CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - The National Science Foundation has awarded a three-year, $449,000 grant to a multi-institutional research team led by a disaster recovery specialist at the University of Illinois that is studying China's recovery from a devastating earthquake in 2008. The goal of the project is to develop a model of recovery management that outlines appropriate governmental roles and actions to ensure fast, efficient, equitable and sustainable recovery from disasters.
The Wenchuan earthquake, which struck southwest China on May 12, 2008, affected 46 million people, causing more than 88,000 deaths and leaving nearly 5 million residents temporarily homeless. More than 216,000 buildings were destroyed, with some towns completely demolished by collapsed structures and landslides. Fifteen state highways were severely damaged, paralyzing economic and social activities in the region. The devastation and death toll from the 7.9 magnitude earthquake made it China's worst disaster in 30 years and ranked it among the worst calamities worldwide in a century.
"The Wenchuan earthquake affected many small to medium-sized cities that would be similar in size to larger cities in the U.S., such as New Orleans," said Robert Olshansky, a faculty member in the department of urban and regional planning, which is part of the College of Fine and Applied Arts at Illinois. "It was an urban disaster over a widespread area." Olshansky is the lead investigator on the project; $166,000 of the grant funding is designated for the U. of I.
Olshansky and team member Laurie A. Johnson, a consultant and researcher with more than 20 years' experience in catastrophe risk management and disaster recovery, have collaborated on several NSF-funded studies of disaster recovery, including studies of Los Angeles after the Northridge earthquake in 1994 and Japan after the 1995 Kobe earthquake. Their new book, "Clear as Mud: Planning for the Rebuilding of New Orleans" (American Planning Association Planners Press, 2010) examines New Orleans' reconstruction during the first 22 months after Hurricane Katrina.
About two months after the Wenchuan earthquake, Olshansky was invited to Beijing for a disaster planning conference and visited some of the damaged areas near the city of Chengdu. Johnson also visited the damaged region a few months after the earthquake as a member of an NSF-funded project team.
"I was struck by the enormity of the disaster and by Chinese officials' ambitious plans for recovery," said Olshansky, who returned to the disaster area twice in 2009.
The Chinese government'sresponse to the Wenchuan earthquake was unique in some ways, Olshansky said. Within days of the disaster, national officials created an Earthquake Rescue and Relief Headquarters, the first of its kind in China, which established restoration priorities and designated responsibilities at the national, provincial and local levels. The headquarters set three-month targets that emphasized survivor needs and established an ambitious, comprehensive set of three-year goals to ensure that every family had housing, employment and social and medical care.
The 24 counties affected by the earthquake were paired with unaffected provinces across China, which had a mandate to allocate a minimum of 1 percent of budget revenues to the devastated counties for recovery programs. The unaffected regions were delegated work tasks and resource assignments and given deadlines for accomplishing them.
The research team will measure the success of the Chinese governments' recovery policies by conducting interviews with governmental officials and by surveying 450 households, collecting data on factors such as damage levels and household members' employment, health and satisfaction with the speed and quality of the programs.
One of the challenges that the team faces is the potential reluctance of Chinese officials and earthquake victims to share information.
"We have tried to address this by working with local partners," Olshansky said. "We're approaching this as an information exchange that allows us to share the strengths and weaknesses of our system and theirs. That's the way that we worked in New Orleans and Kobe and how we got access to busy people. They appreciated the opportunity to reflect on their actions and get some new ideas. We're hoping the same thing will happen in China."
Team member Yan Song, a faculty member at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and recent U. of I. graduate, has spent the past decade researching China's hazard mitigation and urbanization processes, developing an extensive list of contacts along the way. Another team member, Yu Xiao, a professor in the department of landscape architecture and urban planning and faculty fellow of the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center at Texas A&M University, is a native of Sichuan Province and recent U. of I. graduate. The team also includes Yang Zhang, a professor in the Urban Affairs and Planning Program at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
The team is collaborating with colleagues at Peking University, Sichuan University and Beijing Normal University in China, and employing Chinese students who speak the local dialect to conduct the household interviews.
The project includes funding for three scholars from the Chinese universities to travel to Washington, D.C., to meet with federal disaster planning officials from the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. While in the U.S., the Chinese scholars will visit New Orleans and San Francisco, which was the site of a devastating earthquake in 1989 and now is developing a comprehensive pre-disaster recovery plan.