Sonny S. Patel - Community Resilience When Disaster Strikes: Security and Community Health in UK Flood Zones

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Disasters, of all kinds, are becoming more and more prevalent across the world. Environmental changes, globalization, and population growthas well as an arguably tumultuous social, political, and economic climatemean that more people than ever are experiencing disasters, whether they be geophysical, climate-related, or man-made. Many scholars have worked and continue to work on understanding the impact that surviving such a terrifying and often tragic ordeal can have. The aftermath of disasters is associated not just with death, destruction, and physical injuries but often also with psychological injuries, economic problems, fractured relationships, and a sense of grief and shock that can pervade entire communities. However, over time, we tend to see people emerge from the darkness: we see strength, growth, hope, opportunities, adaptation, and tighter bonds. It is belief in these potential positive outcomes, together with passion for empowering communities and the people within them, that drives Sonny Patel to develop a better understanding of community resilience.

This book makes an important contribution to the disaster literature, using both literature reviews and primary data to understand what is meant by community resilience and identify ways of fostering resilience in communities. Community resilience is a term that gets used in different ways by different peopleand so the first chapter of Patels book explores how the term has previously been used in the literature and identifies common elements within all the different definitions. Then, focusing specifically on the severe floods in the southeast of England during 20132014 as a case study, Patel explores perceptions of both those affected by the floods and those at risk of flooding to investigate how communities can pull together after a traumatic incident. Importantly, the qualitative data presented in the second chapter gives a voice to those affected by the severe flooding disaster, and explores the factors