If
youre conducting scholarly research in disaster science, you can
expect to spend weeks or months reading the related studies others have
published and analyzing their significance to your own work.
On the other hand, if youre an emergency official in a small town
that could be in the path of an oncoming hurricane, you probably dont
have time to pore over research journals to help you prepare
especially during this Atlantic hurricane season, which began June 1
amid the global coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
Thats where the University of Delawares Disaster Research Center (DRC) comes in.
Already recognized as the nations oldest research center dedicated
to the social science aspects of disaster, the DRC has added a new
public outreach service in which graduate students compile high-quality
research on a variety of topics and summarize it in ways that are clear
and easy to understand.
Called DRC It! (If you dont know it, DRC It!), the
website is designed to assist emergency management professionals and the
public as they make plans to respond to and recover from disasters.
There are a lot of emergency managers who do follow the research,
but with everything theyre handling, their time is stretched thin,
said Logan Gerber-Chavez, a graduate research assistant in the DRC and a
doctoral student in disaster science and management. We see this as a way to make their jobs a little easier.
Gerber-Chavez and Aimee Mankins, also a DRC graduate research
assistant and a masters degree student, spent months reading and
summarizing hundreds of research papers and developing the online
presentation of their findings. The first two topics focus on
evacuations during hurricanes and on business recovery after disasters
such as fires or floods. They expect to post new topics every several
months.
Weve reached out to emergency management professionals to get their
input on what is most useful to them, Mankins said. Were trying to
create a bridge between practice and scholarship, and we want this
information to be accessible to everyone, especially to people in
decision-making positions.
The first topic was selected because of wide interest in how
communities can best respond to the threat of hurricanes. The DRC fields
questions every year during the season about when to encourage or order
evacuations, the most effective ways to get the word out about an
approaching storm and how residents decide whether and when to leave
their homes.
DRC has always been engaged with our partners in the emergency
management community, and we want cutting-edge science to inform
practices, said Joseph Trainor, associate professor of public policy
and administration and a core faculty member in the center. The idea
for an initiative like this came from many years of hearing that
research ideas were useful but were not always accessible for a number
of reasons. We wanted to be part of the solution to that problem.