To better support planners facing disaster recovery, APA and the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center at Texas A&M University partnered for a two-year research project, funded through the Federal Emergency Management Agency's Cooperating Technical Partners program, that will result in a "Disaster Recovery Guide for Planning Practitioners." Phase One of the project involved designing and executing a mixed-methods approach for collecting evidence about what planners want and need from an "at-your-fingertips" recovery guide. The two primary research questions asked how planners perceive the disaster recovery process the role of planners in it, and what planners need to know about disaster recovery to better support their communities. The Quantitative Survey Report found that few participants had experience making plans for post-disaster recovery and did not regularly use existing recovery resources. Although the research suggests that there is currently a lack of education and training for disaster recovery planning, participants were receptive to future educational resources, specifically workshops, conferences, symposia, and other interactive training and tools. In the Qualitative Interview Report, themes similar to the survey findings emerged with more specific examples that portray the recovery context today's planners are dealing with.

Food banks and food aid agencies help address food insecurity issues throughout the United States. This mission focused on understanding how critical infrastructure failures impact the function of food aid agencies and how the change in functioning changes food access. This research focused on five infrastructure systems -- transportation, electric power, communications, water, and the buildings or facilities utilized by food aid agencies to carry out their normal activities. The functioning of food aid agencies was broken down into three branches or domains that are critical for the operation of a food aid agencies. Specifically, food aid agencies need 1) people to help run the operation, 2) property or, more generally, a physical structure or structures, to house and conduct operations; 3) products or food stuffs to distribute. This mission includes five social science collections. The first two collections provide background on the planning and agenda for a focus group and the data collected from the focus group. The next three collections relate to an online survey of food aid agencies. These collections include the sample frame (a list of all active food aid agencies invited to participate in the survey), the primary (raw) data collected from the survey, and an example of a secondary (curated) dataset that focuses on critical infrastructure failures and changes in food aid agency functioning.

Food retailers are stores that stock staple perishable foods such as vegetables, fruits, dairy, bread, cereal, meat, poultry, or fish on a continuous basis and sell these items to the public. Store types include supercenters, grocery stores, convenience stores, combination stores, dollar stores, butcher shops, bakeries, and other specialty food stores. This mission focused on understanding how critical infrastructure failures impact the function of food retailers and how the change in functioning changes food access. This research focused on five infrastructure systems -- transportation, electric power, communications, water, and the buildings utilized by food retailers to carry out their normal activities. The functioning of food retailers was broken down into three branches or domains that are critical for the operation of a food retailer. Specifically, food retailers need 1) people to help run the operation, 2) property or, more generally, a physical structure or structures, to house and conduct operations; 3) products or food stuffs to sell. This mission includes four social science collections related to the in-person survey of food retailers. These collections include the sample frame (a list of all food retailers within the study area with a chance of being randomly selected for the survey), the primary (raw) data collected from the Harris County and Southeast Texas surveys, and an example of a secondary (curated) dataset that focuses on critical infrastructure failures and changes in food retailer functioning.

The research detailed in this report aims to better understand the impact of Hurricane Harvey on food access in Harris County and Southeast Texas. This report summarizes how disruptions to critical infrastructure (i.e. transportation, water, electricity, buildings, and communications) impacted the functioning of food suppliers and how that change in functioning affected food access. The findings indicate that infrastructure failures, especially transportation and electricity, negatively affect food access. This report highlights the importance of non-infrastructure factors, such as impacts to people, in helping to understand changes in food access that occur after a disaster. This research contributes to the fields of natural hazard research and food access by providing newly developed survey tools. These tools can be applied to future research on the intersection of critical infrastructure interruption and their effect on food suppliers’ ability to provide food access to communities. This archive includes the report, project management files, and code required to fully replicate all figures and tables.