Thursday, June 4, 1998 | 9:16 a.m.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency invited dozens of cities, towns and counties across the country Wednesday to form partnerships among local business and civic leaders to plan how best to make their towns resistant to disaster.
Sparks was selected because of multiple hazards including fire, drought and flooding from the Truckee River. It sits in a seismic zone that has 30 active faults and suffered an earthquake with a magnitude of 7.5 about 500 years ago.
Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., praised the project as one that "appears to echo my overall sentiments of solving local problems on a local level."
FEMA Director James Lee Witt said the proposal is a classic case of an ounce of prevention actually equaling a pound of cure.
"I have seen too much devastation in the last five years; I have seen too many lives lost and too many dreams destroyed," Witt told a news conference.
"We would like to change the way we deal with disaster," he said, "We must put an end to the repetitive cycle of damage and repair, damage and repair. We cannot continue to do the same things over and over again."
Witt said the disaster preparedness proposal, dubbed Project Impact, "will change the way we do emergency management in this country." He said $30 million in seed money is earmarked for the effort this year, with $50 million requested for the fiscal year starting next October.
Since Witt has run FEMA, the agency has largely restored a public image battered by years of criticism that its handling of disasters was badly managed and inept. Calls in Congress that it be abolished have ceased.
But Witt said natural disasters are becoming more severe, more damaging and more costly.
He said the government paid out $2.8 billion from 1978 to 1998 to deal with recurring flood losses alone. In the same 20-year period, FEMA has spent $20 billion overall on disaster recovery efforts, much of it toward the end of the period. Witt said natural disasters have killed 181 people this year alone, including six this week when a tornado all but wiped out tiny Spencer, S.D.
For disaster preparedness, Witt said, local governments should form partnerships of local leaders, businesses and civic and volunteer groups to survey community risks for natural disasters, assess vulnerability and target resources and needed actions.
FEMA said the efforts could be as basic as removing rubbish from culverts to allow flood waters to drain quickly or cutting brush near schools and hospitals in wildfire areas.
Other possible steps, he said, include elevating electric power stations to protect the power supply from floods and preventing construction in flood plains or high-risk coastal areas.
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