Tag: Madras Hazards Integration Plan CPW Community Planning Workshop

Hazard Planning? Sounds Fun to Me!

Posted on by Julia Havens

It’s scary to think about hazards. No one wants to imagine a river breaking its banks and flowing unrestrained through their town, or watching the walls of their house beginning to sway as the earth below them shakes back and forth.

But, with our Community Planning Workshop (CPW) project focusing on hazard mitigation planning, it’s become our job to plan for these things that no one really wants to think about. Throughout the course of this project, we’ve realized there’s an easier way to get people thinking and talking about natural hazards: make it a game!

Here are some good places to start –

Pandemic is a cooperative board game where players work together, instead of against one another, to save the world from a viral outbreak. It’s a great example of making hazard planning entertaining and educational. It didn’t take long for us to the notice the similarities between the board game and our Community Planning Workshop project. While we are not saving the world from a biohazard, we are all working together to protect the city of Madras from natural hazards. Unfortunately, we didn’t save the world in Pandemic, but we did realize how much fun we were having learning about hazard planning!

Our team has been joking that since we enjoyed Pandemic so much, we should make an Oregon-specific version of the game. Instead of playing as a group of scientists saving the word from an epidemic, our Oregon version would have players step into the role of planners to prepare Oregon against natural hazards. While we would love to make this game a reality, our main goal is raising awareness about hazard planning and how it can be both entertaining and educational!

  • Natural Hazard Car BingoHazard Planning? Sounds Fun to Me Drew Pfefferle Laura Stroud Ross Peizer CPW Community Planning Workshop Madras Hazards Plan Integration

On our last visit to Madras, we brought along an Auto Bingo game that kept us on our toes the entire six-hour car trip to Madras and back to Eugene. For the next trip, we discussed creating our own natural hazard bingo game. It could consist of watching for signs of a past hazard like trees charred from a wildfire, flood hazards like creeks or drainage ditches clogged with debris, or signs of preparedness like fire hydrants. The possibilities are endless. This activity can get children and their parents thinking about and discussing natural hazard planning.

  • Emergency Kit Dinner NightHazard Planning? Sounds Fun to Me Drew Pfefferle Laura Stroud Ross Peizer CPW Community Planning Workshop Madras Hazards Plan Integration

Part of hazard planning is making sure folks know how to prepare themselves and their families in the event of a hazard. Families should make sure they have their emergency pantry stocked with a three-day food supply.

To further prepare yourself, you can have an emergency kit dinner night! Check out this FEMA resource to learn what to pack in an emergency food kit and this Red Cross resource for everything you need to know to make your food and water last in an emergency. For extra fun, try cooking on a camp stove instead of your electric or gas range (which shouldn’t be used after a disaster). Just don’t forget to restock your food and fuel after you have your fun!

Hazard Planning? Sounds Fun to Me Drew Pfefferle Laura Stroud Ross Peizer CPW Community Planning Workshop Madras Hazards Plan Integration
About the Authors: Drew Pfefferle, Laura Stroud and Ross Peizer are all first year Master of Community and Regional Planning students. They hail from around the country and all worked professionally before beginning the graduate program. Their experiences outside of the classroom inspired them to go back to school to study planning as a profession. 

 

Reflections: The First Term of our Community Planning Workshop Project

Posted on by Julia Havens

Elizabeth Miller Madras Hazards Integration Plan CPW Community Planning WorkshopAs our team wraps up the winter term, I think it’s a good time to reflect back on our progress on our Community Planning Workshop project. Before my team started our project of incorporating the Madras Natural Hazard Mitigation Plan into the City of Madras’ Comprehensive Plan, few (if any) of us had never read a comprehensive plan. Similarly, most of us had not considered natural hazard mitigation planning as an important task for a city planner.

At the early stages of this project our team was given a considerable amount of reading to do. Between gaining a good understanding of the significant documents, the regulating agencies at play, and our scope of work, it took us almost three weeks to wrap our heads around our project concept, the keys players and documents involved, and task at hand that is our project. Not only did we have to learn these concepts for ourselves, but we also had to quickly figure out how to present the scope of our project and these concepts to our Community Planning Workshop class. Even more intimidating, our team would also so have to present to a committee of community leaders (our Technical Advisory Committee) in our fast-approaching meeting with them. Needless to say, there were several conversations with our project manager and our project advisor that entailed them re-explaining concepts to us, as well as there were many times when we found that we had to go back and re-read the numerous documents.

Our team had both the benefit and the misfortune of having our meeting with the Technical Advisory Committee pushed back three weeks due to a snow and ice storm (the irony of that situation wasn’t lost on us), requiring us to think on our feet and re-work our entire schedule. During these three weeks our team did further investigation of case studies and other relevant documents, so that by the time we reached our meeting, we really knew our content. What’s more, the meeting was a great learning experience, and solidified all of the knowledge we had been gathering throughout this process.

Recently our team did our final presentation of the term to our Community Planning Workshop class. Our team was only able to spend a small fraction of the time on this presentation than we did our previous presentations, and some of us were even set to speak on content that we had never done before. Despite this, our presentation went exceptionally well. The following day our team asked ourselves how we managed such a successful and succinct presentation. Ultimately our team’s understanding of our project, which came from the many hours of research, discussion, and experience discussing it in a professional setting, allowed us to speak confidently with our content.

Our team is now at a point where we’re synthesizing all of our research and work into major deliverables that include stakeholder interviews, a public survey, the initial process of drafting our key documents, and planning a public forum for next month. At the beginning of this term, I looked at these tasks with apprehension and nervousness. As we are going through this process now however, excitement has replaced apprehension. There’s something to be said about doing your homework, and something even more to be said about the professional experience that CPW offers.

 

Elizabeth Miller Madras Hazards Integration Plan CPW Community Planning WorkshopAbout the Author: Elizabeth Miller is a Community and Regional Planning student at the University of Oregon, and is additionally pursuing a certificate in Nonprofit Management. She is from Kalispell, Montana, and is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame with degrees in Fine Arts, Political Science, and Peace Studies.