The Road Home After Disaster

Rebuilding After the US Gulf Coast Hurricanes

On August 29, 2005, a Category 4 hurricane made landfall on the US Gulf Coast packing 145 mph winds. Soon, the town fondly dubbed "the Big Easy" had become a city of vast difficulty.

In the aftermath, more than 2 million people registered for Federal aid and the largest transmigration in the US since the 1930s Dust Bowl began.

In October 2005, NRGmagnet's President Lisa Surprenant led a team modeling potential impacts of various rebuilding strategies.

Her team performed thousands of computer simulations and found that power equal to one nuclear power plant could be saved—if energy efficiency was the threshold for reconstruction.

The environmental benefits would mean reduction of greenhouse gas emissions equal to removing tens of thousands of cars from the roads. If all Gulf Coast communities "built back better", the study found, the benefits would soon multiply.

The team's analytics demonstrated that key decisions made in the critical months after a tragedy ripple long after a storm passes.

For households, businesses, utilities, and a nation trying to repair climate-related damage, having professional analyses is crucial to taking the right steps towards recovery.

As many communities found in hurricanes Katrina and Rita's wakes, small businesses can be the economic engines that power recovery.

With careful capture of these subtle metrics, lessons-learned can be incorporated into recovery strategies. For policymakers, the ability to predict a disaster's impacts on vulnerable populations (or plan the right strategies in the aftermath) is often crucial to gaining funding.

As New Orleans found, rebuilding is not easy. But timely modeling and analysis can guide decisions and lead to sustainable reconstruction. And that benefits everyone.