Vulnerability Reduction

My town of Grove City is a Zone 0 in Earthquakes. It is likely to increase in heavy rainfall with changes in the climate. It is a Zone 4 in hailstorms. Zone 1 in winter storms. Zone 2 in tornadoes.  Zone 1 for wildfires. Overall I think this map is pretty interesting but I also think it is kind of a common sense tool.  Where I live everything is pretty standard, now we will get the occasional hail storm but I don’t know if it deserves a zone 4 rating.  I do like how it mentions the heavy rainfall because I have noticed growing up it seems like definitely and increase in raining days especially heavy rain.  My father owns a landscape company so we watch the weather very closely and a rainy day is basically a lost day for most jobs we do.  Again I think this map is interesting but it only really looks at broad trends maybe not ones specific to your town. For instance search the Johnstown flood, the destruction of a town because a dam failed during a bad storm.

For my natural Disaster I selected a power outage in Leesburg Virgina.  Without a doubt my town can experience this as I have probably lived through about thirty of them in my life.  My town is susceptible to  power outages because we are a well developed town but we still have a majority of our power lines above ground. combined that my town is in a very wooded part of western PA and the high winds we face during summer storms, hail, and heavy snowfall in the winter it is easy for trees to fall and damage power lines.  My town is small so generally if my power goes out I can bet that a major of my friends are experiencing the same issue.  This current power outage is affecting essentially two towns in Virginia and about 23,000 people so it a much larger scale than my town of 8,500 people.  For us the power outages a generally not that big of a deal because my family is fairly well off so we always have plenty of food and drink in the house, but poorer people might not and if all the food they could afford that week were to spoil due to lack of power they could really be in trouble.  One way we are more vulnerable than the people in town is that we have an electric pump on our well so if the power goes out we have no water.  People in town would still have water because the water plant would run on backup generators until power was restored.  I think the greatest reduction to our vulnerability to such disasters would be too bury our power lines in our community.  This though expensive would eliminate the opportunity for trees to fall and damage power lines.

Another natural Disaster that my town cold possibly face is extreme snowfall that could make travel impossible.  Now I live about 40 miles south of Lake Erie so we generally don’t get the heavy heavy Lake effect snow that you see in places like Erie and Buffalo.  Every once in awhile though we do get an extremely strong blowing down from the north we generally refer to it as a nor’easter that can generate a ton of snow, sometimes as much as 24-36 inches or more! This can make travel almost impossible, shutting down schools, government offices, stores, and other businesses.  These shut downs can create tremendous economic losses through loss of Production. One of the greatest of these storms happened in march of 1993.  My parents like to joke that I wasn’t planned they were just really bored while being snowed in.  I ended up being born in December of 1993 so I think they are serious.

A Look Back At The Blizzard Of 1993

I think the main thing about my towns vulnerability is that we essentially have our guts of our town out in the open.  It would make much sense to have your veins on the outside of your body so I think our easiest solution is to bury them and make them less susceptible to the outside elements as they seem to be what fails most often.  I believe our burrough and surrounding townships should be the ones to foot the bill and perform this task.  That’s why I believe we pay tax dollars so they can build and protect our public utilities.  For my I think I just need to be more prepared. most of our natural disasters in my area involve losing power or being stuck inside.  Having extra food and bottled water goes a long way when you are stuck inside.  Also investing in a generator for my house so we could continue to use our well pump would help a lot too.  our town does a great job in getting streets cleared as fast as possible when we get heavy snow.  We have a huge fleet of plow trucks.  Power companies also do a good job of restoring power. I think in large part because it is such a small town they don’t have to search for the issue very long.

2 thoughts on “Vulnerability Reduction

  1. Wesley, Great post! I agree that the map looks for global trends as I noticed most people from PA have the same level of risk for each of the hazards but it would be more beneficial if we broke it down by each county. For example, since you are near Lake Erie, you get large amounts of lake effect snow up to 25 inches and it is very rare in my hometown. I think the biggest reason that hazards cause a lot of damage in our area is because they catch us off guard. In 2013, Hurricane Sandy struck and my basement flooded because we did not have a back up sump pump. In the south, only an inch of snow can cause a lot of damage because it is so rare whereas up north we could have close to a foot and still have school the following day. Check out my post http://sites.psu.edu/geog30/2016/03/31/module-8-douglas-apple/

  2. Hey Wesley!

    Great job on your post! Your post really caught my attention when you mentioned power outages being something that really effects your town. I can completely empathize with this is I too lived in an area that was heavily wooded and it seemed that every time there was a thunderstorm with heavy winds a tree was falling on the power lines. Also I think you made some great suggestions in your last paragraph about purchasing a generator and having extra food. Our family always did both in the case of a large amount of snowfall which did come in handy several times I can remember!

    Feel free to check out my post! http://geog030.dutton.psu.edu/2016/03/31/natural-hazards-6/

Leave a Reply