Flood Resilience Quantification Framework of Rural Communities: Case Study of Harlan County, Kentucky.

Communities need to prepare for anticipated hazards, adapt to varying conditions, and resist and recover rapidly from disturbances. Protecting the built environment from natural and human-made hazards and understanding the impact of these hazards helps allocate resources efficiently. Recently, an indicator-based and time-dependent approach was developed for continuously defining and measuring the functionality and disaster resilience at the community level. The PEOPLES framework consists of seven dimensions (population and demographics, environmental and ecosystem, organized governmental services, physical infrastructure, lifestyle and community competence, economic development, and social-cultural capital), and the indicator-based approach finds qualitative characteristics and transforms them into quantitative measures. The proposed framework is used to study the resilience of rural communities subject to flood hazards. Harlan County, Kentucky, in the US Appalachian region is chosen as a case study to evaluate the proposed resilience quantification framework subject to severe flooding. The results show the validity of the proposed approach as a decision-support mechanism to assess and enhance the resilience of rural communities. The novelty of this case study paper is threefold: (1) a holistic indicator-based resilience quantification framework is used, (2) the aim of this study is focused on rural communities, and (3) it offers a unified way of addressing the effects of flood hazards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]