EATON — Preble County officials are currently seeking public comment on the county’s All Natural Hazards Mitigation Plan Preble County EMA Director Suzy Cottingim met with county commissioners on Wednesday, Dec. 13, to review a draft of the the plan with them.
“We have worked for the last year on our All Natural Hazards Mitigation Plan, and we have hired a contractor, Robert Guentter Jr. of RFG Associates,” Cottingim said. “He’s worked very diligently with us to get this plan put together.
“I just want to thank everybody in this room and everybody who contributed to this plan. We’ve had meetings, we’ve sent surveys out, we’ve had emails, and I just appreciate everyone’s support, and all the contributions you’ve given to this plan. I really appreciate it,” Cottingim added before turning the presentation over to Guentter.
“One of the requirements with updating mitigation plans is to have a public hearing and to make the plan available for people to look at and have a comment period,” he began. “These plans need to be updated every five years and the purpose of a mitigation plan is to identify activities that will make your community safer, protect property and life qualify for you for grant monies for mitigation and natural hazard events and also qualify for communities for pre-disaster mitigation.
“So if you know there’s there’s funding out there to prepare and be ready in advance for something, you know, as a priority in your community,” Guentter continued. “We’ve taken a comprehensive approach to this plan. The committee itself had 24 members. The plan covers a five year period from 2024 to 2028. first looked at evaluating historical natural disaster data events, and there’s two primary sources we looked at. One is the National Center for Environmental Information that provides all the details of all the historical disasters that have happened in the county when they occurred, the amount of damage if there was injury or death, and a neutral put out by FEMA called the National Risk Index. It is basically all the data the federal government can collect on natural disasters, and they’ve come up with a new format and county by county that information is available. We took both of them together because the index information is more aggregated, whereas by looking at the individual events, you can really home in and see the number the magnitude where in the county they occurred. So we use both for the plan,” he told commissioners.
“We’re also required to look at, under these new guidelines, climate resilience, and the impact of climate change on a county,” he continued. “So I have a couple of things we looked at. We looked at what they think is going to happen related to heat, and heat has an impact on disasters, cold weather and the amount of rain. And what’s interesting, they have baseline information based on the past 50 years; how many times a year you have different events, and then looking out to 2040 for what they’re projecting from pretty big supercomputer modeling. How climate might be changing.”
Guentter shared some examples from the data.
“So, for the temperatures over 90 degrees, right now your baseline is 11 days a year. Over time you have temperatures over 90 degrees by 2044. That’s going to increase to 33 to 37 times a year. There’s going to be more heat events based on these computer models. When you go up to 95 degrees or warmer, currently about two events a year. It’s going to go up to nine to 11 and events over 100 degrees, currently, there’s not much record of that here. But it’s going to go up to a couple a year,” Guentter noted. “So those things become important. There are some areas where you’re going to see really significant increases in heat, and that could be dangerous for people which would require more shelters and other activities.”
“As far as cold days, there’s going to be fewer days below freezing,” he pointed out in the presentation. “Current baseline is 30 days a year are below freezing. The new model predicts that you’re going to have 21 to 22 days below freezing. So 10 fewer days a year below freezing. And as far as rain, this is interesting — the amount of rain is going to be similar to right now. You average about 40 inches a year. The model predicts 41 inches a year, but there’ll be three or four fewer days of rain. So each event could be more severe.”
“We also had to in this new plan address vulnerable populations and the vulnerable populations identified here were the manufactured home parks, and then also some of the Amish community that we’re still working on some data on. As far as hazard priority, we went through a whole process and looked at the data,” Guenntter said. “We identified the biggest priority in the county is to address strong winds followed by tornadoes which makes sense given the recent event that was top of mind. Earthquakes, winter weather, flooding, potential dam failure, drought, extreme heat, land subsidence, and then wildfires.”
After three public meetings, and a lot of time between the meetings, the final plan is over 200 pages. Guentter provided commissioners with the action plan portion.
‘This is where the rubber meets the road. This is what you’re hoping to accomplish over the next five years,” Guentter said.
The top five activities identified in the plan included generators during power outages. There is a need for more backup generators, identifying and securing alternative sources of power, primarily for New Paris and West Alexandria, promoting wireless notification options (getting an early warning so people are better prepared when the storms and tornadoes are coming, Guentter noted,) and improving the warning and notification systems.
“This would be sirens, weather radios, using social media more effectively,” Guentter said.
The fifth priority is to encourage and support systems of mutual aid.
There were no big emergency or crisis activities that needed to be addressed, according to Guentter.
“Our next steps would be a two week public notice period which would take us to Dec. 29, that says you’re going to post the plan on your county website. Once that period closes the first week of January, it’s my intent to clean up the data and get it sent to the state for their review,” Guentter said. ‘I’m thinking probably it’ll be February, March by time we hear back from them. Then we would seek a county resolution approving the plan. So, we want to make sure we get through the comment period. The state gets through their first review. We address their comments, and then have you guys approve it.”
“And then there’s also a local jurisdiction resolution that’s in the plan so all your cities and villages would need to sign that for them to be formally included,” Guentter explained. “And we do that after the county and after we get some more feedback from the state. So, I would expect probably April, or May, everything will be done.”
Once approved, Guentter said there would be an annual review by a committee or group to go over what has been accomplished, if they had any problems, and what might need to be added or deleted from the plan.
“It’s meant to be something you’re looking at every year,” he told commissioners.
The draft plan and request for public comment can be found on the county’s website at https://www.prebco.org/159/Emergency-Management-Agency.
