Corridor Recovery

A new "best practice" web-based IT and communication tool for complex disaster management

Corridor Recovery is a collaberative new media response to the Flood of 2008 in Cedar Rapids. As the flood surge reached its peak on June 13, 2008, a former McKinsey consultant (Christian Fong) was called to the Linn County Emergency Operations Center to design a volunteer management system for 5000+ local volunteers.

Cedar Rapids, the home of Rockwell Collins, Geonetric, McLeod and Crystal Group, is a technology heavy city. But communications were all taking place via cell phone, white boards and sometimes paper and pen. Christian Fong met with the Cedar Rapids city manager and the head of United Way to sketch out a private / public partnership to focus all civic communication through a central information portal. CorridorRecovery.org was launched 36 hours later, after a caffeine-fueled development period from a local web designer (Michael Deeter). Since then, it has served as the central communication hub, using mapping to communicate home damage to displaced residents, creating customized web pages for local employers and allowing information officers for nearly a dozen organizations to post up-to-date information in an ongoing dialogue between civic institutions - sometimes within departments - that were literally cut off from each other by the waters.

http://corridorrecovery.org/portal created customized web pages for local employers to communicate directly to the business community. By creating a single intake form, Corridor Recovery could ensure all agencies had the same information about businesses for government grants, recovery statistics and public reporting. It could also create hard-to-replicate time series data for disaster reporting.

CorridorRecovery.org managed corporate volunteer teams in cleaning up nearly 30% of the city's flooded homes within 5 months, until Americorps and United Way could create a dedicated volunteer center. It used a match system that posted needs and quickly could match the needs to registered volunteer teams. When team outnumbered needs, human resources shifted to finding more volunteer sites. When needs outnumbered teams, resources shifted to recruiting, creating and training more volunteers.

Both the US Chamber of Commerce and FEMA cited it as a new "disaster management" best practice, and Galveston, after Hurricane Rita, took advantage of the lessons learned as well.