RAPID: Increasing community resilience to inland flooding: Lessons learned from response and recovery efforts in West Virginia and North Carolina

On September 27, 2024, Hurricane Helene brought historic rainfall and related floods and landslides to Western North Carolina (NC), causing over 100 deaths, destroying or damaging tens of thousands of homes, and costing over $50 billion. The aim of this project is to collect hyper-local, individual experience data on the response and recovery efforts to Hurricane Helene in Western North Carolina to synthesize lessons learned and to better understand how communities with high risk of inland flooding can increase resilience to better prepare for future disasters. Community resilience is the ability to withstand and mitigate the effects of a disaster, an essential component of which is effective response and recovery efforts. Hyper-local and individual experience data captures personal knowledge and experiences, and storytelling methods are known to be particularly useful tools for sharing experiences and understanding the impacts of disasters. The primary case study for this project will be Swannanoa, a town particularly hard hit by Helene and where the team has strong community relationships. This project is a collaboration between researchers at Warren Wilson College (located in Swannanoa, NC) and members of a research team previously funded by the NSF to study flood resilience in West Virginia. Project findings will be disseminated to policy makers and the NC disaster response network to improve future response scenarios and is expected to have insights for improving disaster response across the US. Existing research demonstrates that disaster storytelling is known to be an effective tool for communicating about disaster risk and can promote recovery for storytellers. Through a combination of Participatory Action Research centered on storytelling methods, a survey, focus groups, and GIS, this community-engaged research project will meet three objectives: 1) Capture lessons learned about the response to Hurricane Helene and early recovery efforts; 2) Promote the transfer of tools developed through previous research in WV to NC communities to assist with recovery; and, 3) Collect data to develop long-term research on the collective insights WV and NC have for improving response and recovery efforts in places at risk for inland flooding. When combined with findings from WV, this project will have significant insights for the bourgeoning field of critical disaster studies and for conducting interdisciplinary community-engaged science. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.