Abstract

In 1977, Kates and Pijawka constructed a four-stage post-disaster recovery model to explain how communities recover after a disaster. Since their model was developed, it has been well-cited within the academic literature and used as a basis for communities to understand their recovery process. While this model has been used extensively, it does have its weaknesses concerning the present state of the world. Most prominently, the model did not consider pre-disaster preparation and equity issues. In this paper, we reconfigure the Kates Pijawka model to reflect these issues and propose an updated model that better reflects the needs of the 2020s without going away from the spirit of the original model. The model we propose keeps the original four phases yet bookends them with pre-disaster and equity at the front end and resiliency at the back end with emotional recovery running throughout.