Contact: Scott Miles, assistant professor of planning and environmental policy, Department of Environmental Studies — (206) 406-9805 or scott.miles@wwu.edu

BELLINGHAM—Western Washington University environmental studies assistant professor Scott Miles has been awarded a $250,000 grant from the National Science Foundation Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation (CMMI) Program to study post-disaster infrastructure restoration and the effects on local economic recovery.

During this four-year project, which will begin Oct. 1, Miles will be developing a tool that can help decision makers in restoring services to best facilitate recovery of local economies. Miles has been developing ResilUS, a computer model of community loss and recovery from disasters, for the past eight years.

The information that ResilUS provides will lend valuable insight regarding the decisions necessary to best facilitate post-disaster restoration of services provided by infrastructure, such as communication networks, highways and electrical networks, so that a local economy recovers quickly, Miles said. Studying the relationship between infrastructure and local economic performance will enhance ResilUS, allowing decision makers to analyze different scenarios of service disruption.

Data will be collected from western Washington, a region with frequent natural hazards, such as flooding, landslides and storms. The data will focus on infrastructure damage, service loss and restoration, as well as the associated impacts to western Washington businesses.

The project will also explore effective means for visualizing complex information about community recovery so that utility managers, urban planners and elected officials can make effective decisions about disaster mitigation and recovery, Miles said. At the end of the project, he plans to hold workshops with these stakeholders to evaluate the effectiveness of the ResilUS model.

“As a country, we tend to focus on the emergency period and not the disaster that unfolds in the subsequent months and years,” he said. “This project will help people focus more on issues of long-term recovery.”

Miles will involve undergraduate and graduate students in the research process through research assistantships, paid internships, volunteer data gathering opportunities and in-class service learning projects. Rebekah Green, associate director of WWU’s Resilience Institute, helped coordinate the grant proposal and will be working with Miles on the project.

Miles has a doctorate in geography from the University of Washington. His research focuses on disaster risk reduction, urban planning and sustainable development. He was a member of the U.S. Geological Survey Western Region Earthquake Hazards Team for six years, during which time he developed hazards information tools for public decision-making using geographic information systems. Miles has been teaching at Western since 2006.

Miles is the director of The Resilience Institute at Huxley College of the Environment at Western. The institute’s mission is to create and disseminate practical knowledge and tools that promote resilient human and ecological communities in the context of natural hazard risk. A resilient community is one that maintains services and livelihoods after a hazard or disturbance event; if disaster occurs, services and livelihoods recover rapidly with optimal resource use and vulnerability reduction.

For more information on this research, contact environmental studies assistant professor Scott Miles at scott.miles@wwu.edu.

printer friendly