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At a cost of $267,000 – most of it provided by federal funding – Middlesex County will submit its Pre-Disaster Hazard Mitigation Plan to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) by November.

FEMA is part of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The plan is available for the public to review at the county’s office of Emergency Management at http://www.co.middlesex.nj.us/emergency/index.asp.

The purpose of the plan is to reduce the impact of natural and certain manmade disasters long before one even occurs. Natural hazards can include floods, high winds, ice storms, and other threats. Manmade hazards can include dam or levee failure and hazardous material releases.

The plan development process began in April 2008, with the first step being an evaluation of the hazards that a jurisdiction is susceptible to and the extent to which those events might occur. As a result, the document emphasizes attention to hazards that are more likely for Middlesex County. It then develops options such as specific projects – and potential sources of funding – that can be used to minimize future losses of life and property resulting from those hazards.

John Ferguson, Assistant County Coordinator for the Office of Emergency Management, presented the plan at a Sept. 8, 2009 meeting of the Metuchen Borough Council. He is currently making rounds, speaking to the leaders of each municipality in Middlesex County, on the plan’s progress.

In Middlesex County, the main natural hazard is flooding, but other hazards such as drought, extreme cold and heat, snow, ice, hail, windstorms, tornadoes, and even earthquakes are addressed in the plan.

“We are really looking at hurricanes and straight line winds,” Ferguson said. “Our area, from Pennsylvania to Connecticut, gets about 15 tornadoes every year. Most are EF0’s, but we do have a lot of microbursts, which is a matter of semantics, as they only snap the trees 180 degrees versus 360. But they do happen and we have to be prepared for those. One thing that FEMA would love to do is to have all our power lines buried. Unfortunately, it is very expensive. In addition, we also have 37 dams in Middlesex County, and the county has the most number of chemical facilities in the state.”

“We don’t have too many earthquakes, but we did have one in [1979] that was centered in Cheesequake Park,” Ferguson added.

A magnitude 3.5 earthquake at Cheesequake State Park/Raritan Bay in Matawan occurred on February 2, 1979.

While an important part of emergency management deals with disaster recovery – those actions that a community must take to repair damages and make itself whole in the wake of a disaster – mitigation is an equally important aspect of emergency management. Mitigation is what can be done today to reduce damages in the future.

Under the plan, disaster mitigation projects can be classified as being either “soft” or “hard.” Soft mitigation projects include activities such as building code enforcement, land development regulations, and developing other studies and plans. Hard projects include construction activities such as hardening or retrofitting public buildings such as hospitals, utilities, police/fire stations, and schools.

The plan is a federal requirement – if a community does not have a FEMA-approved hazard mitigation plan in place, it will no longer be eligible for certain FEMA post-disaster assistance.

“Under FEMA guidelines, every jurisdiction in the US needs a pre-disaster mitigation plan,” Ferguson said. “Middlesex county decided to do it as a multi-jurisdictional plan instead of having each municipality do one separately. All 25 towns signed off and said that they wanted to participate.”

The plan comes with a total price tag of $267,000. According to Ferguson, $200,000 of the plan’s cost was covered by a grant awarded to the county by FEMA. The remaining $67,000 was provided in the form of county services toward work on the plan.

Because the county did not have the expertise to write the plan, its development was contracted out to consultants James Lee Witt Associates of Washington, DC, Ferguson said.

James Lee Witt was FEMA Director under President Clinton, when FEMA was first elevated to Cabinet-level status, and he had strongly supported pre-disaster mitigation plans.