Ryan ChartrandA team of Cal Poly faculty, staff and graduate students spent the last year updating the State Hazard Mitigation Plan, which will be implemented Oct. 8.
The plan deals with ways to prevent and reduce the damages caused by major natural and human-caused disasters such as fires, floods and earthquakes.
The plan must be updated every three years by federal law. Members of Cal Poly’s city and regional planning department garnered the contract of $762,894 with the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (OES).
“(OES) saw that Cal Poly had excellent resources to support that effort,” said Michael Boswell, a city and regional planning associate professor.
Boswell and two other members of the faculty, lecturer Ken Topping and department head William Siembieda, headed the project.
The good reputation of Topping’s international mitigation work and the university contributed to the state’s decision, Boswell said.
The more than three-quarters-of-a-million dollar contract was technically between OES and the Cal Poly Corporation, and included supplemental salary for faculty and graduate assistants, administrative assistants, outside consultants, travel and office expenses.
“I think everyone involved learned quite a bit from this,” Boswell said.
“I believe we have provided a great service to the state.”
While many aspects of the 2004 plan were included in the new edition, there were innovations.
The SMART system, or state mitigation assessment response team, will allow for OES to see how mitigations worked in wake of a disaster, Boswell said.
For example, a flood wall installed to protect a mobile home park ended up saving more than $1 million in damages when the Napa River flooded.
The report also includes an assessment of all of California’s local plans, which was unprecedented nationwide.
Lilly Schinsing was one of the city and regional planning graduate students involved and mainly concentrated on reviewing the local plans.
“It was a pretty extensive process,” she said. She read about 50 different plans, each from 200 to 400 pages long, to see what kind of people were involved in their drafting and what hazards they identified. The goal was to graphically present the data in a way that represented the plans collectively.
Schinsing had some prior experience in coordinating emergency response, but nothing like this. She was hired before the school year even started, and saw it as “an avenue to explore” something new.
“It was a really great experience,” she said.
She and the other graduate students got the chance to go to Maryland to participate in a FEMA exercise using HAZUS, a simulation that showed how much financial and human loss a disaster would cause to a city.
The federal government does not require cities and counties to have a hazard mitigation plan, but does provide financial incentives, Boswell said.
Both San Luis Obispo County and the city of San Luis Obispo have a hazard mitigation plan.
The Cal Poly team had a daily relationship with OES and will continue to work with them to establish the SMART system.
“We had a very positive working experience with them,” Boswell said.
“The initial feedback from FEMA is positive.”
The project took a lot of work, but Boswell wouldn’t say no to doing it again in three years.
“We hope to have an ongoing relationship with them,” he said.