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Hot Topic HAZARD MITIGATION AND YOU, CHATHAM COUNTY RESIDENTS!
What is Hazard Mitigation?
Hazard Mitigation is sustained action taken to reduce or eliminate long-term risk to people and their property from the effects of hazards.
Mitigation focuses on breaking the cycle of disaster damage, reconstruction, and repeated damage. Mitigation efforts provide value to the American people by creating safer communities and reducing loss of life and property.
Examples of Hazard Mitigation:
Mitigation includes such activities as:
• Complying with or exceeding National floodplain management regulations.
• Enforcing building codes, flood-proofing requirements and wind-bracing requirements for new construction or repairing existing buildings.
• Adopting zoning ordinances that steer development away from areas subject to flooding, storm surge or coastal erosion.
• Retrofitting public buildings to withstand hurricane-strength winds.
• Acquiring damaged homes or businesses in flood-prone areas, relocating the structures, and returning the property to open space, wetlands or recreational uses.
• Building community shelters and tornado safe rooms to help protect people in their homes, public buildings and schools in hurricane- and tornado-prone areas.
Mitigation's Value to Society
1. Mitigation creates safer communities by reducing losses of life and property.
2. Mitigation enables individuals and communities to recover more rapidly from disasters.
3. Mitigation lessens the financial impact of disasters on individuals, the Treasury, state, local and tribal communities.
Mitigation Plans form the foundation for a community's long-term strategy to reduce disaster losses and break the cycle of disaster damage, reconstruction, and repeated damage. The planning process is as important as the plan itself. It creates a framework for risk-based decision making by the community to reduce damages to lives, property, and the economy from future disasters.
What is Mitigation Planning?
Mitigation planning is a process through which communities assess risks and identify actions to reduce vulnerability to hazards.
What is a Mitigation Plan?
A Mitigation Plan is a community-driven, living document used to reduce vulnerability to hazards.
Benefits of Mitigation Planning
1. Increases public awareness and understanding of vulnerabilities as well as support for specific actions to reduce losses from future natural disasters.
2. Builds partnerships with diverse stakeholders increasing opportunities to leverage data and resources in reducing workloads as well as achieving shared community objectives.
3. Expands understanding of potential risk reduction measures to include structural and regulatory tools, where available, such as ordinances and building codes.
4. Informs development, prioritization, and implementation of mitigation projects. Benefits accrue over the life of the project as losses are avoided from each subsequent hazard event.
Learn More About the Specifics of Chatham County Hazard Mitigation Planning
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