Emergency management involves a cyclical
process of four phases:
- Prevention: regulatory and physical measures to prevent emergencies or mitigate their impact
- Preparedness: arrangements to mobilize and deploy all necessary resources and services
- Response: actions taken during and immediately after an emergency to minimize the impact and
- Recovery: arrangements to restore the facility to normal as quickly and efficiently as possible and to assist the community to recover from the crisis
Hazard mitigation planning can be defined as
a coordinated series of structural and nonstructural actions and processes
designed to reduce the likelihood of future damages to property, while
minimizing the health and safety-related impacts associated with natural
hazards and disasters. Plans rely on a mix of mitigation strategies that fall
into four principal categories: 1) public information (e.g. hazard disclosure,
mapping of hazards, education and outreach initiatives), 2) structural property
protection (e.g. building and infrastructure hardening, elevation of
flood-prone property, levees, seawalls), 3) natural resource protection (e.g.
beach, dune and wetlands preservation, riparian buffers) and 4) hazard
avoidance (e.g. limiting future development in hazard zones, relocating
existing development from hazard zones).
Selecting a hazard mitigation strategy should
involve both the process of identifying a coordinated set of actions or
“projects” targeting buildings and infrastructure that are currently at risk as
well as the application of land use techniques, policies and processes focused
on pre-event hazards avoidance. Examples of land use planning tools that can be
used for this purpose include zoning, subdivision regulations, building codes,
and the public financing of capital improvements. The benefit of taking a land
use planning approach, broadly defined, limits the level of exposure to hazards
before an event occurs in addition to tackling problematic decisions made in
the past.
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