Help Drafting Assignment
HM510
Unit3 DQ
DQ#1
Structural Versus Non-Structural Mitigation
In today's world, given an increase in the frequency and severity of natural disasters as well as a shrinking economy, do you think that the public would prefer emergency planners/managers follow structural mitigation or non-structural mitigation?
Explain your answer and provide real-world examples.
READING
This unit’s reading focuses on gaining an understanding of structural and non-structural strategies. There are numerous tools and techniques available for mitigation, and planning personnel should be able to make informed decisions based on economics and sustainability.
Read the following from the online Library:
· Chapters 2, 3, and 4, from Disaster Policy and its Practice in the United States
Visit the following:
· Structural and Non-Structural Mitigation
· Structural Mitigation Measures
· Effective Adaptation to Rising Flood Risk
Respond Kindly to Student #1
Timothy Brenneman
When it comes to the case of whether the public world would rather see structural or non-structural mitigation, it would have to be structural in my opinion. People love to see change and how things work. The community doesn’t want to guess what has been done and hoping its efficient. A great structural mitigation example is a levee. Levees help stop flooding and drastically reduce the effects of hurricanes. If the levees were properly built and maintained in New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina would have had far less of an impact. The structural mitigations are the most obvious of the mitigations and are shown front and center. People understand where the funding has gone and what the money is doing to protect them. Non-structural mitigation goes into planning and deflecting disasters and mitigating the affects. These techniques are not as obvious to the public and may have some backlash of where the funding is going or if anything is done to protect them. Structural mitigation is more important in the public eye.
References
Canton, L. G. (2020). Emergency management: Concepts and strategies for effective programs. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Haddow, G. D., Bullock, J. A., & Coppola, D. P. (2021). Introduction to Emergency
Management (7th ed.).
Respond kindly to Student #2
William Leach
This week’s question was a bit difficult to choose a side on. Structural mitigation is defined as, the physical changes as an act of protectors from disasters or hazards (Reed, 2015). While nonstructural mitigation involves what people can do on a personal level that is not structurally or physically evident as a protective defense such as a surge wall or a storm shelter (Reed, 2015). Understanding the frequency of natural disasters and a shrinking economy I personally struggle to chose which form of mitigation to be above another. But if forced I would choose nonstructural mitigation it is stronger in the recovery and mitigation phases of emergency management. For example, requiring insurance of citizens and not allowing constriction in high-risk areas strengthens community resilience with the least amount of push back as well.
References
Reed, M. (2015). Mitigation: Structural and nonstructural. Penn State: Public Health Preparedness.
Respond kindly to Student #3
Kimberly Ord
First, one must understand what each is. According to Haddow et al. (2020), structural mitigation is altering the built environment to make it more able to withstand the impacts of a disaster (or can eliminate the impacts altogether). Examples of structural mitigation for flooding are building dams, levees, elevating buildings, building sea walls, etc.
Nonstructural mitigation, on the other hand, does not alter the built environment at all, but relies upon other ways to reduce impacts, Haddow et al. (2020) noted. For flooding, this may mean zoning changes to prevent building in floodplains or ones to mandate building code changes to reduce the impact in flood-prone areas. Land acquisition for wetland restoration or to make green space that provides natural flood protections are others. Public education is also nonstructural mitigation to make people aware of the risk so they can do what they need to adjust and mitigate their properties.
Most people would feel that the public would choose nonstructural mitigation over structural due to the costs involved with altering the built environment, but I feel if the public knew about each type and who bore the costs of each, they would choose structural mitigation over nonstructural. The reason is that the costliest structural mitigation is completed by governments using tax money already in the coffers. On the other hand, nonstructural mitigation, especially those that deal with building codes, land use, zoning, and land acquisition has the cost end up coming out of people’s pockets. This includes the added costs to remodel or build a home, retrofitting their home or business properties to withstand impacts, etc. Losing land that has been in generations of families may lead to money in one’s pocket from the value, but the land is gone and not theirs anymore. Look at the fights over eminent domain issues that happen. When stricter building codes came into being in the last decades, people scoffed at the added cost it would entail in building or remodeling a home as that comes from their pockets without funding from the government.
Reference
Haddow, G. D., Bullock, J. A., & Coppola, D. P. (2020). Introduction to emergency management, (7th ed.). Butterworth-Heinemann.
DQ #2
Challenges Faced with Structural and Non-structural Mitigation
There are significant challenges with structural mitigations and lesser challenges faced with non-structural mitigation but nonetheless each has challenges that must be addressed. Discuss these challenges and how to address each of them. In your discussion, select a structural and non-structural challenge and how you would address each.
Respond kindly to Student #1
Diego Salgado
Challenges
There are many challenges associated with structural and non-structural mitigation. Structural mitigation commonly includes dams, levees, ocean wave barriers, earthquake-resistant construction, and evacuation (UNDRR, 2021). Overall, structural mitigation’s goal is to minimize loss of life, injuries, and property damage. However, the most significant challenge of structural mitigation other than the cost is that it may lead to a false sense of security. Thus, causing the local populace to stay and not evacuate during a natural disaster. Another way to look at it is that structural mitigation is there in case people can not evacuate on time, therefore, minimizing the damage and cost of recovery (Phillips et al., 2012).
Furthermore, on the opposite non-structural mitigation are cost-efficient and requires little to no effort from homeowners. Most commonly, non-structural mitigation includes land use planning, building codes and enforcement, public education, relocations, relocation buyouts, and insurance (Phillips et al., 2012). Thus, after witnessing Hurricanes Katrina destroy New Orleans, the lack of public education regarding natural disasters and their effects were evident. In addition, as emergency managers and decision-makers, there are no building codes or relocations that can make citizens understand how critical it is for them to take action to reduce the impacts of area hazards. Phillips et al. (2012) further stated, “communicating risk to the public and expecting them to take the recommended actions can be challenging” (p. 7). Thus, to address non-structural challenges, it will be ideal for emergency managers to educate community leaders on the effects and risks associated with the many natural disasters in their area.
References
Phillips, Brenda D., et al. (2012). Introduction to Emergency Management, CRC Press, Taylor and Francis Group, Boca Raton, FL ISBN-13: 978-1-4398-3070-3
United Nation Office For Disaster Risk Reduction. (2021). Structural and non-structural measures. UNDRR. https://www.undrr.org/terminology/structural-and-non-structural-measures
Respond kindly to Student #2
Travis Reed
Good Afternoon Y’all
Both structural mitigation and non-structural mitigation are faced with various challenges that need to be addressed effectively. One of the challenges of structural mitigation is that it gives a false sense of security and people are not to evacuate from the affected areas. In other words, structural mitigation gives false confident and even after several warning signs, people may not be ready to evacuate, thus leading to loss of lives upon the occurrence of a disaster. For instance, in 1997, 27 people died in Jarrel Texas due to Tornado since they were not ready to evacuate even after ten minutes of sounding of tornado sirens (NOAA 2, n.d.). To address this challenge, the government should enlighten the communities to change their perception on the structural mitigation and understand that this mitigation does not offer a 100 % safety. Another challenge facing structural mitigation is cost. The process of raising physical structures is expensive and some individuals are not able to afford this extra cost. Consequently, some people fail to undertake the construction and others use inferior construction materials that are not able to resist the force of any disaster. To address this challenge, the government should subsidize the prices of quality materials to these individuals and go further to construct the facilities for those people who are in absolute poverty.
On the other hand, one of the challenges facing the non-structural mitigation is that it needs attention to unprecedented or infrequent events and people tend to ignore any pre-event advice from relevant authorities. To address this challenge, the local government should educate people on the importance of adhering to pre-event advices and put policies in place that enforce a forceful evacuation in case of any disaster warning sign is given. Another challenge facing this method is that it relies on the individual community member, who may lack adequate resources for mitigation (Pesaro et al., 2018). To address this challenge, the government should modify the insurance cover to cater for the above challenge.
References
NOAA 2. (n.d). “Thunderstorms, Tornadoes, Lightning; Nature’s Most Violent Storms.” The U.S. Department of Commerce and the American Red Cross. www.nws.noaa.gov/om/brochures/ttl.pdf .
Pesaro, G., Mendoza, M. T., Minucci, G., & Menoni, S. (2018). Cost-benefit analysis for non-structural flood risk mitigation measures: Insights and lessons learnt from a real case study. In Safety and Reliability–Safe Societies in a Changing World (pp. 109-118). CRC Press.
Respond kindly to Student #3
Kenneth Battersby
Hello All,
I would say that there are always going to be challenges in anything that requires people to do things or buy things or learn new things. Regardless of people realizing the necessity of mitigation approaches it still takes these people to get the buy in and actually take this steps toward mitigation. When it comes to structural mitigation approaches the two main challenges I see are funding and abundance of resources for all buildings requiring structural stability. According to Reed (2015) "In general structural mitigation is the direct actions that people take, build, or move in order to better preserve their life and or property" (para. 1). So not only do these residents or communities require the funds to put these efforts into play but they also require local resources to be accessible for them to purchase. Now, in regards to non-structural challeneges I see two challenges and that is having actual trained personnel on staff to educate these local communities and also validating the efforts these residents put into place are actually stable. As a community you can tell residents to have non-structural mitigation strategies but without someone to actually educate them on the full extent of what that means then these residents may be lost in translation. As for validity of efforts, this means allowing people to submit maybe to local responders or a central agency a non-structural mitigation plan can be submitted so they can actually say whether the plan would work. Consider a plan that utilizes back roads in a form of escape during a winter incident, but the resident failed to realize the back roads are usually closed off or closed during snow which would leave the resident panicking if put in a situation. An outside pair of eyes would be able to identify that and a fix could be established.
Reed; M. (2015, May). Mitigation: Structural and Non-structural. Retrieved from https://sites.psu.edu/workworthdoing/2015/05/06/mitigation-structural-and-non-structural/