First Hazard Mitigation meeting

Clarke County now has a Hazard Mitigation team, a group comprised of first responders, health and safety enthusiasts and representatives from local entities, who will work together toward setting safety measures for the county based on the risk factors they’ve identified.

During its first meeting Monday, the Hazard Mitigation Team members present rated what they thought were risk factors in Clarke County. To figure out current hazards and the risks they pose, members reviewed documents with information on historical occurrences of hazard events such as weather conditions like drought, earthquakes, extreme heat, flash floods and river floods, severe winter storms, thunderstorms with hail/lightening and tornado or windstorms. There were other non-weather hazard events to consider such as dam/levee failure, pandemic, crop disease, infrastructure failure or grass/wildfire. Once these events were evaluated based on what has, has not ,or cannot occur, the team moved on to profiling the hazards.

Members ranked the various probable hazards based on six criteria including:

• Future probability – The probability scores reflect the estimated frequency of the hazard occurring in the future.

• Vulnerability of the population – The vulnerability scores represent adverse impacts to citizens, visitors, and emergency responders.

• Maximum area of extent – The maximum geographic extent impacted by the hazard.

• Severity of impact – This considers the on-the-ground actual impact of a potential event to the health and safety of the public, first responders, the ability of the community to function after the incident, property damage, economic and financial damage and even the local reputation.

• Speed of onset – The speed of onset is the amount of warning time available before the hazard occurs.

• Duration of event – The duration of event is the length of time a typical event affects an area, not counting the cascading events, response or recovery times.

The members not only assessed the risks of hazards in Osceola, but also in Murray and other rural areas of Clarke County – anywhere there are bridges for the railroad or interstate, sewer lagoons and water towers exist. These areas were looked at to see what hazards could affect these particular locations.

With the hazards identified, the Hazard Mitigation Team will work on building a plan and its implementation. Based on the discussion during the meeting, members plan on promoting annual storm spotting training, developing an agreement for a secondary water source in case of drought, raising grades to eliminate water back up and flooding, encouraging citizens to purchase/use smoke detectors and fire extinguishers, and identifying specific at-risk populations that may be exceptionally vulnerable and organize outreach to them.