Natural and human-caused events such as wildfires, earthquakes, power outages, and extreme temperatures can seriously hinder building operations. Additional factors like climate change can make catastrophic events even more severe and less predictable. The human toll of such crises, not to mention the economic costs, can be devastating.
Whether you run a large organization or are concerned about your own family’s health, it’s essential to have the ability to anticipate, adapt to, and rapidly recover from a disruptive event. Resiliency planning will help you better prepare to maintain operations that support health, safety, communication, transportation, and other essential needs.
What is Resiliency Action Planning (RAP)?
A resiliency action plan (RAP) is a collaborative process by which we help clients plan for actionable steps to increase the resilience of their home, business, organization, and community to disruptive events.
Resiliency action planning starts with clarifying the client’s priorities. Those priorities inform their resiliency goals and strategies. We then facilitate the development of a budget, timeframe, and work plan to help ensure implementation is achievable, no matter how aspirational your resilience vision might be.
Resiliency action plans typically focus on the following key infrastructure systems:
- Structural reinforcement to resist earthquake damage
- Energy conservation, production, and storage
- Water conservation, storage, and filtration
- Fire prevention and resistance strategies
- Air filtration/purification and air sealing
- Transportation energy, access, and safety
- Food and medical supply (re)stocking
- Emergency response plan mapping and regular trainings
Why conduct resiliency action planning?
In recent years, a global pandemic coupled with multi-day power outages, wildfires, ice storms, extreme heat events, and other severe weather due to climate change has impacted many organizations’ ability to maintain safe, stable operations.
Additionally, the looming potential of a large Cascadia earthquake is impossible to ignore. According to seismologists, if you live in the Portland Metro Area, in the heart of the Cascadia Subduction Zone, there is a 37% chance that a 7.0 earthquake will occur in the next 50 years.
From college campuses to hospitals to senior living communities, leaders are taking action to protect their clients, residents, employees, and visitors by undergoing resiliency planning. Doing so will help them anticipate, adapt to, and rapidly recover from disruptive events. In many places, government agencies have the mandate to undergo resiliency action planning to protect public infrastructure and the most vulnerable communities.
Steps to resiliency planning
Green Hammer can help you and your organization take a proactive approach to plan for the future. Whether you are a single-family homeowner or run a multi-use campus, we can help you understand the severity of potential risks and take action to minimize those risks. Resiliency planning is a highly collaborative process. Together, we create solutions that will work for your budget and timeline.
1.) We lead your team through a Visioning Workshop, defining what resiliency means for your organization and learning from key stakeholders the most significant risks and systems of concerns (i.e., seismic, energy, water, air, fire, emergency response, etc.).
2.) Together, we determine your goals, strategies, timeline, and budget for implementation.
3.) We host additional workshops to dig deeper with experts and your staff to understand better each system, how systems interact, where systems break down, and brainstorm solutions. In addition, we schedule follow-up interviews with you and stakeholders as needed.
4.) We develop your resiliency action plan. Sequencing system updates are a critical component of resiliency action planning. In addition, your budget and other planned facility upgrades and maintenance plans will impact your timeline.
Ready to get started?
Contact us today to set up a time to discuss your ideas.