As thousands fled the rage of Hurricane Ike, officials throughout Texas scrambled to meet storm victims’ nonemergency needs by providing food, clothing and temporary shelter.
Research currently under way at Texas A&M University’s Hazards Reduction and Recovery Center promises to fine tune the disaster response of Texas government and social service agencies by more accurately defining these nonemergency needs, as well as when and where they arise.
Sherry Bame, associate professor of urban planning at Texas A&M, is heading this three-year, $750,000 study funded by the U. S. Department of Homeland Security.
“It will be the first analysis of this magnitude of unmet disaster-related needs over time and location statewide,” said Bame, who holds a doctorate in health services and policy.
In the study’s first year, Bame and a team of students are gathering data collected from the 26 regional 2-1-1 call centers in Texas before, during and after hurricanes Katrina and Rita ripped through the region in 2005.
Similar to 9-1-1, 2-1-1 is a nationwide number for people with nonemergency needs. It connects callers with services such as food banks, clothing providers, shelters, rent and utility assistance, and services for the elderly, ill, disabled, or those unable to afford existing community resources. In Texas, 2-1-1 is an integral part of the state’s emergency management system.
“It’s going to be a lot of work to code and analyze over 1.5 million 2-1-1 calls documented during the time of the two hurricanes in 2005,” said Bame. “The findings will help to identify unmet needs that usually do not surface until much later, if at all, in managing emergencies. What we’re going to learn,” she said, “is really going to be remarkable.”
Because Texas established 2-1-1 as a statewide network in 2004, Bame said the service played a prominent role through its 26 call centers during Katrina and Rita as a communication hub between people with unmet needs and services, and volunteers who were available to help them.
“We’ve got a huge task to merge the 26 different databases,” she said.
A group of students hand-picked by Bame are currently combing through massive amounts of data, including some 300,000 handwritten records penned by call center volunteers. This information, she said, will be standardized and merged with electronic data within the 2-1-1 system to create one giant database.
In the study’s second year, Bame will analyze the data, characterizing the unmet needs of those affected by the storms, as well as needs of the communities that hosted the evacuees. The findings will be used to develop a template for real-time 2-1-1 analyses in the project’s final year.
“Using this tool, the availability of resources could be identified for community residents or evacuees who are able to connect online,” said Bame. “Staff and volunteers for 2-1-1 would log data of the calls for help, information and referral. Both online and 2-1-1 call data would then be configured for ‘real time’ analysis to inform emergency managers and community agencies when and where to mobilize what types of resources.”
She said with the template in place, emergency officials’ ability to track the location of vulnerable populations over time using the 2-1-1 database would help them mobilize resources with more precision and better serve high-risk populations during preparation, evacuation, mitigation and recovery phases of disasters.
“Needs during disasters vary by location and between high-risk subgroups of the population,” she said. “The needs change quickly, as do the resources that are available.”
The template, said Bame, could be adopted by 2-1-1 programs nationwide for emergency management through WebEOC, an Internet-based information management system that provides a single access point for the collection and dissemination of emergency or event-related information.
Destruction from hurricanes Katrina and Rita, though tragic, provided a unique research opportunity.
“During a disaster, you have certain needs such as shelter, food and clothing, but that’s usually only needed for the first few days, and then people go home,” she said. “After Katrina and Rita, though, for many people there wasn’t anyplace to go home to.”
Through the 2-1-1 data, Bame will be able to determine precisely what the short term needs were as well as the long term needs.
“For example,” said Bame, “we’ll be able to identify very specifically what types of clothing were needed — was it diapers, kids’ clothes, adult clothes, work clothes — and determine how those patterns shifted over time before the hurricane, during landfall, short term and long term, for both Katrina and Rita,” she said.
“At the same time,” she added, “we’ll be able to give some sort of a profile as to what types of needs seem to cluster together during specific periods of time before, during, and after the hurricanes. These findings may help communities to more efficiently mobilize appropriate resources to better meet disaster needs.”
- September 29, 2008 -
