MPH 600 Week 2 Hazard and Community Asset Assessment Example

Fire, Flood, Heat and a Rail Line: Ranking a Southern Colorado County's Hazards and Mapping the Community Assets That Can Blunt Them

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

MPH/600: Community Resiliency and Response Preparedness

Week 2 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The county, its hazard rankings, tract data, assets and meetings are composites written for a model paper; research findings and federal guidance come from the sources cited.

While reviewing the county's hazard mitigation plan after the summer's flash flood, the health department's emergency preparedness coordinator noticed something missing. The plan listed hospitals, fire stations, shelters and generators, but not a single church, food bank, neighborhood association or radio station, the organizations that had carried much of the flood response. This paper presents a new assessment of the county's hazards, social vulnerability and community assets.

Identifying Hazards

The team identified hazards in three groups. Natural hazards include wildfire in the foothills, flash flooding from burn scars, river flooding, extreme heat, winter storms and drought. Technological hazards include a rail line and interstate carrying hazardous materials and failures of power or water systems. Human and biological hazards include pandemics and other infectious disease outbreaks.

Ranking Hazards

Each hazard was scored from one to four on likelihood, health impact and property impact, and on the community's current capacity to respond, with weak capacity scoring higher. Extreme heat ranked first, with high likelihood every summer and serious health impact. Wildfire and post-fire flash flooding ranked second and third. Pandemic disease ranked fourth for impact despite lower annual likelihood. A hazardous materials release from rail ranked fifth, with low likelihood but high potential impact near the rail yard. Winter storms, river flooding, drought and utility failures filled the remaining places, each scored with the same criteria so the board could see why.

Linked Hazards

Several hazards are linked. Heat and drought raise wildfire risk; wildfire creates burn scars that turn summer storms into flash floods; heat and smoke together worsen breathing problems; and power failures during heat or winter storms threaten people who rely on medical equipment. Ranking each hazard alone understates these chains, so the team noted linkages beside each score.

Why Social Vulnerability Matters

Hazards harm people unequally. Two neighborhoods facing the same flood recovered very differently, as the previous analysis showed. Assessing social vulnerability locates the residents least able to prepare, respond and recover.

A Tract-Level Index

CDC researchers developed a social vulnerability index from 15 census variables at the census tract level for use in emergency management, noting that socially vulnerable populations are more likely to be adversely affected by disasters, less likely to recover and more likely to die, and they examined its value using the effects of Hurricane Katrina (Flanagan et al., 2011). Its variables fall into four themes: income and education; age, disability and single parenthood; race, ethnicity and English ability; and housing type, crowding and access to a vehicle.

What the Index Showed Locally

Applied to the county, the index ranked six census tracts on the east and south sides in the highest vulnerability group, driven by poverty, lack of vehicles, crowded housing, limited English and high disability rates. Several of these tracts also lie along the creek that flooded and in the least shaded parts of the city.

Different Drivers in Different Places

A county-level social vulnerability index reduced 42 socioeconomic and demographic variables to 11 independent factors explaining about 76% of the variance, and found that the factors contributing to a county's score often differ from county to county, some raising vulnerability and others moderating it (Cutter et al., 2003). Vulnerability is not one thing; in one tract it is age, in another it is language or cars. Within the county, rural tracts were vulnerable mainly because of age and distance from services, urban tracts because of poverty and housing.

A Whole Community Approach

Federal guidance on emergency management calls for a whole community approach built on three principles: understanding and meeting the actual needs of the whole community, engaging and empowering all parts of the community and strengthening what works well in communities every day (Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA], 2011). The third principle points directly to assets.

Asset Category One: Physical

Physical assets include two hospitals, the community health center, 14 schools that can serve as shelters, four libraries and senior centers that serve as cooling centers, the fairgrounds for mass care and generators at critical facilities.

Asset Category Two: Organizational

Organizational assets include 60 congregations, the regional food bank and 22 food pantries, a Hispanic community center, two homeless service providers, the Boys and Girls Club, the community college and home care agencies that know which clients depend on power for medical devices.

Asset Category Three: Social

Social assets include neighborhood associations, church networks, parent groups, mutual aid groups formed during the pandemic and extended families. They carry information and help faster than formal systems. During the flood, a mutual aid group's phone tree reached more southern households in a day than county outreach did in a week.

Asset Category Four: Economic

Economic assets include local businesses that donated supplies after the flood, hardware stores, a regional utility with an assistance fund and community foundations able to release emergency grants.

Asset Category Five: Informational

Informational assets include a Spanish-language radio station, local television and newspapers, school messaging systems reaching most families, community social media pages and trusted messengers such as pastors and promotoras.

Assets Inside Vulnerable Neighborhoods

Vulnerable neighborhoods are not empty of assets. The south side has three congregations with kitchens, a corner store owner who knows most families and a promotora network from the community health center. The east side has a strong parent group at its elementary school. Recognizing these assets changes the approach from delivering help to partnering with people already doing the work.

Overlaying the Layers

The team overlaid maps of hazards, vulnerability and assets. Three gaps stood out. First, two high-vulnerability tracts on the south side lie in the flash flood zone but have few organized groups or cooling centers. Second, rural tracts have high heat and wildfire exposure, older residents and long distances to shelters. Third, the neighborhood near the rail yard has high vulnerability and no plan for rapid shelter-in-place communication in Spanish.

Priorities for the Preparedness Plan

The gaps set priorities: build partnerships with congregations and groups in the south side tracts, open a cooling site there, create a rural check-in network for older residents during heat and fire, and develop Spanish shelter-in-place messaging with the radio station for the rail yard neighborhood.

Limits of the Assessment

The index uses census data that lag current conditions. Asset inventories miss informal networks that are hard to see from outside, which is why the team will validate maps in community meetings. Hazard scores involve judgment and should be revisited each year, especially as summers grow hotter and the wildfire season lengthens.

Conclusion

The county's new assessment ranks extreme heat, wildfire and post-fire flooding as the top hazards, uses tract-level vulnerability data to locate residents least able to recover and counts congregations, networks and trusted messengers as assets alongside buildings. Overlaying the three layers reveals where hazards and vulnerability meet thin assets, setting the priorities for the preparedness plan.

References

Cutter, S. L., Boruff, B. J., & Shirley, W. L. (2003). Social vulnerability to environmental hazards. Social Science Quarterly, 84(2), 242-261. https://doi.org/10.1111/1540-6237.8402002

Federal Emergency Management Agency. (2011). A whole community approach to emergency management: Principles, themes, and pathways for action (FDOC 104-008-1). https://www.fema.gov/sites/default/files/2020-07/whole_community_dec2011__2.pdf

Flanagan, B. E., Gregory, E. W., Hallisey, E. J., Heitgerd, J. L., & Lewis, B. (2011). A social vulnerability index for disaster management. Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, 8(1), Article 3. https://doi.org/10.2202/1547-7355.1792