Virginia Hazard Mitigation Planning

Research Status:  Funded
Date Began: 02/2012
Date Ended: 02/2013
Key Personnel:  Peter Sforza, Thomas Dickerson, Erica Adams, Leslie Tate, Talmage Hansen

To support the Virginia Department of Emergency Management, CGIT has updated the Virginia Hazard Mitigation Plan. This plan identifies and assesses natural hazards impacting Virginia, and develops strategies to reduce their impact. CGIT uses its expertise in geospatial software and data sources that help to quantify the nature of the hazards, updating the Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment (HIRA) portion of the plan. 

The HIRA specifically calls for the analysis of hazards potential effects on state owned and operated buildings, critical facilities such as hospitals, schools, law enforcement, etc, as well as analyzing each hazard’s overall effects on a jurisdictional and state scale. Hazards that were analyzed include, flood, wind (both tornado and non-rotational winds), earthquake, winter storm, drought, wildfire, karst/land subsidence, landslide, dam failure.

CGIT has a long history of supporting Hazard Migitation Planning projects at the local, regional, and statewide scale.  A related previous project has been featured in a Virginia Tech Spotlight on Impact article: https://www.eng.vt.edu/news/virginia-tech-researchers-collaborate-va-dept-emergency-management-develop-statewide-hazard
.