Brian Bledsoe, a professor and founding director of the Institute for Resilient Infrastructure Systems in the College of Engineering, spoke with GPB about the rise of natural disasters in Georgia.
According to Bledsoe, Georgia needs a statewide plan to standardize disaster response which has, at this point, been managed by a variety of agencies with different access to resources.
“Recent back-to-back storms are a testament that we no longer live in a ‘one hazard’ world,” Bledsoe said. And as floods and extreme temperatures become more common in the South, “random acts of kindness” will not be enough.
There are different steps that can be taken to improve the state’s infrastructure to handle disasters.
“A lot of people talk about, ‘well, we need capacity,’” Bledsoe said. “And then you have to ask, ‘what is capacity?’ It’s a lot of things. It’s people that can write grants. … It’s staff embedded across sectors. And it’s some state-level guiding vision for resilience.”
