Chapter 10 - Post-event field surveys

Abstract

After major coastal flood disaster events, post-event field surveys are regularly undertaken under various organizational and volunteer structures. Such field survey teams increasingly comprise experts from a range of disciplines and are often self-funded and represent important opportunities to advance our understanding of the causes, nature, and characteristics of natural hazard processes and their impacts and effects and to use this learning to advance recommendations that effectively contribute to disaster risk reduction efforts. That said, organizing and running post-event field surveys require an extraordinary amount of planning and care. This chapter provides an overview of how to approach the development, deployment, and activity of a post-event field survey; notes the rapidly developing and continuously evolving “tool kit” of methods that researchers might use; and briefly outlines some of the tensions and challenges an individual post-event field survey team leader might encounter leading a survey team.