JOHNSON CITY — The Geoinformatics and Disaster Science (GADS) Lab at East Tennessee State University has received national recognition from FEMA, being featured in the federal agency’s Mitigation Planning Success Stories series. Currently, the online storymap only includes 13 stories nationally.
“To be featured in FEMA's Mitigation Success Stories is a huge deal since they only do a handful of these per month for the entire country,” said Andrew Joyner, director of the ETSU GADS Lab. “It means that ETSU's comprehensive hazard mitigation plan, approved in 2019, was among the best and most innovative plans approved by FEMA over the last several years, specifically because of some of the techniques we used and our overall approach that included extensive student involvement, both undergrads and graduates.”
ETSU is one of only a small number of universities nationwide with its own hazard mitigation plan which, according to FEMA, demonstrated best practices that can be used by universities as well as cities and counties in developing their own plans. Those best practices include: 1) focusing on local needs by prioritizing building a planning process and a plan that would meet the university’s unique needs, 2) getting creative with in-house resources available to the university, 3) using mitigation planning as a real-life emergency management and hazard mitigation training opportunity for students, and 4) “thinking outside the box” in regard to planning tools by creating tools, such as webmaps, currently used regionally for additional purposes.
“Overall, it’s extremely rare for students to be able to work on a project like this,” added Joyner. “Offhand, I don’t know of any other active hazard mitigation planning process that includes students in any part of that process, so it provides a real-life training opportunity for them and increases their marketability post-graduation. It also gives them a glimpse into a career field that they likely didn’t know existed.”
By developing ETSU’s hazard mitigation plan, the GADS Lab has also been able to create an extensive GIS database for campus infrastructure.
“Very few other universities have done this and most don't have public-facing dynamic, and mappable, databases,” said Joyner. “We’ve leveraged this database for other products, including capturing and providing drone (unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV) imagery for public safety and facilities. We also mapped varying stages of construction for the Martin Center, which we'll use when we update the hazard mitigation plan in a few years (FEMA requires five-year update cycles), and our imagery and data are now being used for a project with Disability Services where we are trying to map ‘accessible’ walking routes on campus (i.e., where curb cuts are located, sidewalk locations, crosswalks, handicap parking, elevators/accessible building entrances, etc.). This Disability Services project is also student-led.”
Joyner noted that having a hazard mitigation plan at ETSU allows his office to apply directly for certain types of grants through the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency (TEMA) and FEMA.
“This past year we were able to apply for a Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) grant that will allow us to fully or partially complete multiple mitigation strategies for the university,” he said. “The first set of mitigation strategies includes further development of our infrastructure database and public accessibility to our data and risk assessments (possibly via a map series or storymap, as suggested by FEMA Region IV in their review of our HMP), along with an in-depth building assessment that informs retrofitting, drought and extreme temperature studies aimed at reducing impacts, a process for assessing spaces with high hazards, detailed slope stability and sinkhole studies, and the development of a database containing type and location of hazardous chemicals.”
For more information about the GADS Lab, contact Joyner at joynert@etsu.edu or 423-439-4183. To read ETSU’s Mitigation Planning Success story, visit fema.gov/case-study/university-resources-produce-risk-reduction-tools.
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Pictured above: This image of the ETSU Main Campus Flood Zones is included in the East Tennessee State University Hazard Mitigation Plan created by the university's Geoinformatics and Disaster Science Lab.