Monday, April 9, 2018

A Shade On Disaster Damage Assessment

By Carolyn Nelson


The preliminary evaluation of calamities is normally the key step in the process of looking for the federal calamity declaration in assisting individuals as well as public entities to recover. In the wake of a calamity, the catastrophe specialists together with the local emergency managers as well as officials normally from two teams of the PDA which are the individual assistance as well as the public assistance teams to work on the disaster damage assessment.

The individual assistance evaluation teams commonly assess the damage that has been caused to homes as the personal property. They do not visit every home, but their work is to obtain a broad overview of all the ruins that have happened. They can then help the individuals that are eligible for temporary rental assistance. They can also provide some basic repairs to the homes and provide other fiasco-related needs that may not be covered by the insurance.

Similarly, the team evaluating the public ruins has to obtain an overall overview of the impairment to the public infrastructure such as schools, roads, bridges, nonprofit entities and hospitals among others. The team is then required to offer assistance in repairing of the entities that have been destroyed. This is an important step because, with this kind of support, everything is likely to go back to normal within a short time.

Therefore, before conducting formal impairment evaluations after a calamity, it is necessary to perform the preliminary damage assessment or PDA that is generally defined by FEMA (Federal emergency management agency). This is usually a joint evaluation that is mainly used to determine the magnitude as well as the impact of the catastrophe.

The team thus ensures that it has visited all local catastrophe relief applicants and assesses the wreckage first-hand. This is done to evaluate the magnitude of the wreckage as well as estimating the cost of these repairs. The PDA is also helpful in the identification of other needs requiring immediate attention by FEMA. To add on that, the agency helps people to go back to normal situations.

In the event the calamity is confined to an area like a hospital or office building thus it is small-scale, the PDA will also do the estimations of ruins. The personnel will be evacuated from the building then the activation of the first respondent done. This is important to ensure the safety of all people that are around or near the building.

More so, the team will ensure that people do not enter the area until it is safe. Also, the agency team will conduct an inspection to determine if there are more ruins in the area apart from the main one in case of a fire fiasco. On top of that, the environmental controls of the building are inspected as well such as water supply, power feeds, transformers, air handling systems and more others.

After the evaluation, depending on the depth of the ruins, the team will decide the next course of action. For example, if a hotel building is completely ruined, they can decide to close the place down until all the repairs have been done so that the hotel can be reopened and normal operations resume.




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