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Well said, dadioflex. Another big problem plaguing the rebuilding effort is a rather interesting mental condition (which is shockingly common even today) called "Normalacy". It's two fold really. The first kind, which is being experienced in today's world is sometimes wrongly referred to as "apathy". It's the mental state where a person believes that "since it's never happened before, it never will." Our ancestors suffered from that problem time and time and time again, sometimes resulting in disastrous consequences. (floods, collapses, etc) The second kind is sometimes viewed as stagnation. People are tired of the change, the upheaval, the constant fighting. They want to have a "normal" life again. Normal in this case being something where things follow a regular, predictable pattern. No having to deal with something different every day and every hour.
If you look at the dark ages, that was something which happened with incredible rapidity. First there was the fall of Rome, so you had people trying to pick up the pieces and assume, if only on a most basic level, some form of normalacy. They would stagnate there for a period and then advance, only to get kicked to the curb again. But instead of picking up the pieces and trying to salvage those advances, they'd just fall back on what they knew and stagnate all over again.
A culture trying to come out of a massive, or major disaster, would have to understand that, when recovering from a major disaster, normalacy is the biggest killer of recovery, because it causes people to stagnate rather than recover. I'm dealing with that topic right now in two of my upcoming books. The novel "One Second After" covers this topic quite well also. Sure, they have the initial period of "survival" they have to get through, but once on the other side they make the right choice to try and pick up the pieces and push forward, regardless how bad things were, or are. A recovering society would have to make sure they held to that, even if it took a hundred years.
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