Activity 3: Assess and Report Long-Term Recovery Needs

Purpose

The purpose of this activity is to develop an accurate assessment of disaster damages and needs.

Why?

Until the full extent of damages and needs sustained in your community have been tallied, it is impossible to know whether long-term recovery planning is required, or whether state and/or Federal assistance must be requested. In Colorado, recovery assessment is a multi-phased process that needs to begin in conjunction with early response. The incident’s scope and scale will determine the number and type of recovery-focused assessments conducted. In Colorado, there are four types of assessments (described below). These vary by the amount of detail they seek and the involvement of and coordination between local, state, federal, and other NGO, and private-sector stakeholders.

Assessments are what enable decision-makers to make more informed decisions and they are an important precursor to potential state and federal recovery assistance.

When?

Recovery assessments can begin when the disaster event is ongoing and will be repeated periodically throughout the response and recovery processes. (Days 1 until the recovery is complete)

How does my community do this?

1. Ensure that long-term community recovery stakeholders are involved in all assessments. Damage and needs assessments are initiated by your community board of commissioners, chief elected official, or emergency manager. For a deeper dive see the FEMA Damage Assessment Operations Manual. There are four types of assessments:
   • Rapid Needs Assessment: One or more assessment teams are mobilized in the first 0-72 hours of the incident. Local long-term recovery stakeholders may participate in this process.
   • Initial Damage Assessment:  This is conducted in the first two days to two weeks of the incident if a formal request has been received from the Regional Field Manager (RFM), State Emergency Operations Center (SEOC), or as determined by the local emergency manager. The assessment findings are reported to the SEOC, and State Verification is obtained. Local long-term recovery stakeholders may participate in this process.
   • Joint Preliminary Damage Assessment (Joint PDA): DHSEM may request that this assessment be conducted approximately 2-3 weeks following the incident. Local long-term recovery stakeholders may participate in this process.
   • Recovery Assessment:  Your community may do this if previous assessments do not adequately inform the recovery planning process. It is more closely focused on ongoing infrastructure repair, the structural safety of public and private facilities, permitting, and other informational needs specific to recovery support. The purpose of this assessment is to help prioritize recovery resource allocation and to formulate recovery projects.  See the  City of Boulder Initial Disaster Recovery Assessment Process, Pages 9-10.
2. Create or incorporate standard assessment methodologies to capture data and information that informs long-term recovery. The sooner that your community starts capturing the appropriate and necessary data the better. This data can be used in subsequent phases of recovery.
3. Create a central information management system to capture community impacts that can be used to support insurance claims and state and federal recovery assistance. Centralized information and approaches to information gathering will help streamline the use of this information to support applications for funding and post-disaster support.

Community Call Out: Larimer County

Larimer County developed a Damage Assessment Annex in the Emergency Operations Plan that helped ensure information relevant to long-term recovery was collected. Larimer County calls the interaction between the different assessment types the ‘assessment continuum’, recognizing that they provide an increasingly detailed picture of community needs. The Recovery Assessment addresses the unmet needs of the community as operations transition out of response, but all assessments have a recognized long-term recovery function.