No one wants to guess how a disaster will impact their community. To respond well and recovery quickly when a disaster strikes, health and emergency management professionals need to know quickly how the emergency will impact their community. There is only a brief period after a disaster when researchers can gather to aid community members in making decisions about responding and recovery. Without a solid research base, community members are left relying on their best guesses or past experience to make critical decisions on disaster health.

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, ASPR, CDC, and NIEHS were awarded a series of grants to study aspects of disaster recovery, and the conclusions of those studies are starting to be published.

Social Connections Reduce Depressive Symptoms

Amid busy lives, does taking time to get to know your neighbors matter, especially your elderly neighbors? A study from Rowan University indicates that, yes, having strong social connections can help make people, especially elderly people, be more resilient. The researchers found that some aspects of neighborhood social connectedness (social capital) promoted resilience of older adults exposed to Hurricane Sandy. The study also found that people who developed PTSD after Hurricane Sandy had fewer social connections before the hurricane. Older adults who reported stronger neighborhood connections reported fewer depressive symptoms after the storm.

Although neighbors helped to mitigate feelings of physical danger during the hurricane, they played a less central role when homes were damaged. The findings show that coming together as a community before a disaster strikes makes the community more resilient in the face of a disaster. Promoting social connectedness could enhance quality of life for older people; reduce health care costs; and minimize the damage caused by natural disasters. That’s a lot of reasons to try to increase connectedness in your community.

Another behavioral health study sought to identify the groups most vulnerable to mental health impacts from the hurricane. Researchers from Project LIGHT (Leaders In Gathering Hope Together) investigated various mental health symptoms and diagnoses in people who lived through Hurricane Sandy. They found that individuals with greater exposure to Hurricane Sandy had greater symptoms of PTSD, anxiety, depression and generalized stress. The study showed the greatest mental health impacts among people with a history of mental health difficulties, people with lower educational levels, and people of Hispanic ethnicity. The study’s results can help community organizations target their behavioral health intervention strategies and help emergency planners prioritize behavioral health activities in future disasters.

Worker Safety

Do workers face new and different risks following a disaster? Turns out, following Hurricane Sandy, many immigrant laborers who engaged in clean-up and reconstruction work did not have prior access to health and safety training, and there was a lack of OSHA-approved trainers in the New York area who could conduct health and safety trainings in Spanish. With HHS grant funding, the United Steelworkers Tony Mazzocchi Center partnered with Make the Road New York and the National Day Labor Organizing Network to develop 40 immigrant worker-trainers who are now qualified to conduct “OSHA 10 construction worker” courses in Spanish. Since March 2014, this partnership has trained more than 3,600 Spanish-speaking workers with almost 58,000 contact hours of “OSHA 10 construction” training.

Recommendations to Improve Coordination and Resilience

Researchers at the New York State Department of Health collected feedback from local health departments, emergency management, and a variety of public health service providers. Among the notable findings: local drinking water providers did not have identification that allowed them to pass roadblocks, and clinics that serve women, infants and children (WIC clinics) experienced severe service delays. Based on the findings, the researchers developed recommendations for improving disaster response, such as improving shared emergency reporting between health departments and emergency management agencies and exploring options for alternate/mobile WIC sites.

The way in which resources are allocated after a disaster can impact the community’s ability to withstand disasters in the future. A group of researchers from the University of Delaware developed a conceptual and corresponding computational model to help New York City policymakers decide how to allocate resources to make the city more resilient in the face of a disaster. The model is based on a theory of community functioning, and what characteristics of a community – social, physical, economic, political, etc. – may predict a community’s experience with a disaster. The researchers use this model to explore how much loss of function the community experiences and how long it might take the community to recover.

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These are just a few of the studies that our grantees conducted. Other researchers looked at issues related to modeling community resilience; recovery worker safety; working with city and local health departments; health system response and health care access; mental health outcomes; recovery work and resilience in volunteers and citizens; reducing morbidity and mortality; training in mold mitigation and other health impacts of flooding; and vulnerable populations impacted by Hurricane Sandy.  Check out these findings to see how they can be used to help you plan more effectively.