In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, when attention focused on the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) response to the disaster, one Penn State researcher found that damage prevention is effective.

Adam Rose, professor of geography, recently completed a two-year research study with the National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS) to use cost-benefit analysis to determine whether FEMA hazard mitigation, i.e. damage prevention programs, were worthwhile from an economic standpoint.

Congress mandated that an outside group conduct the study, so the Multihazard Mitigation Council (MMC) of the NIBS performed the research.

Looking back on the 10-year period from 1993 until 2003, the study concluded that every dollar FEMA spent on hazard mitigation efforts would ultimately reduce potential damages by $4, Rose said.

Rose said that while this research did not pertain to Hurricane Katrina, there would be a lot of research done in the future on hazard mitigation in relation to Hurricane Katrina.

"Rather than spending billions cleaning up and all the social trauma that was incurred, there are things we can do before the fact," he said. "Not all of them are costly, such as land use planning, but can be very effective."

Some of the losses prevented included property damage, business interruption, death, injuries, environmental impact, social disruption and a reduction in spending on emergency services, he said.

In order for businesses and organizations to receive grants from FEMA, the group requesting the funds must do a cost-benefit analysis, but this study provided an objective cost-benefit analysis, Rose said.

To conduct this research, the teams used the HAZUS-MH software program.

The software, which stands for Hazards-US, was developed by a group at NIBS for FEMA. It can be used for research, to estimate losses from natural disasters, said Claret Heider, vice-president of the Multihazard Mitigation Council and Building Seismic Safety Council Programs for NIBS.

"It projects losses from a certain level of disasters, including floods, earthquakes and winds," she said.

The software initially could only analyze data for earthquakes, but has since been extended to flood and wind damage assessment, she said.

The research teams evaluated both project mitigation grants and process mitigation grants.

Project mitigation grants "refers to preventing a natural disaster or reducing its magnitude or reducing society's vulnerability," Rose said.

Examples of these grants would include funding to construct a dam or levee before a disaster impacts an area in order to prevent or reduce flooding and structural reinforcement of buildings, to provide shelters for hurricane and tornado victims and to demolish homes in flood planes that are frequently flooded to rebuild them elsewhere.

Process mitigation grants are also used to conduct studies, to educate the public and to provide community mitigation plans, Rose said.

Follow-up research needs to be conducted in the future to quantify the efforts to increase the knowledge of citizens, said Heider. She said that she hopes that in the future, other groups can fill in the gaps created by this study.

He said that small precautionary steps could make a big difference. In relation to Hurricane Katrina, having people store more water, creating an evacuation plan, or owning a backup generator could have been simple steps for the citizens of New Orleans to take that would have had immeasurable benefits.

Heider said that mitigation should be considered during rebuilding of New Orleans, such as constructing buildings that are up to code and that are structurally reinforced.