My plan will apply the Threat and Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment (THIRA), which is a three-step risk assessment completed every three years. THIRA helps communities to identify potential threats, the impacts o those threats on the community, and the capabilities needed by the community based on the impacts of specific hazards or threats. The output of the THIRA process helps the community to identify their capability gaps, which is crucial in enhancing disaster preparedness and response. Thus, I will use the three steps of THIRA to narrow down to a hazard or threat with the highest impact on the community. Enfield, CT usually experiences various natural disasters, including hurricanes and severe windstorms among others, which calls for effective application of the THIRA process to enhance the Town's preparedness against the natural disaster.
I will use a combination of the experience of the occurrence of natural disasters in Enfield, available forecasting information, and subject matter expertise to arrive at the hazard with the most significant impacts and threats to the town ( Wickham et al., 2019) . Besides, the threat identified must challenge the ability of Enfield to deliver various capabilities, including mass search and rescue operations, fatality management services, critical transportation, operational coordination, and risk and disaster resilience assessment. Particularly, mass search and rescue operations would be challenged by power outage due to severe windstorms at night. Thus, this plan identifies severe windstorm as a major threat because the storms usually cause power outages, which affects resource mobilization and response to the disaster.
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When giving context to the damage of the hazard, it is important to consider the change of activities as a result of Covid-19. For instance, severe windstorms are likely to cause power outages, which will adversely impact several customers and students who rely on technology for distance learning in these times of Covid-19. When establishing the capability targets, the main focus will be shortening the number of hours of power outages. Thus, power should be restored within an hour of a power outage as a result of a severe windstorm.
References
Wickham, E. D., Bathke, D., Abdel-Monem, T., Bernadt, T., Bulling, D., Pytlik-Zillig, L., ... & Wall, N. (2019). Conducting a drought-specific THIRA (Threat and Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment): A powerful tool for integrating all-hazard mitigation and drought planning efforts to increase drought mitigation quality. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction , 39 , 101227. doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2019.101227
