Developing and testing a community resilience tabletop exercise in Los Angeles County

Background/purpose. With the advent of community resilience policy, discussions have abounded regarding how communities can truly assess whether or not they are resilient before a disaster hits. While absolute resilience assessment may require a particular event, there is an opportunity to determine the extent to which communities are performing well on proxy indicators of resilience. Thus, an approach is needed to directly observe how communities may approach disaster response and recovery and whether they are employing strategies that will enhance resilience is needed.

Methods.  This presentation will describe the process of developing a community resilience tabletop, testing four levers of resilience (Chandra et al., 2011)-partnerships, engagement, self-sufficiency, and education.  The tabletop was subsequently tested with 8 community coalitions in the Los Angeles County Community Disaster Resilience Project.

Results. The coalitions provided critical feedback on tabletop design and the scenarios used. Overall, the tabletop afforded an ability for coalitions to determine how well they could activate integrated response and recovery plans, to identify where they did not know what asset a particular organization would offer in response and long-term recovery, and to assess how well their network of organizations reflected all of the key sectors needed for long-term recovery capability. 

Conclusions. The tabletop development and exercise process illustrated that it is possible to assess proxy indicators of resilience and stress the networks needed for efficient and effective response and recovery.