At least half of the 20,000 residents in the small town of Dickinson, Texas were impacted by the flooding from Hurricane Harvey. In October after the storm, LeadersLink held a disaster recovery forum there for city and county leaders throughout the area. We screened our Leading Through the Storm film and our disaster veterans shared what they had learned from their experience leading Louisiana and Mississippi communities through Hurricane Katrina.
"It's a great idea. The lessons learned and experiences gained through a disaster are so helpful to instruct or guide people. It's just so valuable that experience, and so helpful. There's an art to this."
"I would love to have had someone saying 'for the next 3 weeks here's what you need to focus on'. That would have really helped me. There really wasn't a lot of information passed on to us about what was coming in the weeks and months ahead. We did our best to anticipate a lot of issues."
"A website would be really helpful. The ability to link to somebody, talk to somebody in a city of 10,000 or 300,000. There is just some consolation to hearing affirmation. Truthfully, the emotional support means a lot."
"There's a lot of people sit back and say, 'Oh my God! What am I going to do?' At times, you just need someone to talk to about what you need to be doing next."
"You're going to get the first call. So you'd better have some answers. You have five minutes! You need to know what you're going to do."
"If we keep educating folks - however it needs to be done - but if we can keep educating and letting them know what we know now and wished we had known back then, I think we'll all be better off."
"I think it's very important. It gives us an opportunity to take lessons learned and mistakes made and pass them forward and help people make the right decisions and keep from making the wrong ones."
"Anytime you tap on experience, that's a whole lot better a lot of times than a bunch of books. If you have somebody that lived it say, this is what you need to do. Especially if it worked out."
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