and put together your implementation team, you are finally ready to take action! You will want to ensure that the implementation of your pre-disaster recovery actions is effective, efficient, and equitable. As you have already determined the priority short-term actions, you can begin to implement them by reaching out to the people, organizations, or departments responsible for implementing them. This can be done by members of your implementation team for more discrete actions, but in some instances, subcommittees may be necessary to address the more complex or long-term actions. You can also organize subcommittees by strategy, and this may provide more opportunities to hear from invested community members.

*For more information, reference Step 5 of the Community Readiness and Resilience Toolkit.

+Step 11: Maintain your plan.

As social, economic, and environmental conditions change in your community, pre-disaster planning strategies and actions will need to be monitored, evaluated, and adjusted over time. For long-term success, it is important to have regular plan updates (generally every five years) and the willingness to redirect critically important resources. The plan should serve as a resource for local staff, elected officials, and key stakeholders in the community, therefore the plan needs to be monitored, maintained, and adjusted by your team and/or department over time.

For more information, see Step 6 in the Community Readiness and Resilience Toolkit.