Posted on: Monday, November 5, 2001
Big Island gets grant to help with disaster damage
By Hugh Clark
Advertiser Big Island Bureau
HILO, Hawai'i — Hawai'i County's Civil Defense Agency has obtained a $200,000 federal grant to plan for averting negative economic impacts from damage from volcano flows, flooding and earthquakes.
The Big Island is known as the one of the most disaster-prone areas of the country because of its range of risks.
Officials will use the money "to develop data and concerns that economic development planners can use to forecast locations," according to David Sampson of the Commerce Department, which awarded the money.
The money will be augmented by $85,000 in county matching money that will help pay for a plan to be developed by Patricia Arthur, a physician and former sports medicine doctor who worked in the Olympic movement.
"I have always been interested in hazard mitigation," said the county's new planning officer at Civil Dense. She succeeded Wendell Hatada, who left the job to join his former boss, Mayor Harry Kim, as an executive assistant.
Arthur said she wants to catalog experiences of the past such as the costly 1973 and 1975 earthquakes and the 1946 and 1960 tsunamis that caused millions of dollars in damage and a loss of lives.
She does not expect money from the grant will allow all risks to be delineated.
She said she is trying to stretch the study by enlisting the U.S. Geological Survey staff at Hawaiian Volcano Observatory on volcanic and seismic concerns.
She also hopes to bring in people from the Center for the Study of Active Volcanoes at the University of Hawai'i-Hilo for advice.
The current grant is separate from $500,000 the county received from the Federal Emergency Management Administration in early 2000, also for hazard mitigation.
Hawai'i County is vulnerable to many types of natural disasters. In one case, island rescuers had to find a Texas visitor lost in a snow storm on Mauna Kea.
The only event not to hit the Big Island in the last century is a hurricane, though many threatening ones have been tracked.
The effects from some have caused high wind and wave damage in Puna.
Recent projects, experts claim, have diminished the level of damage that otherwise might have occurred, including during the November 2000 flooding. Federal engineers credited a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers flood control project in Hilo with preventing greater damage in the downtown area.
Earthquake experts for years have warned that the Big Island is more challenged by fault zones on the east side of the island than is any place in California.
