Recovery Overview

Recovery is a distinct phase of disaster management that presents a wide array of challenges and seeks to address often disparate community needs. A well-organized, well-managed, and local-government-led disaster recovery requires a well-defined and scalable framework that can be quickly operationalized.

The framework includes a structure for disaster recovery governance for City government as well as a guide for how to implement the governance structure in collaboration with local, regional, and national partners. By engaging in pre-disaster planning for post-disaster recovery, the City can be more responsive to community needs and move more quickly from response to recovery to resilience.

The National Disaster Recovery Framework (NDRF) as well as FEMA’s guidance for disaster recovery planning both indicate the importance of Local Disaster Recovery Managers (LDRMs) and the concept of “local primacy,” which encourages local jurisdictions to lead and manage disaster recovery efforts while coordinating with other partners. The governance structure presented in this chapter follows that guidance, laying out roles and responsibilities for recovery leadership, recovery management, and local partners.

During disaster response, before a recovery effort has begun, there are key questions detailed below that will need to be answered to fully operationalize the City’s CRF Disaster Recovery Framework.

Leadership

• How will the organizational structure for event-specific recovery be built out?

• Who sets event-specific recovery goals, priorities, and metrics?

• Who is responsible for ownership and updates to data used to measure recovery progress?

• Will recovery leadership staff be permanent, temporary, or a combination of both?

Management

• Which departments and/or agencies will be activated as part of recovery management?

• How will the public be informed and engaged throughout disaster recovery?

Staffing

• Will existing support staff be detailed to disaster recovery roles?

• How will steady state public services continue to be provided during disaster recovery?

• How much additional staff support is needed and for how long to support disaster recovery roles?

Answering these key questions will help guide how to populate the governance organizational chart below for each recovery effort.