Newsletter of the College of Architecture at Texas A&M University
Texas A&M’s Hazard Reduction & Recovery Center will continue its research of Galveston’s Hurricane Ike recovery begun last year with the help of a $350,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.
In December 2008, 18 graduate students and four faculty members from Texas A&M’s College Station and Galveston campuses collected approximately 1,500 damage assessments and completed nearly 300 household surveys with funding from the NSF.
With the new grant, said Shannon Van Zandt, the project’s lead investigator, center researchers will build on the December 2008 sample, establishing four units of analysis: the households, meaning the people living in a residence, the residential building itself, businesses, and the businesses’ building.
“Recognizing that some households will stay in the housing units and other people will have left, and new people will be there or no one will be there, we want to track both the structures as well as the occupants to see what they’ve done, how they’re doing, if they’re recovering from the storm and how that recovery is going.” she said.
Van Zandt will be joined in the project, titled “Developing a ‘Living Laboratory’ for Examining Community Recovery and Resilience After Disaster” by investigators Wes Highfield, a postdoctoral research associate with the HRRC, Yu Xiao, assistant professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning, Sam Brody, acting HRRC director, Walt Peacock, HRRC director, and Sherry Bame, associate professor of urban planning.
“Recovery has only just begun,” states the project’s abstract. “Follow-up data collection on structures, businesses, households and policy decision making is needed to capture long-term recovery trajectories for households, housing and business and adaptive decision making and management.”
See related story: "HRRC researchers documenting recovery efforts in Galveston after Hurricane Ike."
- Posted: June 17, 2009-
