Mitigating Natural Hazards: A National Challenge

Screaming headlines announce another presidential declaration of disaster as the latest flood, hurricane, or earthquake strikes a populated area. Television airs images of devastated homes and freeways. Governors demand federal disaster relief funds. Hearts go out to unfortunate victims huddled in shelters. The Federal Emergency Management Agency rushes in with recovery and rebuilding programs. This frenzied scenario has been repeated many times, with each new disaster seemingly bigger than the last. In fact, the first half of the 1990s saw the largest and most costly floods, hurricanes, and earthquakes in U.S. history.

Why are these disaster damages growing so large? Do we simply have to bite the bullet and keep rebuilding our disaster-stricken communities? Is something wrong with our national disaster policy? Could some of the damage and suffering from natural disasters be prevented?

To answer these questions, this book digs into the decisions and programs behind the headlines. It is the first complete analysis of the outcomes of the Stafford Act, the basic U.S. disaster law, to examine how natural hazard mitigation—the technical term for prevention of future harm from disasters—has worked over time and how it can be made to work more effectively in the future. Its authors are the first to study how federal hazard mitigation funds have actually been spent since the Stafford Act was adopted in 1988, what is actually contained in state hazard mitigation plans required by the Stafford Act, what goes on in mitigation decision making following a major disaster, how government mitigation officials rate the effectiveness of the mitigation system, and what changes are being considered to solve the widely recognized problems with the present way of coping with natural disasters.

Importance of Natural Hazard Mitigation

Disasters happen when nature's extreme forces strike exposed people and property. These recurring natural phenomena, such as floods, hurricanes, and earthquakes, are known as natural hazard events. When natural hazard events take place in unpopulated areas, no disaster occurs, when they take place in developed areas, damaging life and property, they are called natural disasters. The magnitude of a disaster depends on the intensity of the natural hazard event, the number of people and structures exposed to it, and the effectiveness of pre-event mitigation actions in protecting people and property from hazard forces.

Natural disasters have grown larger as more people and property have become exposed to natural hazards. Unfortunately, the places where hazards occur are often the same places where people want to live—along ocean shores and riverfronts or near earthquake faults. As more urban development takes place in such high-hazard areas, the risk of damage and injury from disasters multiplies. During the first half of the 1990s, the United States suffered unparalleled damage from natural disasters. Hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, and other natural disasters caused billions of dollars in damage, destroyed homes and businesses, and cut off roads, bridges, water systems, and other public infrastructure.

Yet much of the damage and suffering from natural disasters can be prevented. Natural hazard events cannot be prevented from occurring, but their impacts on people and property can be reduced if advance action is taken to mitigate risks and minimize vulnerability to natural disasters. Following disasters in the early 1990s, the U.S. Congress directed the Federal Emergency Management Agency to place its highest priority on natural hazard mitigation, shifting its emphasis from responding to, and recovering from, disasters once they have occurred to mitigating future hazard events. This marked a fundamental change, moving from reactive to proactive national emergency management policy.

This book describes and analyzes the way hazard mitigation has been carried out in the United States under the national disaster law—the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act, enacted in 1988. We seek to answer questions about how the requirements of this law, establishing a national system for hazard mitigation, have worked in practice and how they might be made to work better. Our goal is a sound system of natural hazard mitigation, which we believe is a prerequisite to a safe future for the nation and its communities.

The Concept of Natural Hazard Mitigation

Natural hazard mitigation is advance action taken to reduce or eliminate the long-term risk to human life and property from natural hazards. Typically carried out as part of a coordinated mitigation strategy or plan, such actions, usually termed either structural or nonstructural, depending on whether they affect buildings or land use, include the following:

• Strengthening buildings and infrastructure exposed to hazards by means of building codes, engineering design, and construction practices to increase the resilience and damage resistance of the structures, as well as building protective structures such as dams, levees, and seawalls (structural mitigation)

• Avoiding hazard areas by directing new development away from known hazard locations through land use plans and regulations and by relocating damaged existing development to safe areas following a disaster (nonstructural mitigation)

• Maintaining protective features of the natural environment by protecting sand dunes, wetlands, forests and vegetated areas, and other ecological elements that absorb and...