Charleston, SC Announced as Third Partner Community

Tuesday October 16, 2007

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                                                  For more information, contact
October 16, 2007                                                                     Warren Edwards, 865-574-8277
          

Community and Regional Resilience Initiative (CARRI)

Announces Charleston, SC as Third "Partner Community"

                            Project part of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory's
                                      Southeast Region Research Initiative

Oak Ridge, Tenn. - Leaders from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory's (ORNL) Community and Regional
Resilience Initiative (CARRI), and their partners at Savannah River National Laboratory, announced today
that Charleston, South Carolina and its surrounding counties will join Gulfport, Mississippi and Memphis,
Tennessee in a new partnership to better define community resilience and to help more communities prepare
for and quickly recover from natural and man-made disasters.

An important new initiative of ORNL's Southeast Regional Research Initiative, CARRI is already working
closely with leaders of Charleston to help develop and share the essential benchmarks, tools and techniques
that any community or region should take to strengthen its ability to prepare for, respond to, and rapidly
recover from significant natural and man-made disasters with minimal downtime to basic community,
government and business services.

"We will be looking to draw insights from the experiences of all sectors of the Charleston community as we
begin to construct what we are calling our ‘resiliency toolbox,' said CARRI Director Warren Edwards. "If we
can identify what these ‘partner communities' need to be truly resilient, then we can use that information to
assess vulnerabilities in other communities and then work with them to help them close the gaps."
Edwards said that the decision to approach Charleston about becoming a "partner community" for the
project was strategic since the city's location on the Atlantic Coast and as a major seaport makes it susceptible
to both natural and man-made disasters.

"Charleston is particularly vulnerable to both hurricanes and earthquakes," Edwards said. "We feel like we
can learn a lot from Charleston given what it has already shown in its ability to respond to and recover from
Hurricane Hugo in 1989. Charleston, under the leadership of Mayor Joe Riley has shown a strong
commitment to becoming an even more resilient community in the future."

Edwards said he hopes that one of the results of CARRI will be to help communities move beyond their
reliance on government and first responders and to draw on all of the resources within a community:
business, education, and civic resources, to quickly get the right resources to the right people as efficiently and
quickly as possible in the event of a disaster. CARRI will also have access to national and international
researchers and practitioners who can augment the findings from the community activities with the best
information and practices available.

"A resilient community is not only prepared to help prevent or minimize the loss or damage to life, property
and the environment, but also it has the ability to more quickly return citizens to work, reopen schools and
businesses, and restore other essential services needed for a full and swift economic recovery," said Edwards.

"Charleston, along with our other two ‘partner communities' of Gulfport and Memphis are already doing
some great work. So we look forward to working closely with key leaders in those communities to learn from
what they are doing well, to help them locate and address any gaps, and to then formalize and develop some
new best practices that can be shared and used by other communities."

ORNL's Community and Regional Resilience Initiative is a new program of the Southeast Region Research
Initiative. ORNL is working closely and in partnership with South Carolina's own Savannah River National
Laboratory on this important project.

Key leaders from CARRI will also be featured at a special event hosted by U.S. Senator Jim DeMint and
several of his colleagues in the U.S. House for a one-day technology event in Greenville, SC on November
19.

For more information, please visit our website at www.ResilientUS.org.
                                                      ###

 

Back To News Releases