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Planning Timeline

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This timeline uses varying time resolutions—decades before 2000 and after 2010, years before 2005 and after 2006, and months during 2005 and 2006—to display planning activities in relation to disaster recovery planning. Attributes of each major planning activity include the name of the jurisdiction, the primary client, a graphic thumbnail of geographic scope, a time bar of the time over which the planning activity occurs, specific planning events, and federal and state funding amounts. All of these attributes are displayed in association with a graph of population change before and after the Hurricane Katrina landfall. Population change is an example of a pertinent variable to track in this case. Others might include jobs, revenues or expenditures by City of New Orleans, which would be relevant in tracking change during recovery.

This graphic display is designed as a poster, which can be viewed on line by zooming and panning to see relationships or by printing as a 30 by 40 inch or larger poster. Design of such timelines requires careful judgments about what to include in order to represent the range, diversity, and intersections of planning activities with development processes without overwhelming human perception capabilities with too much information. One approach to coping with added complexity is to create linked timelines, such as one focusing on New Orleans, linked by common events and time points to another timeline focused on the larger Katrina-Rita recovery region of the Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas gulf coast.

Other displays of relationships among planning activities include jurisdiction and authority and examples under “Using Plans” that access information in multiple plans.

Disaster recovery, like most planning situations, involves many plans. One way to understand relationships among plans is through timelines of planning activities.

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