Virginia Tech Hazard Mitigation Planning

Research Status:  Funded
Date Began: 05/2012
Date Ended: 08/2013
Key Personnel:  Peter Sforza, Thomas Dickerson, Erica Adams, Leslie Tate, Talmage Hansen

To support the university’s hazard mitigation efforts, CGIT has updated the Virginia Tech Hazard Mitigation Plan. This plan identifies and assesses a variety of hazards impacting the main Blacksburg campus, and develops strategies to reduce their impact.  CGIT collects best-available data describing campus facilities, including building footprints and building attributes, and intersects this information with known hazard data, such as FEMA-designated floodplains in order to estimate risk and vulnerability of Virginia Tech facilities to these hazards.

Hazards that were quantitatively analyzed using geographic information systems (GIS) include, flood, winter storm, arson/building fire, earthquake, wind, and lightning. Other hazards that were included in this analysis were drought, karst/land subsidence, wildfire, hazardous materials, terrorism and crime, technological disaster, airport incident, pandemic/public health crisis, civil unrest, dam failure, and infrastructure/utility disruption.