Resilient Communities: A New Disaster Preparedness Approach

In my eight years as mayor of South Bend, we’ve experienced a 500-year flood and a 1,000-year flood. They happened within 18 months of each other.¹ Floods like this should occur once in a lifetime, but with climate change what was once rare has become routine. These disasters upend lives. I remember standing with a mother of four on the porch of her flooded house, the night before the first day of school, trying to figure out what to do because the flood made their house unlivable.

We can’t stop all natural disasters from striking, but we can control how we prepare for and recover from them. Continued »