FLOOD01788

• County: Statewide
• Title: Surviving Disasters Building on Experience
• Date: 10/12/2001
• Prepared For: CWCB
• Prepared By: CSU
• Floodplain - Doc Type: Floodplain Report/Masterplan

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Lessons have been
learned from many
disasters, including
terrorist attacks.

Earthquakes in the
US, Japan and other
countries taught
valuable lessons.
Some utilities lost
their treatment
plants during floods.

Drought is a
creeping disaster.

In addition to response and recovery planning, preparedness includes
hazard and vulnerability assessments, mitigation programs, and
engineering and capital programs. In vulnerability analysis, modeling
water components and systems reveals how they work under stress
conditions, and highlights redundancies, flexibility, and other features
of sources, transmission facilities, treatment plants, and distribution
grids and zones. Assessing preparedness considers damages,
suffering, business outages, and additional effects. Compared to
emergency management, little information is available about
hardening of engineered systems.

Available publications outline emergency management procedures for
water utilities, but preparedness is unique to each organization. Each
utility will have its most probable hazards, such as earthquake,
hurricane, coastal flooding, or others..

Disasters affect many aspects of society-shelter, energy,
transportation, water supply, and public health. Utilities have
experienced many of them. A WW ARF noted "In the Northridge
California Earthquake, over 1,500 pipe breaks occurred... Projections
by East Bay Municipal Utility District for an earthquake of $1.2
billion.... Similarly, the flooding... following Hurricane Floyd, and in
the Mississippi River drainage in 1993 and the Red River area in 1997
also highlighted considerable vulnerability of water systems to
disasters." Now, with the nation on alert against terrorism, human-
caused threats are causing concern. This table lists some disaster
experiences that will be discussed at the workshop:

Earthquake Earthquakes threaten water utilities in several ways.
Research has advanced, and utilities have learned from
recent earthquakes implement seismic improvement
programs for mitigation and emergency response.
Flood Flooding causes more dollar damage than earthquakes,
because occurs more frequently and in more places.
Several water utilities lost treatment plants and other
facilities in recent large floods, and their experiences
will be discussed.
Wind During wind storms, water utilities suffer damage from
loss of electricity, flood effects, and structural damage
Volcano Little direct utility damage seems to have occurred
from volcanos, but ashfall and mudflows affect them
Drought Drought is a "creeping disaster," and easy to ignore
until too late.
Fire Forest fires, brush fires, and firestorms threaten areas in
a number of ways. Fire after earthquake is a danger to

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