Disaster Planning for Vulnerable Coastal Towns
Most of my blog posts revolve around utility disaster planning, but there are definitely things we can learn by analyzing emergency preparedness efforts in other sectors. As such, let’s take a look at some community planning initiatives.
Community Disaster Planning
There are many great articles online that touch on municipal or community level emergency planning, but for this post I’ll be focusing on this article from governmentnews.com that highlights the emergency planning efforts of a handful of coastal towns in Australia.
Specifically, 14 small coastal communities have banded together from an emergency preparedness perspective. The towns have been working on the program since 2014, and here is a list of their disaster planning improvements to-date:
- Putting backup generators in community centers
- Providing ample supplies of essential equipment such as emergency or ham radios, evacuation kits, defibrillators, and first aid kits
- Creating lists of first-priority, high-vulnerability residents
- Providing emergency training for residents and response volunteers
- Launching an online ‘disaster dashboard’ that provides a single source of information to residents on weather, road closures, school closings, outages, and restoration progress, among other things
There are other provisions as well, but the above list represents the bulk of them. Overall, these are all great ideas, and although some of them may seem somewhat elementary to us utility emergency preparedness professionals, the more communities improve their disaster planning efforts, the better off we’ll be as well. There is no substitute for documentation, communication, and training, no matter if we’re talking about utility or community disaster planning efforts.
