THE ROLE OF A STATE GEOLOGICAL SURVEY IN THE ASSESSMENT OF NATURAL HAZARDS FOR LOCAL HAZARD MITIGATION PLANNING

Following the impact of Hurricane Fran in 1996, the State of North Carolina began a pilot program to assist local governments in the preparation of detailed plans on the natural hazards a community faces and on the actions that community would undertake to greatly alleviate or eliminate those hazards. The Hazard Mitigation Planning Initiative began with a dozen communities and followed a seven-step planning process. Success depended on input from all stakeholders in order to complete and implement the local mitigation plan. The planning process included:(1) hazard identification, (2) risk analysis, (3) vulnerability assessment, (4) capabilities assessment, (5) strategizing solutions, (6) adoption and implementation, and (7) documentation and feedback.

Most natural hazards in this region are geologic in nature and state geological surveys are well suited to provide basic geologic information on topics such as landslide potential, location of sinkholes and land subsidence, recent and historical earthquake sources, estimates of predicted earthquake ground motion, soil liquefaction potential, potential impacts of sulfidic rocks, and in some cases information on floodplain mapping and water resources.

State geological surveys deal with thousands of public inquiries per year and have trained, professional staff members who have experience in interpreting technical information and translating that information for the lay public. Examples are presented on the application of HAZUS (the Federal Emergency Management Agency's GIS based loss estimation software) in North Carolina. Also, the participation of the N.C. Geological Survey in the North Carolina Floodplain Mapping Initiative is briefly described.