Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Mitigation Framework: General

For a community to have a risk assessment that will allow them to understand the impacts and vulnerabilities within the community, they must account for the social factors that affect people's ability to respond to and recovery from an event. This goes beyond just thinking of the infrastructure and lifelines to a community. The makeup and resources of the people in neighborhoods is key in an assessment that allows you ...more »

I know the reason a lot of "historic" town were located on rivers was because of commerce. However, times have changed with the plans, trains and automobiles. I'd love to see towns located on the rivers to relocate out of the flood plain. Keep the old historic downtown next to the river, but convert those buildings from businesses that the town depends on for tax revenue to something else. Sure this won't work for ...more »

Proper construction and land use management reduces disaster damages. Currently, disaster assistance does not reward good construction and planning--nor our there any consequences for poor construction and planning. As a result, many communities get multiple disasters with no change in the behavior. Communities should only get one bite of the "disaster apple" unless they take specific building code and planning actions ...more »

For a community to successfully mitigation the risks that it faces they must first identify the threats and hazards that are possible for them. Based on an assessment of those risks, a community could then decide what threats and hazards they want to prioritize to mitigate against. A community and the nation as a whole would benefit from the community being able to share their risk assessment data and use it for multiple ...more »

Mitigation grants can be an venue for getting federal money--not necessarily addressing the most needed or cost-effective mitigation. Mitigation loans should be provided instead--roughly modelled on the community disaster loan program. The amount of loans that a community would be capped based on their analysis of their ability to repay--how resilient their tax base is.

One area which would make a community more successful in terms of mitigation and increasing their resilience would be to integrate hazard mitigation planning with other community planning such as land use or economic development planning. Mitigation planning could also be integrated with pre-disaster recovery planning to be better positioned to take full advantage of opportunites that may present themselves in a chaotic ...more »

Currently, 44 CFR Part 201 dictates that States must update their Hazard Mitigation Plans every three years to maintain eligibility to receive Hazard Mitigation Assistance funding. This requirement has several drawbacks that lessons the effectiveness of the mitigation programs as a whole. The three year time frame does not give the State's adequate time to actually act on mitigation strategies and objectives listed ...more »

Mitigation would be successful in communities if local community governments and the local private sector business community and non-profits would focus their efforts in an collaborative way to leverage the resources available for mitigation activities and to provide incentives.

Earthquakes of all magnitudes are scientifically detectable for quite some time before they strike as described by NewMexicoGeologist on YouTube using piezoseismology.

FEMA's mitigation is the effort to reduce loss of life and property by lessening the impact of disasters, including earthquakes; to not do so would be considered fraud. Save lives FEMA. http://www.youtube.com/user/NewMexicoGeologist

PPD-8 requires both a Protection and a Mitigation Framework. Why not combine them into a single Resilience Framework as your request for examples implies: "◦Examples of activities it would take to successfully mitigate from all disasters and threats"? DHS has the internal resources to do this by having the FEMA Mitigation folks collaborate with the folks in the Office of Infrastructure Protection (IP).