Hazard Mitigation Plan Review: Orange County

Question

(2 pages) In this part describe the hazard mitigation planning process, describe how the community went about creating the plan. Specifically, summarize how the local community organized resources, assessed risks, developed the plan, and implemented the plan / monitored progress. ( I uploaded Community Hazard Mitigation Plan as the article that needs to be used). Name of community is Orange County.

Discipline: emergency management

Answer

Hazard Mitigation Plan Review: Orange County

Orange County’s disaster and mitigation plan is formulated around the geographic, terrain and climatic conditions that prevail over this region and neighboring areas. Primarily a rural area with low populations, Orange County is a mountainous place with a major watershed separating it along a north-south plane. Many rivers flow from the mountains and divide into numerous tributaries. With most residential and commercial buildings being along the Vermont route, Orange remains largely rural with most of its lands occupied by lakes, water bodies, rolling hills and ridges. Orange County’s mitigation plan is thus centered on its risk to floods,heavy rains, landslides and large snow melts. The current plan is an improvement on the previous plan and carefully includes additional considerations that affect the trade, transport and population trends (Town of Orange and the Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission, 2017).

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Beginning with a public participation process, initial community mobilization efforts were aimed at assessing their perceived effectiveness of the prior mitigation plan. This was then combined with other departmental quantitativeanalyses to provide a summary on the changes or additions that should be prioritized. The final draft was then distributed electronically to the town’s people who continuously provided feedback based on their own experience in the region. The planning team maintained collaboration with Stephanie Smith who collaborated with FEMA and DMHS to review the final plan and align it to Vermont State and Federal structures (Town of Orange and the Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission, 2017). Some of the mitigation actions included purchasing a generator for the school, expanding and upgrading George Street Bridge, expanding the Manning and Prechtl road, cleaning the dam, obtain Red Cross shelter certification and upgrade town radios (Town of Orange and the Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission, 2017).

The assessment plan included analyzing the vulnerabilities, the likelihood of their occurrence and their damaging capacity. The hazards were then ranked based on these three main considerations in addition to other factors such as warning time and potential impact. Those hazards that ranked highest on the scales were avalanches, landslides, dam failures, forest fires and tornados. Severe weather and flash floods ranked the highest and demonstrated the highest score and pose the greatest risk of impact. The plan and assessment carefully concentrates on the Orange County as opposed to Vermont due to the concentration of the risk factors in the town and its environs (Town of Orange and the Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission, 2017).

The mitigation plan aims to make Orange County more resistant to risks caused by natural disasters. The adjustments seek to eliminate or widely reduce the risk to human life and damage of property or infrastructure. One of the goals of the plan is to maintain the rural aspect of the town which the people highly value. For this reason, the plan must execute social, economic and political alternatives that do not interfere with the rural socialization of the people (Town of Orange and the Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission, 2017). The plan makes considerable financial plans that do not weigh heavily on taxpayers whose population is rather small. The plan maintains the safety and convenience that the people exercise and retains a level of energy-efficiency especially in the transport networks.

The Orange County mitigation plan works through the state with agencies such as ANR and Regional Planning Commissions to create a localized program that makes use of the local leadership and the accessible resources while fully optimizing their deployment for maximum impact. Through a high prioritization system, high risk hazards are given the full focus they deserve. At the same time, efforts are made to ensure moderate-to-low level risk hazards are not neglected. The plan operates within the standards outlined by FEMA in order to reach its funding criteria and further enhance the disaster management’s financial capacity (Town of Orange and the Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission, 2017).

References

Town of Orange and the Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission (CVRPC) (2017). The 2017 Local Hazard Mitigation Plan. Orange: Vermont.