Sean C. Morgan
Completion of a hazard mitigation plan for the City of Sweet Home will open up avenues to federal funding to help protect local structures from potential disasters.
Only six communities in Oregon have adopted hazard mitigation plans so far, consultant Ken Goettel told the City Council at a work session last week. There will probably be a dozen total in the next year, providing a window of low competition for project funding, mainly through the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
FEMA money is not distributed equally throughout the country, Goettel said. It goes to communities with plans in place, and that can mean up to $3 million in project funding in 75-percent matches.
Larger communities have more resources to pursue grant funding, Goettel said. Portland has five grant writers on staff. For a smaller community, a plan like this can help draw dollars that will bring benefit.
Mitigation planning is not the same as emergency response planning, Goettel said. Mitigation is the reduction in the risk of damages, economic losses and casualties.
The plan is a general guide not a regulation, Goettel said. The community may adopt regulations based on the ideas in the plan.
The mitigation plan reviews each hazard that poses risk to the community, Goettel said. It evaluates the frequency and severity of potential events and actions for reducing the risk.
The plan specifically deals with floods, winter storms, landslides, wildland-urban interface fires, earthquakes, volcanic activity, dam safety, disruption of utility and transportation infrastructure, hazardous materials incidents and terrorism. The plan details potential risks in each of these areas, the most likely to affect Sweet Home being winter storms and related utility outages.
It also talks about the potential for a Cascadia subduction zone earthquake. Understanding about earthquakes in Oregon has improved over the last decade, and the potential for them is higher than once believed.
That does not mean that every building in town needs to be retrofitted to new earthquake standards, Goettel said, but the plan may identify key structures that should be.
“We need to look realistically at the risk,” Goettel said. “We want to strike a pragmatic balance between ignoring the hazard and running around screaming the sky is falling.”
Sweet Home cannot be made “risk-free,” Goettel said. For example, to completely protect against a wildland fire destroying structures, the city might need to pave a mile-wide strip around the city. Such a response would be extreme, but some steps can be taken to reduce risk. For example, a home could be raised above a flood plain.
The plan will quantify specific risks, Goettel said. It is not enough to know that a building is in a flood plain. Rather it is important to quantify the risk, the effect if it is one inch or one foot below the 100-year flood plain.
In each area, the plan suggests short-term and long-term action items. In flooding, projects would include an update of FEMA’s 1982 flood insurance study for Sweet Home and a survey of structure elevations within the 100-year flood plain.
The creation of the hazard mitigation plan is being funded by an Oregon Emergency Management grant.
Upon completion of a final draft, the council will decide whether to adopt the plan.