The ability of a community to successfully manage recovery from a disaster event begins with pre-disaster preparedness, mitigation and recovery capacity building. Pre-disaster recovery planning builds resilient communities better able to withstand, respond to and recover from disasters, ensuring faster rebuilding, greater community cohesion and more effective city operations in the rebuilding phase that follows a disaster event. Planning can also provide more effective and rapid access to State and Federal disaster resources, including funding.

The following set of planning tools has been curated to help communities in their pre-disaster planning efforts.

This checklist identifies 12 actions city managers and leaders can take before disaster hits to launch an effective community recovery. Any of these 12 actions can be integrated into a pre-disaster recovery plan.

This guide is designed to help local government officials and planners work with community stakeholders to develop a pre-disaster recovery plan that includes recovery roles and capabilities, organizational frameworks and specific policies and plans.

This tool kit provides an annotated overview of the range of tools planners can use for pre-disaster recovery planning, including the most valuable features of each tool, supplemented by a pull-out chart and comparing the circumstances under which tool might be used. It includes:

• Emergency measures;
• Tools appropriate to long-term hazard planning;
• A model recovery and reconstruction ordinance that integrates the use of many of the most essential planning and emergency management tools to facilitate post-disaster recovery and reconstruction;
• References to more in-depth resources.

This model Long-Term Disaster Recovery Plan developed for the City of Oakland offers a model for other cities and communities in the Bay Area. It identifies the components of a Pre-Disaster Recovery Plan for cities in the region with a focus on the issues that are most likely to be critical in the first 90 days after a disaster event.

The model plan covers eight of the nine issues identified by ABAG as critical to recovery:

• Financing recovery issues
• Recovery of government facilities and services
• Long-term housing recovery
• Long-term recovery of business
• Long-term recovery of health care Schools and education
• Utilities and transportation
• Land use change

This resource includes a copy of the ABAG survey on the status of long-term disaster recovery planning by local Bay Area governments. The Oakland plan was updated in 2016.

This library of Pre-Disaster Recovery Planning documents housed together in the ABAG Library provides a sampling of some of the work done by ABAG, other local, state, and federal partners, other local governments and academics on the topic of long-term disaster recovery, and includes some conceptual and theoretical work as well as practical tools such as model ordinances. While the toolkit aims to provide tools that are useful to individual jurisdictions, we have also included content that explores the role of jurisdictions within their larger region during the recovery phase.

The curated resources on this page include:

• Checklists and plans;
• Recovery ordinances and tools;
• Funding and Economic issues;
• Recovery concepts and frameworks;
• Case studies and additional thinking.