National Institute of Standards & Technology Releases Planning Guide Briefs

Communities striving to improve their resilience by better planning for and dealing with hazard events will want to review six new “Guide Briefs” issued by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The documents complement NIST’s Community Resilience Planning Guide for Buildings and Infrastructure Systems, which lays out a six-step process to plan for resilience in the face of natural, technological, and human-caused hazards.

Each of the Guide Briefs is intended to be used in conjunction with the NIST Guide, although several can be used independently by any community interested in taking steps to improve its resilience. For example, Guide Brief 12, “Short-Term Implementation Tasks”(link is external), suggests ways that communities can shorten recovery time as longer-term solutions are being put in place. These short-term tasks could include:

• Developing a post-event recovery plan that streamlines the permitting process, adds resilience during repairs, protects the natural environment, preserves the community voice in approval of construction projects, and handles and processes the increase in construction activities.
• Developing processes and guidelines for post-event assessments to accelerate evaluation and designation of buildings that can be used while being repaired.
• Adopting the latest building codes and enforcing design and inspection requirements.

This link https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2017/05/nist-releases-six-new-community-resilience-planning-guide-briefs contains additional information.