Emergency Plan Manual

Data Sources Various possible resources exist from which to obtain historical and predictive information. For our county, mapping tools are available. These maps allow the user to approximate where and how often specific hazards have occurred. Examples of mapping tools available on the Internet are:  ESRI - www.esri.com/hazards/makemap.html  Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) - www.fema.gov/maps  U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) - http://www.usgs.gov Some state Geological Survey or Office of Emergency Services may have online resources as well. Community organizations and agencies are valuable sources of information as is our local emergency management organization. They may have already conducted a similar hazard assessment for our community and should be partners in our assessment. Our local American Red Cross chapter also may provide regional historic information including a listing of disasters. Additionally, information can be obtained from other sources. For instance, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) can provide information on hurricanes and other wind events and local environmental health agencies or fire departments can provide information on hazardous materials incidents. Step 2: Severity of Consequences When something happens, how bad will it be? The first step of the hazard risk assessment provided us with a list of hazard probabilities affecting our area. We will initially choose to focus on five to ten hazards that have been identified as having high probabilities of occurrence. However, a comprehensive analysis will require us to also study hazards that, while infrequent in occurrence, may have higher potential consequence on the public health infrastructure. The hazard-specific data should attempt to capture data that reflects the maximum credible event regardless of more typical consequences of the hazard. Since the purpose of HRAI is to assess the capacity of our agency to respond to various hazard scenarios. One possible source for hazard-specific data is a modeling tool. Modeling allows us to estimate losses from natural hazards for a specific geographic area. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has created a model, HAZUS, which may be used to estimate losses from earthquakes, floods (both coastal and riverine), and hurricanes. More information on the program can be found at http://www.fema.gov/hazus/. Step 3: Scoring the Consequences When something happens, can we respond to it? After completing Worksheets we are focusing on in our assessment, we are ready to give each indicator a “score”. The score, a number between 0 and 5, is based on an assessment of our community’s capacity in dealing with the increase brought about by a particular hazard as reflected by the hazard-specific figures. After assigning a score to each indicator, complete Scoring the Consequences : taking in care: Human impact, impact on properties, impact on business, resources available (interruption of healthcare services, etc), external resources. The severity score is a qualitative comparison between the added impact of the hazard and our community’s ability to meet the needs generated. Our baseline indicator should be a reasonable expectation of our capacity. Step 4: Risk Analysis Integrating Steps 1 & 2: Where does this assessment take me? The final step in your community risk assessment combines the probability information given in Step 1 (the likelihood of hazards occurring) with the severity data determined in Step 2 (how bad it will be if the hazard hits). The more 10 commons disaster/severity in our community are: