Fire & Flood Recovery

Fires and floods can cause damage to property and personal injury, including casualties. Recovering from floods and fires is an important step toward restoring things to their original state prior to the incident. The importance of fire and flood recovery is rooted in the knowledge regarding the benefits and features the recovery process provides.

Significance

• Fires and floods cause damage and create chaos, even in areas where strict planning had been in place prior to the occurrence. Recovery is significant in both situations because of the inherent issues fires and floods create by association. Fires can render an area unsafe because downed electrical wires and structures become unsafe when they have burned. Floods render drinking water unsanitary, and water logged roadways inhibit travel. Recovering from fires and floods is important to restoring a sense of normalcy and livability to an area. In the beginning stages of recovery, it is instrumental to get emergency responders to survey and assess the area to deem what is and isn't considered safe.

Function

• The function of fire and flood recovery is to start repairing, replacing and reusing critical components of daily life. The beginning stages are to assess damage and begin operating in a recovery manner, which utilizes secondary sources for needed services and supplies such as water, food and shelter. Fire recovery involves removing all unsafe and unusable structures and items. This includes demolishing buildings that have been burned beyond repair, removing burnt sections of buildings and clearing debris from the immediate area. Flood recovery assesses what water supplies were impacted, determines what secondary source of water is to be used and begins the process of extracting water from areas that remain underwater. Emergency personnel and insurance companies also become involved in assessing the cumulative damage caused by either a fire or a flood.

Features

• Fire and flood recovery plans are the basis for the restoration process and are a critical element in recovery. Interim processes are outlined in recovery plans to provide a set of operating procedures until a full recovery has been achieved. Features of a recovery plan include information on topics such as secondary and alternate ways of living--for example, providing alternate water sources after a flood and providing temporary housing after a fire. Proper recovery techniques outlined in a recovery plan can help prevent illness and injury that could be a result of unsafe conditions created by a fire or flood.

Considerations

• Considerations during fire and flood recovery need to include special circumstances. For example, during the recovery phase following Hurricane Katrina, the city of New Orleans began the recovery process while still in the search-and-rescue and evacuation phases. Multiple disaster plans can overlap, provided coordination and communication between teams responsible for the various plans is in place. Hurricane Katrina displaced residents in flood plain areas; recovery included temporary housing for those residents. The recovery process for the housing portion of the plan continues to this day, as displaced residents are still being relocated to permanent housing. You need to consider that recovery is not always a fast response, and complete recovery following a flood or fire can take many years to accomplish.

Potential

• The potential for flood and fire recovery is to provide short- and long-term recovery goals to restore an area to the way it once was. A fire or flood can impact many people and things beyond the actual affected area. For example, Hurricane Katrina caused flooding that impacted residents because of flooding of their homes and streets. This flooding then caused secondary damage to the local and surrounding economy because the flooding shut down the city for an extended period of time. This translated into lost tourism revenue for New Orleans, which in turn impacted the state of Louisiana and the global businesses located in New Orleans. Recovery for that catastrophic event is still underway, many years after the flood waters have subsided.