Urban Planning and Emergency Preparedness

Urban planning is probably not the first thing that comes to mind when you think about emergency preparedness, yet it is related to preparedness on multiple levels. 

It’s true that the vast majority of utility emergency planning efforts focus on restoration, not prevention, and this is by necessity.  But in other, non-utility sectors, especially at the municipal level, there is an increasing focus on prevention. 

Obviously urban planning is not a core element of our daily jobs or even lives, but I think it serves as a good case study for why it makes sense to shift at least some of utilities’ focus to being more proactive vs. reactive.   

How Urban Planning Can Help Prevent Disasters

According to an interview in Government Technology, many governmental emergency managers are starting to realize that how and where communities are built is the biggest determinant of the impact of a disaster, not the response.  Similar to storm hardening tactics, avoidance is always better than mitigation.

Although this is not breaking news, planners are now starting to gain access to the type of sophisticated data that they need to optimize preventative strategies like urban planning.  Thanks to artificial intelligence and similar technologies, planners can now identify, visualize and analyze specific risk factors, degrees of risk, and what can be done differently to change negative outcomes.

The company featured in the GovTech article, One Concern, indexes and analyzes over 160 variables per structure, including profiles of building occupants, to identify weak point and fortification techniques for its municipal clients.  The data helps the municipalities paint a picture that clearly shows the proverbial weak links in the chain, which helps both hardening as well as urban planning efforts. 

I predict that communities will indeed utilize this type of data to harden their weak points on an increasingly frequency basis, which will help partially dampen the impact of larger destructive events in the future caused by global warming.  So, although the optimization of urban planning does not directly impact utility emergency planning, the resultant prevention of incremental damage can only help restoration efforts.