1. I will start with addressing the final thought posed in the question, these maps are frustratingly hard to read accurately, and possibly more frustrating for my situation because of micro-climates that make up a majority of California. The micro-climates are areas where the weather can differ within miles because of the hilly or mountainous terrain that encloses smaller areas. While the map does clearly show that I have wetter El Nino, higher mean temperature than most areas, low precipitation and a susceptibility to earthquakes, the temperatures in my county can vary from 10-20 degrees at any given time of the year, and while north county can get awful heat, south county may enjoy the pleasures of a light sprinkle cool weather and unusually foggy mornings as you head towards Avila Beach. Earthquakes do occur here very frequently, I check this pretty often because the small twos and threes on the Richter scale have a tendency to wake me up in the middle of the night. We even just recently had a four on the Richter scale out in Bakersfield that shook my entire work site.

2. Let me start with the thought that I will possibly spend every night on this site, coming from the Navy we spend a lot of time with incident reports, and it was one of my particularly strange obsessions. I justified it by saying it was a need to know the basis of procedural policy or design, but there may have been something a bit more to it than that. I picked a forest fire in Mark Twain National Forest. Unfortunately there was not a whole lot of information available that you would normally see with a forest fire report. There was no listing of acreage that had been burnt up, and there was not listing of residential areas affected. I was assuming and hoping that no persons were injured which is what the site indicated but it was definitely a good segue into my current home. Living in the central coast which has a particularly hilly yet barren of trees terrain, primed for grazing and farming, we have the occasional wild fire. We come fairly well equipped for fighting wild fires as I have seen at work because of the response small fires that may or may not of occurred at work have seen. There are numerous planes and helicopters on standby in the dry seasons to drop water from lake Santa Margarita and the towns are fairly small and compact with little brush in the towns. Being in California everyone generally has a heightened sensitivity to these fires so even people who are a little further out of the established towns have taken precaution to not allow any dry brush or grass near their homes to establish a natural fire boundary. So while having plenty of brush and dry land to catch fire we generally have immediate response and fires can usually be contained to a couple hundred acres to minimize the severity. While the scale could get out of hand our installed practices prevent any loss of life or hazard to human life. That also being said the lands that do catch fire usually sprout into greener areas months after the fire event because of the carbon left over and is actually very good for the environment sometimes.

3/4. The San Luis Obispo Officer of Emergency Services details out the possible disasters or events that could occur in the county at any given time, to account for smaller areas like Los Osos which is technically not its own township but unincorporated land. Living along the coast we naturally have Tsunami preparedness and the site includes a Tsunami history of the county to included the 500,000 dollars of damage to boats and docks in the area from the 2011 Tsunami that took out the Fukishima Daichi plant (San Luis Obispo OES, April 1, 2016). The detailed plans that are listed out here even cover nuclear fallout because of the local nuclear power plant Diablo Canyon located at beautiful Avila Beach, which makes sense given nuclear power plants generally need large water sources for emergency cooling heat sinks (That does not mean a place to discharge radioactive liquid) and as small as storm preparedness. If I had to make some adjustments to the plan or to the area as part of my assessment I would say it comes down to city planning. The towns and cities particularly in this case Atascadero and Paso Robles have an issue with wanting to rezone their land and build another home to split the property and to sell the home. That is all fine until you remember that is it a very hilly area, homes are built on the hill sides, and sometimes fairly steep. This does not bode well with the occasional earthquake, and with the lack of rain, as we get less and less rain for extended periods, once an El Nino comes around where you get rain in the bulk your home becomes a landslide risk, and mudslides are a common occurrence in the county. Overall we are fairly prepared, but city planning needs to be re-evaluated. As far as what I can do, I suppose I can run for mayor, or city council, or I could work with the city council however having only lived here for 2 years I do not have much pull with the locals.

References

San Luis Obispo County Office of Emergency Services (OES). “Office of Emergency Services.” Last Modified April 1, 2016 http://www.slocounty.ca.gov/OES.htm