Mitigation

      No matter where you reside, you are subject to an environment that makes you susceptible to hazards. The hazards where I live in Bellingham Washington are different for where say someone who lives in Denver, Colorado. However, each city and therefore county has to mitigate against these hazards, deciding how to divvy up budgets to address each one.

(Mitigate: Activities that prevent a disaster., reduce probability of them happening, or lessen damaging effects of unavoidable disasters.)

     In my Hazards Planning course this quarter, we prepared for an upcoming quiz by profiling the hazards for Whatcom County (this is where I live). Each team had a very different take on the situation.

My team identified seven hazards that residents in Whatcom County have to deal with. They were:
1) Winter Storms (Blue)
2) Flooding (Pink)
3) Landslides (Green w/ Black writing)
4) Earthquake (Orange)
5) Tsunami (Yellow)
6) Volcano (Purple)
7) Wildfire(Green w/ Blue writing)
     Our second step was to create a set of scales that we could use to profile the hazards against one another.The tricky part was creating units for each scale that fit every hazard. Then to place each hazard along each scale. We took into account how each hazard would specifically effect Whatcom County. For example, a Tsunami, though scary, would cause very little damage to coastal areas due to barrier islands and a protective bay. Winter storms on the other hand are common and very unpredictable for this area. Our scales were:
1) Intensity - Units: 1 -10 in terms of deaths and destruction (no change to total destruction)
2) Frequency - Units: 100 Year time-line - (Infrequent to Frequent )
3) Speed of Onset - Units:  (slow to fast)
4) Duration - Units: 1 Minute - 1 Week
5) Spatial Extent - Units: Neighborhood Wide - County Wide
     The next step was to display these scales in a public friendly way. We chose a flip chart:

Sadly I accidentally cropped out the right hand side. But you get the idea.

    The final part of this exercise was to pretend to delegate a million dollar budget to mitigate against these hazards. It's difficult to decide how to split the budget. Should we spend more money on hazards that are low intensity but frequent such as flooding or winter storms? Or should we plan for the disastrous, infrequent hazard like an earthquake?