Though it’s through a project in its infancy here, federal funds received by Kaua’i County have already been used to turn the Kaua’i War Memorial Convention Hall into a hurricane-resistant disaster shelter, and to protect all fire and police buildings
Though it’s through a project in its infancy here, federal funds received by Kaua’i County have already been used to turn the Kaua’i War Memorial Convention Hall into a hurricane-resistant disaster shelter, and to protect all fire and police buildings against hurricane-force winds and other natural disasters.
Additional funds have been used to make sure the county Department of Water can continue operating after a natural disaster. And they will protect the soon-to-be-built police headquarters and Civil Defense emergency operating center communications lines, said Mark Marshall, Civil Defense administrator.
Other “critical facilities,” like hospitals, Kaua’i Electric buildings, lines and poles, and similar operations vital in the aftermath of natural disasters are also recipients of federal funds designed to lessen adverse impacts of such disasters, he explained.
But President George W. Bush wants to do away with the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Project Impact program and its $25 million price tag. He calls it ineffective.
Tell that to the folks in Seattle, one of the first Project Impact cities, where the schools and bridges survived last week’s 6.8-magnitude earthquake in part due to retrofitting of those facilities through the Project Impact goal of reducing damage and death as a result of natural disasters.
Kaua’i County received $300,000 in Project Impact funding last year, nearly a third of which will go toward an islandwide study of all risks and hazards to be conducted by the University of Hawai’i-Manoa, said Marshall.
The idea is to identify all the vulnerabilities and do a hazard assessment to prioritize mitigation work, he added. For a complete, published work, the price tag from UH is around $95,000.
The federal funding acquired last year, which carries a requirement that the county match that figure, has already been budgeted, allocated and released, Marshall said.
But future years’ funding could be affected if Bush gets his way and the FEMA Project Impact funds are removed from the 2002 fiscal-year budget, as proposed by the Bush administration.
Marshall figures it would take an act of Congress, or at least an amendment to the current Stanford Act, for Bush’s budget proposal to be successful.
The Stanford Act authorizes Project Impact and also empowers FEMA to come to the aid of communities impacted by natural disasters.
Friends of Project Impact in the U.S. Senate are many, including Sen. Dan Akaka (D-Hawai’i), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Proliferation, International Security and Federal Services. Akaka has requested that the federal General Accounting Office review the federal government’s disaster mitigation programs, including Project Impact, to determine their effectiveness.
“FEMA estimates that for every dollar spent on disaster mitigation, two dollars are saved in disaster response and recovery,” Akaka said. “The program’s positive impact in Seattle underscores the administration’s short-sighted numbers crunching.
“Although the president’s budget proposal states that Project Impact has not been effective, it is unclear how that conclusion was reached. We should not eliminate a program without reviewing its successes and failures.”
Even if Bush eliminates Project Impact, Marshall still feels there will be the federal mitigation funding sources. For example, as a result of the recent floods on the Big Island, FEMA has made available $1.3 million for all counties for flood-mitigation measures, he said.
The cutting of Project Impact funding for hurricane and flood-prone counties like Kaua’i would be a bad thing for disaster-mitigation efforts already underway here, Marshall said.
What could be worse, he added, is the proposed cutting of some $100 million from a FEMA program which provides equipment, training and other necessities for firefighters.
Staff Writer Paul C. Curtis can be reached at mailto:pcurtis@pulitzer.net or 245-3681 (ext. 224).
