As heavily industrialized, Los Angeles-area, urban communities adjacent to North America’s largest port complex, the communities of San Pedro and Wilmington are potentially subject to many disasters. However, this area’s preparedness for and resiliency to these disasters is largely unknown to the general public. This project, to conduct a vulnerability assessment and analysis of San Pedro and Wilmington and to increase community awareness and the potential for planning among options and alternatives for mitigation, supports the locally neglected USDHS mission to “ensure resilience to disasters” in a manner that is responsive both to immediate, local needs and potentially transferable to other communities. The first phase of this project proposes to concentrate on assessing the probabilities of future extreme events (e.g., earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, industrial accidents, terrorist acts) in San Pedro and Wilmington and to begin mapping and estimating their consequences by using risk and decision analysis and geospatial mapping tools. This project will provide a source for sound analytical guidance to community leaders and other decision makers regarding the most effective means of obtaining maximum local resiliency to disasters.
The second phase of the project will be an exercise in risk communication whose goal is to increase community awareness and the potential for planning among options and alternatives for mitigation. This phase will involve surveys of local residents, businesses, and government agencies, several community meetings, a disaster planning charrette, and establishment of a San Pedro/Wilmington disaster awareness website.
Click on the following, blue-highlighted text — KML Map of Major Industrial Vulnerabilities in San Pedro and Wilmington — to open a map of the industrial vulnerabilities of the area with estimated worst case impact zones. (If you download this kml file (Ctrl+S on the map page), it can be opened in Google Earth for greater visual impact with more detail).
The following map is courtesy of Climate Central. It shows impact zones of various sea-rise levels.