That’s what the county mitigation plan does, and it’s been no small feat to craft the document.
“There is a lot to keep up with, a lot of documentation from a lot of government entities, along with FEMA guidelines, state guidelines,” said Margaret Walton, a senior planner in Land Planning at Atkins North America. She consulted with the Chatham Emergency Management Agency (CEMA) on the plan, which covers the county as well as seven municipalities and the Savannah metro area, population 527,106 according to the 2014 Census Bureau estimate.
The county crafted its first mitigation plan in 2000 and has been refreshing the document every five years under the dictates of the federal Disaster Mitigation Act. A Department of Homeland Security grant of $60,000 has helped pay for the work, said CEMA Interim Director and Chief of Staff Dennis T. Jones.
Previous iterations of the plan helped to make this most recent effort run smoothly, according to Jones. “It allowed us to start in the middle; we didn’t have to start from scratch,” he said.
Still, past recommendations could form only a part of the county’s latest mitigation plan. “In emergency management, you want to look at the past not just in your city, but also in comparable areas,” said Norbert Chandler, assistant professor at Savannah State University in the homeland security and emergency management program.
In this case, “they looked at the totality. Even if the likelihood of some of these things are historically low, they still were inclusive of all situations based on what they saw elsewhere.”
For context, the report cataloged past mitigations, especially those accomplished since the last set of recommendations. These spanned a broad territory that included:
- A study to identify fire vulnerabilities of buildings and their contents;
- A review of building codes for proper wind strength and safety regulations;
- Revision of the county building code to require all mobile home parks to have tornado community safe shelters;
- Installation of window protection and replacement of doors at the Citizens Service Center; and
- Elevation of the Police Department generator and flood-proofing of the structure.
To establish a new set of priorities, the planning team turned to the community, and in an outreach effort formed the heart of the mitigation planning process.
Planning included some 15 meetings across the community in all jurisdictions, Jones said. The county went digital, establishing a Facebook page and Twitter account, and sending a steady stream of emails to local media, citizens and points of contact for various jurisdictions. Atkins conducted an online survey, coordinating with the jurisdictions to place the questionnaire on a range of civic websites.
As a result of soliciting input using so many different tools, Jones said the collection of information went smoothly. Planners had ample historical and present-day data to paint a picture of local hazards and assess needed changes. So why make such an effort to draw out suggestions and personal anecdotes from members of the community?
“The research can only tell us so much. We have to know what people have actually experienced,” Walton said. “There are actually a surprising number of people who will speak up, who will say, ‘We had hail last year, and this is what happened in our city.’ Those reports are often the base level, and then you can grow a plan from there.”
It’s equally true, though, that the inclusion of broad community input can make an already-complex process just a little more complicated. For example, some portion of the citizenry may place a strong value on schools reopening as soon as possible after a disaster. From the emergency management point of view, these facilities can act as distribution points and logistics staging areas. “Realistically we don’t need every single school operational within the first week,” said Kate Busbee, CEMA’s chief planner. “Obviously everybody has an opinion. But we have to take what we identify as those facilities that are essential to life and property.”
When it comes to the imperative to include diverse viewpoints, the challenge is in the fact that with so many people, there are so many opinions, Busbee said. “It’s just like when you are trying to develop continuity of operations plans and one person thinks a function is mission critical and someone else does not.”
With everyone on board — and with conflicting opinions — it was time to hunker down and make a plan. High on the list of priorities was something rarely considered in Chatham County in the past. That is, the prospect of man-made havoc. In a word: terrorism.
As the plan readily notes, there is no historic record of a major terror threat in Chatham County, although there have been events elsewhere in the state. A terror attack killed one person during the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. More recently, in October a grand jury formally placed terror charges on 15 individuals who had gathered to celebrate the Confederate flag, in a rally that led to a confrontation with a black family who was celebrating a child’s birthday.
In planning for a terror threat, mitigation experts have to think outside the usual box, approaching the potential hazard from a somewhat different point of view.
In the case of natural disaster, some mitigation actions are consistent. “A fire is a fire,” Jones said, and fire remediation doesn’t vary by a whole lot. If you see a fire hazard, you clear away the dead vegetation.
Terror hazards, on the other hand, likely will be more complex. You can put blockades in front of the courthouse, perhaps install a metal detector. You can put extra locks on the storage spaces in facilities that handle chemicals. But planners admit the breadth of potential terror events is sprawling. A partial list of targets named in the mitigation plan includes the Natural Gas Pressure Center, Fort Pulaski National Monument, Grayson Stadium, Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport and the County EOC, to name but a few.
Mitigations are as varied as the possible targets. Garden City should evaluate potential targets; Savannah needs to safeguard chlorine tanks at the Industrial & Domestic Water Plant; the county should place vehicle barriers outside the judicial courthouse.
Even as planners wrangle with the emerging man-made threat of terror, they still must contend with the likelihood of a natural disaster. Largely considered the biggest local hazard, hurricanes rank high on the scale of mitigation needs.
According to the National Hurricane Center’s historical storm records, 114 hurricanes or tropical storms have passed within 75 miles of Chatham County since 1859. While none has made landfall since 1979, the mere possibility merits serious attention, as a major storm would likely flood the entire area and cause serious damage. Rising sea levels would only exacerbate the situation.
Recommended mitigation actions get down to a fine level of detail. Planners call for actions to remove trees that would threaten utility infrastructure; retrofit schools and nursing homes to include shelter areas; and upgrade the prison roof. There’s an organizational element too, as emergency management leaders establish a process whereby the insurance commissioner will set up a base of operations to act as a central location for those seeking insurance information.
That level of granularity is important not just because of the safeguards it offers, but also because of the financial opportunities it may open up. The more detailed the plan, the greater chance of funding.
“If they apply for a grant from one of these [federal] pots of money and this action was not in their mitigation plan, FEMA is going to make them go back and put it in,” Walton said. “If it is in their plan they are much more likely to get a grant for that action. It also streamlines the process, so when the grant funding comes up you are ready to take out your pieces and put them on the board.”
Whether or not a given grant comes through, county officials still must prepare for the worst, especially when it comes to hurricanes. In some instances, this requires a relatively straightforward action: all those retrofits of windows and remediation of roofs.
Sometimes, though, preparedness is not so easily achieved.
Downtown Savannah, for instance, is home to a number of historic buildings that would be difficult, if not impossible, to bring up to current hurricane standards. In those cases, mitigation takes a different form. “You plan for evacuation, you plan for redundancy of systems, and you plan for critical documents and materials,” Walton said.
She pointed to the example of an aluminum-sided building presently being used by a local narcotics team. There is simply no way to proof the structure against high winds. Thus mitigation plans call for the removal of critical equipment and documents. If you can’t safeguard the building, at least protect the most significant contents. That kind of flexibility is necessary if a mitigation plan is to cover all conceivable circumstances.
And then there’s the money.
Most in the emergency planning community are familiar with the situation. Municipalities have immediate needs: roads that need paving, snow removal budgeting, civic center activities. It can be a hard-fought battle to convince leaders they must set aside funding for something that might or might not happen next year or 10 years from now.
There’s no budget line item to cover all the Chatham County mitigation recommendations. Each will have to be funded separately by municipalities or through grants — and grants look like the more likely scenario. “There is no way these smaller municipalities or even the county will be able to afford all these actions in one year,” said Jones. “That’s why it’s a five-year plan, and sometimes it takes even longer than that.”
To help the process along, the county monitors the eCivis website for grant opportunities, and keeps a dedicated grant writer on staff to pursue these possibilities.
That grant money may not be easy to come by, however. As Jones pointed out, the federal government invests just $1 in mitigation for every $6 it spends on recovery. While emergency managers contend mitigation is by far the better investment, it’s likely that mitigation plans like the one in Chatham County will not see full funding until priorities shift at the federal level.
Those who have dedicated themselves to crafting this plan, and who will do so again a few years down the road, acknowledge that not all of the needed mitigations will ever see the light of day, urgent as the need may be. “This is a wish list,” Jones said. “In a perfect world, this is what we need to do. All of this. But obviously a perfect world doesn’t exist yet."
