Community adaptation to cope with disaster related road structure failure

Natural hazards can cause a wide range of social and economic impacts both to the area directly affected by the hazards as well as to the broader community. Although community resilience is an important aspect that influences post-disaster response and recovery stages, it has not been explicitly studied by most scholars, and is rather taken to be embedded in the socio-economic landscape studied in the literature. Road structures such as bridges, culverts and flood-ways play a vital role in times of natural disasters as their functionality directly influences evacuation, rescue, recovery and reconstruction activities. In addition to the direct benefits derived from road structures, in the event of a disaster, they play a vital role in resilience by connecting individuals and communities. This paper identifies adaptation methods practiced by disaster affected communities targeted at increasing their accessibility and mobility, and analyses how such adaptation activities can minimise the negative effects brought on by the failure of road structures. The paper uses a recent case study from regional Queensland, Australia, to understand how adaptation options vary in rural areas and to explore possible methods to improve resilience of communities.