James Kendra’s research while affiliated with University of Delaware and other places

The science of resilience presents the opportunity to explain how natural, social, and physical systems interact to impact community functioning and well-being postdisaster. This paper describes the development and theoretical foundation of a comprehensive conceptual model, presenting a shift from the usual thinking about resilience to construe resilience more precisely as the trajectory of postdisaster recovery, with community functioning and well-being as the outcome of interest. Unique contributions of the results include the identification of the natural, social, and physical systems that are implicated in disasters, and the dynamic nature and directionality of how these elements relate in the context of hazards. The model represents the integrated and interdependent nature of the natural, social, and technical systems that influence community functioning, and resistance to and recovery from disasters. We argue that an integrated and interdependent model of community resilience can benefit scholars building theories of disaster and policymakers who need a guide for navigating the complex disaster environment. The paper concludes with a discussion of how the model is used in practice.

Critical infrastructure systems derive their importance from the societal needs they help meet. Yet the relationship between infrastructure system functioning and societal functioning is not well-understood, nor are the impacts of infrastructure system disruptions on consumers. We develop two empirical measures of societal impacts—willingness to pay (WTP) to avoid service interruptions and a constructed scale of unhappiness, compare them to each other and others from the literature, and use them to examine household impacts of service interruptions. Focusing on household-level societal impacts of electric power and water service interruptions, we use survey-based data from Los Angeles County, USA to fit a random effects within-between model of WTP and an ordinal logit with mixed effects to predict unhappiness, both as a function of infrastructure type, outage duration, and household attributes. Results suggest household impact increases nonlinearly with outage duration, and the impact of electric power disruptions are greater than water supply disruptions. Unhappiness is better able to distinguish the effects of shorter-duration outages than WTP is. Some people experience at least some duration of outage without negative impact. Increased household impact was also associated with using electricity for medical devices or water for work or business, perceived likelihood of an emergency, worry about an emergency, past negative experiences with emergencies, lower level of preparation, less connection to the neighborhood, higher income, being married, being younger, having pets, and having someone with a medical condition in the house. Financial, time/effort, health, and stress concerns all substantially influence the stated level of unhappiness.

Despite technological improvements, the number of maritime accidents is still high. The human element still plays an important role in maritime operations and leadership and communication issues are two key elements that can threaten safety, as happened in the Costa Concordia and El Faro disasters. In this paper we investigate the possibility of introducing shared leadership principles in the current vertical model, interviewing 11 seafarers belonging to two international maritime associations. We conducted Skype interviews and we qualitatively analyzed them using the software Atlas.ti. We describe six elements – organizational culture and ship's climate, error isolation, leadership, mentoring, multiculturalism and teamwork – that, combined together, can foster or inhibit safety. Results highlight the dual role of the captain as mentor and leader, suggesting the need to share responsibilities among crewmembers. Additionally, results emphasize the pivotal role that organizations have in defining the safety environment for preventing errors. Therefore, this study advances the proposition that the maritime system could implement the shared leadership model into the vertical hierarchy.

Disasters are among the crises that can test the decision making skill of elected and appointed public officials from planning through response and recovery. The COVID-19 crisis, a public health emergency rather than one with immediate damage to the built environment, has affected many aspects of community life. Experiences in responding to the pandemic will likely stimulate fresh planning initiatives for public health emergencies. How then should emergency planners approach planning and response tasks? The All-Hazards approach has been a mainstay of both research and policymaking for over 40 years, but it has come under recent criticism. In this paper, we consider if the All-Hazards approach to disaster management is still viable. Comparing the management needs that emerged in the pandemic with those of disasters from more familiar hazard agents, we conclude that the All-Hazards approach is valid and can continue to guide policymakers in their hazard and disaster management activities.

Objective: The emergency operations center (EOC) is an essential component of modern emergency management. Traditionally understood as a place where officials communicate with the public, support coordination, manage operations, craft policy, gather information, and host visitors; there has been little recent research on their structure, operations, or work procedures. EOCs may in fact be, as we argue here, places where emergency managers come to find workarounds, delegate tasks, and find new sources of expertise in order to make sense, make meaning, and make decisions. However, despite their status as a symbol of emergency management and recipients of large amounts of funding, there has been relatively little scientific research into the EOC. With this paper, we synthesize the existing research and propose a variety of research questions to accelerate the process of inquiry into the EOC.Design: Informed by an extensive literature review, this article presents a comprehensive look at the existing state of knowledge surrounding EOCs.Interventions: Research questions to support investigation of the EOC are suggested.Conclusions: The EOC is an underexplored setting ripe for development and discovery by researchers and emergency managers seeking to influence the field of emergency management.

Objective: The emergency operations center (EOC) is an essential component of modern emergency management. Traditionally understood as a place where officials communicate with the public, support coordination, manage operations, craft policy, gather information, and host visitors; there has been little recent research on their structure, operations, or work procedures. EOCs may in fact be, as we argue here, places where emergency managers come to find workarounds, delegate tasks, and find new sources of expertise in order to make sense, make meaning, and make decisions. However, despite their status as a symbol of emergency management and recipients of large amounts of funding, there has been relatively little scientific research into the EOC. With this paper, we synthesize the existing research and propose a variety of research questions to accelerate the process of inquiry into the EOC. Design: Informed by an extensive literature review, this article presents a comprehensive look at the existing state of knowledge surrounding EOCs. Interventions: Research questions to support investigation of the EOC are suggested. Conclusions: The EOC is an underexplored setting ripe for development and discovery by researchers and emergency managers seeking to influence the field of emergency management.

Community resilience is a community’s ability to maintain functioning (ie, delivery of services) during and after a disaster event. The Composite of Post-Event Well-Being (COPEWELL) is a system dynamics model of community resilience that predicts a community’s disaster-specific functioning over time. We explored COPEWELL’s usefulness as a practice-based tool for understanding community resilience and to engage partners in identifying resilience-strengthening strategies. In 2014, along with academic partners, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene organized an interdisciplinary work group that used COPEWELL to advance cross-sector engagement, design approaches to understand and strengthen community resilience, and identify local data to explore COPEWELL implementation at neighborhood levels. The authors conducted participant interviews and collected shared experiences to capture information on lessons learned. The COPEWELL model led to an improved understanding of community resilience among agency members and community partners. Integration and enhanced alignment of efforts among preparedness, disaster resilience, and community development emerged. The work group identified strategies to strengthen resilience. Searches of neighborhood-level data sets and mapping helped prioritize communities that are vulnerable to disasters (eg, medically vulnerable, socially isolated, low income). These actions increased understanding of available data, identified data gaps, and generated ideas for future data collection. The COPEWELL model can be used to drive an understanding of resilience, identify key geographic areas at risk during and after a disaster, spur efforts to build on local metrics, and result in innovative interventions that integrate and align efforts among emergency preparedness, community development, and broader public health initiatives.

The Disaster Research Center (DRC) was founded in 1963 to help American government decision makers understand how citizens would respond in times of crisis. Since then, DRC personnel have embarked upon some 700 quick-response deployments to better understand the social and physical aspects of disaster mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery. This research has taken DRC faculty and students around the world, from New York City, conducting research that explored and documented the city's response to and recovery from 9/11, to the Kathmandu Valley to better understand mothering during disaster evacuation after the 2015 Nepal Earthquake. Relevant to the academy, practitioners, and the public, DRC is available to lend its expertise to answer the most pressing questions in disaster science.