Presenting at WEMA
On September 23, Jackson Parr and Paul Buchmann presented “Tools and Guidance Within the Hazard Mitigation Planning Process” at the Wisconsin Emergency Management Association (WEMA) conference. Jackson and Paul presented on a new data tool that can reduce the time and resources required to update Hazard Mitigation Plans (HMP).
Jackson is the Climate Hazards Planning Educator with the UW–Madison Division of Extension. Paul is a Research Associate with the Wisconsin State Climatology Office. Their work is supported by the Rural Partnerships Institute’s effort to prepare Wisconsin’s rural communities for amplified weather extremes, with a focus on Northern Wisconsin, the Central Sands, and the Driftless Region.
Why HMP updates are positioned for improvement
Conversations with county emergency managers, regional planning commissions, and Wisconsin Emergency Management staff, along with a review of existing plans, demonstrated that plans follow a heavily prescribed format to comply with Federal Emergency Management Agency standards. HMPs across Wisconsin share a fairly consistent format, follow common requirements on hazard occurrence, probability, and severity, and draw on the same handful of federal and state data sources.
However, county still pulls, cleans, and writes up that data largely from scratch every five years. That makes plan updates time-consuming and expensive. With future funding and regulatory direction uncertain, some rural counties are weighing whether a plan update is worth the investment at all.
The opportunity is to aggregate high-quality data formatted in a way that aligns with HMP requirements. This opens up the local official’s and stakeholder’s time and attention on the more critical aspects of planning: inventorying capacity and vulnerability and building a mitigation strategy that fits their community.
The County Hazard Mitigation Plan Data Tool
The goal is to develop a centralized, standardized database that generates the data each county needs for the Risk Assessment section of its plan. The tool lets a user pick any Wisconsin county and see its hazard history, risk data, and climate trends in one place. It also auto-generates plain-language summaries that planners can drop straight into their plan, and exports a draft Risk Assessment document.
The tool currently brings together:
- Hazard events, deaths, injuries, and damages from the NCEI Storm Events Database
- FEMA National Risk Index data, including risk mapped by census tract
- Wildfire records from DNR and INFORM databases
- NOAA Climate at a Glance historical summaries
- Long-term trends and projections from the Wisconsin State Climatology Office
Over the next several months, the team is adding coastal hazard information, refining the tool, and working with partners at Wisconsin Emergency Management (WEM) and the United States Army Corps of Engineerings (USACE) to incorporate it into existing efforts and resources.
Rural counties: test the tool with the team
Rural counties with a Hazard Mitigation Plan update on the horizon are invited to partner on the next phase. Early partners can test the tool on their own county and get support bringing the results into their planning process.
To get involved or ask questions, contact Jackson Parr, Climate Hazards Planning Educator, UW–Madison Division of Extension at jgparr@wisc.edu.