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Workshop Documents

First Disaster Resilience Workshop - April 7, 2014 in Gaithersburg, MD

NIST's first workshop was a success

NIST/EL hosted the inaugural Disaster Resilience Workshop at NIST in Gaithersburg, MD, on April 7, 2014. The workshop convened a multi-disciplinary community of over 150 stakeholders to begin development of a Disaster Resilience Framework. The Framework will provide local and regional authorities with guidance on codes, standards, available tools, and best practices that support community resilience.

Links to workshop presentations as well as the workshop summary and agenda documents can be found under "Workshop Documents" on the right hand side of this page.

Workshop recap

Opening remarks were delivered by Acting Deputy Secretary of Commerce and NIST Director Pat Gallagher and Acting Director of NIST's Engineering Laboratory, Howard Harary. Invited presentations were given by Warren Edwards, Executive Director, Community and Regional Resilience Institute (CARRI), Oak Ridge, TN, "What Is Community Resilience and Why Is It Difficult to Measure?" and by Chris Poland, co-Chairman of SPUR Disaster Planning Program's Resilient City Initiative, "Creating Disaster-Resilient Communities".

Workshop breakout sessions followed each presentation to obtain stakeholder input on the following subjects: performance goals and metrics, recovery from disasters, interdependencies among buildings and infrastructure systems, lessons learned from past events, and methods to achieve resilience within building and lifeline infrastructure sectors.

What's next? The input from this and future workshops will be incorporated into the Disaster Resilience Framework, to be released for public comment in Spring 2015.
Created April 16, 2014, Updated January 6, 2017