Evaluation of New York State's County Plans for Disaster Resiliency

The primary aim of this study is to determine the relative effectiveness, strengths, and weaknesses of hazard mitigation plans (HMPs) in New York State. In addition to evaluating HMPs based on certain principles, they were also evaluated using real life scenarios. Further, this study determined their impact on reducing flood damage from storms, and concluded with recommendations to the state for improving the procedures and planning process of HMPs. The counties that were evaluated were considered federal disaster areas under the community development block grant action plan. Eight evaluation principles were selected based on content analysis and coding drawn from federal emergency management agency guidance documents and other hazard mitigation literature: (1) plan basics; (2) participation; (3) inter-organizational coordination; (4) hazard identification; (5) capability assessment; (6) goals; (7) proposed actions; and (8) monitoring. A combination of binary or ordinal scale were used to measure the eight plan quality principles. Results show that the principles that received the lowest scores were proposed action, monitoring and implementation and capability assessment. Additionally, results show that there is no coordination between the damages that occurred during hurricane sandy, tropical storm Lee and hurricane Irene in each county and their HMP overall resiliency score.