…to the Rural Rivers/Mapping for Resilience project, a collaboration across Geography, Anthropology, Earth Sciences, Emergency Management, and Humanitarian Engineering at Dartmouth College and Colorado School of Mines, in coordination with communities in the Black River and White River Valleys of Vermont.
Recent floods in the rural northeast of the United States have tested the area’s social and physical resilience. In the rural Black and White River Valleys of Vermont, locals respond first to crisis with tools on hand – backhoes, bulldozers, shovels, and water pumps, kitchens to make sandwiches for responders, water delivery carts, and more. In this area, people relate to each other with an orientation to helping-your-neighbor; they are used to trying to fix problems themselves.
For historical reasons, some people in this area view state intervention with suspicion, instead relying on community connections to recover from disasters. Differences between formal state response and locals trying to fix the rivers themselves reveal tensions around what it means to respond correctly or appropriately to disasters. Our team studies how these rural communities – in which some of us live and work – respond to overlapping disasters of flood water inundation, poverty, housing scarcity, and a sense of social abandonment.
Our research team has seen that community members, local responders, federal disaster response agents, and others do not have easy ways to communicate before, during, and after flooding. This is in part due to lack of shared language, and lack of adequate tools for collaboration across these different groups. In this project, we study everyday processes of response, recovery, and mitigation work in these river valleys.
We are conducting ethnographic and geographic research to understand this better. We look at land-use regulation and practice during and after floods; and how social forces, economic realities, and technical infrastructure shape the impacts of land use. Through community-based research we focus on how communication, responsibility, and collective community assistance works after disaster. We’re hoping to address communication difficulties by examining how and when different people take responsibility for identifying, fixing, and mitigating disaster-related problems. Based on this research, we’re collaborating with impacted communities to facilitate clearer communication across different groups responding to rural disasters at the levels of towns, states, and the broader region.