Follow the Money: Using Content Analysis to Understand Disaster Spending

Recovery from and mitigation for disasters is not uniform across events or communities. Although there can be commonalities across disasters in terms of recurrent disaster funding streams, financing for disaster management varies by community and hazard event. This poster explores various funding streams and how planning documents such as hazard mitigation, recovery, capital improvement, and comprehensive plans can have codes created for mixed methods of qualitative and quantitative analysis. The typology of codes can represent policies, themes, funding awards, time frame, and track recovery costs, investments, and funding sources through time. This poster applies this method to the case study of Galveston, TX, after 2008 Hurricane Ike to track federal disaster spending on infrastructure, utilities, and facilities. The ultimate aim of this research is to track funding sources and spending and develop a standardized coding process and methodology to facilitate comparisons across different communities, hazards, mitigation, and recovery priorities to identify best practices and broader trends of how recovery resources are utilized in disaster management. Actions, policies, and improvements can be identified to help set a protocol for other cities to follow.