Natural Hazards and the Comprehensive Plan: The Hazards Are Already on the Map

Part 2 of 5 in our August series on Public Safety and Hazard Mitigation in the Comprehensive Plan.

Every community has natural hazards. Not every community has chosen to shape their future to put resilience to hazards front and center.

That distinction is at the heart of hazard mitigation and comprehensive planning. Tornadoes, floods, drought, severe storms, wildfire, extreme heat, and winter weather cannot be eliminated by a zoning ordinance or a future land use map. But the consequences of those events are not wholly inevitable. They are shaped, over time, by decisions about where homes are built, which roads provide access, whether critical facilities have backup power, how stormwater is managed, where shelter is available, and whether growth is directed away from places known to be dangerous.

There remains an important gap between recognizing risk and allowing that risk to influence routine land-use decisions. A community may have a current hazard-mitigation plan, participate in the National Flood Insurance Program, maintain warning sirens, and still approve new development without asking whether future residents will have a safe tornado shelter, a second emergency exit, reliable water during drought, or practical access to a hospital when the roads flood. The comprehensive plan is where those questions should be answered before the subdivision plat, building permit, or capital-improvement budget makes the exposure permanent.

This is not an argument for stopping growth or attempting to engineer away every risk. It is an argument for planning with open eyes. The most resilient communities do not wait for the next disaster to discover where their development pattern, infrastructure network, or public facilities are vulnerable. They use the information already available to make better choices while options still exist.

natural hazards comprehensive plan — aerial view of rural landscape with storm approaching small town

Hazards Are a Land Use Problem

The plans I’ve worked on—particularly plans that closely integrate a current multi-jurisdictional hazard-mitigation plan—go further than a simple acknowledgement and inventory. But the connection is often uneven: hazard information may inform emergency operations, floodplain administration, or capital projects without consistently shaping the future land use map, subdivision standards, site design, and development approvals that determine future exposure.

We’ve tried to bring emergency management, public safety, and the planning department together to incorporate emergency operations and the local hazard mitigation plan into the comprehensive plan.

The thing is, land use decisions determine hazard exposure. A manufactured home park sited in a tornado-prone corridor without adequate shelter infrastructure is vulnerable. A subdivision approved in the wildland-urban interface without defensible space requirements or emergency egress roads is more dangerous than one that builds those standards in from the start. A commercial development approved on a site with known expansive soils or subsidence risk carries structural costs that a different site selection could have avoided entirely.

None of these outcomes are inevitable. They are the product of land use decisions made without reference to the hazard data that was already available. The comprehensive plan is where that data should be doing its work — shaping the future land use map, the zoning standards, and the subdivision requirements that translate goals into outcomes on the ground.

Grand Island and Hall County, Nebraska, offer a useful example of what it looks like when mitigation becomes an investment decision rather than a planning aspiration. Its flood-control program—detention cells, a diversion channel, and upland detention dams—removed 600 structures from the floodplain. During the 2019 floods, the city estimated that the project avoided $47 million in damages. That is hazard mitigation doing exactly what a comprehensive plan should do: reducing future exposure through the location, design, and financing of public infrastructure.

The comprehensive plan can’t prevent the next tornado. But it can determine how many people are in its path — and whether they had somewhere to go.

*FEMA Resilience Analysis and Planning Tool*

Understanding the Hazard Landscape: What the Data Shows

Here in the US, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) classifies hazards into natural hazards (events from natural earth and atmospheric processes) and man-made/technological hazards (accidents, system failures, or intentional acts by people) in a broad all-hazards approach. In the 1980s and 1990s, large natural hazard events like flooding on the Missouri and Mississippi river systems put natural hazards to national attention. After 9/11, human-cause hazards rose to the fore. Over time, FEMA’s attention has returned to natural hazards and the current administration has challenged even the agency’s very existence.

Not to get political, we’re just living in interesting times…

FEMA’s National Risk Index formally tracks 18 distinct natural hazard types across the United States, including:

Weather & Atmospheric: Avalanche, cold wave, drought, hail, heat wave, hurricane (tropical cyclone), ice storm, lightning, strong wind, tornado, winter weather.
Water-Related: Coastal flooding, riverine/inland flooding, tsunami.
Geophysical & Earth: Earthquake, landslide, volcanic activity.
Environmental: Wildfire

FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security (via frameworks like THIRA) split human-made incidents into two primary sub-groups of technological hazards and human-caused incidents.

Technological Hazards — unintentional events caused by industrial processes, failure of systems/structures, or everyday technology:

Hazardous material spills or toxic releases.
Major transportation accidents (air, rail, marine, highway).
Critical infrastructure or computer system failures (e.g., power grid or 911 outages).
Nuclear power accidents or industrial fires.

Human-Caused / Adversarial Incidents — intentional destructive acts carried out by individuals or groups:

Terrorist attacks (conventional, cyber, or agro-terrorism).
Use of chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBRN) weapons.
Civil unrest, riots, or intentional sabotage.

The National Risk Index provides a starting point for state-wide and county-level natural hazard analysis. It scores expected annual loss by natural hazard type and combines those scores with social vulnerability and community resilience indicators to produce an overall risk rating. We’ll be discussing man-made hazards next week.

Source: Nebraska State Hazard Mitigation Plan 2026

For most rural counties in the Great Plains and Midwest, the dominant natural hazard types are tornadoes, drought, extreme heat, and wildfire. The dominant hazards differ across the country — coastal counties may focus on hurricanes and storm surge, Appalachian and Rocky Mountain counties on landslides, western communities on earthquake and wildfire, and Midwestern counties on tornadoes and riverine flooding.

Here in the US, your State Hazard Mitigation Plan will provide a good starting list of natural and man-made hazards to start with. Nebraska’s State Hazard Mitigation Plan 2026 identifies hazards ranging from animal disease, dam/levee failure, drought, and flooding, to power and infrastructure failure.

The planning principle is the same regardless of geography: identify the hazards most likely to affect your community, and connect that risk to the land use decisions that shape exposure.

Natural Hazards — Weather

Snowstorm at 28 of December 2012 in Niederau / Tyrol. — *Source: Wikimedia Commons CC*

Severe Storms

Severe summer and winter storms are among the most common natural hazards. For summer storms, this includes severe thunderstorms with lighting and hail, and may lead to flash flooding (see below). Winter storms bring heavy snow and blizzards, ice storms/freezing rain which bring down trees and power lines, extreme cold, and secondary risks such as traffic crashes on icy roads.

These storms routinely threaten life, health, property, infrastructure, agriculture, and local economies. A storm becomes a disaster when it affects exposed and vulnerable people or systems, with specific public policy criteria for local, state, or federal disaster declaration.

Hurricanes and typhoons/cyclones affect both coastal and inland areas with a variety of wind and water hazards ranging from intense wind and rainfall, tornadoes, river flooding, and storm surge at the coast. Architect William G. Ramroth, Jr., describes the largest, most deadly hurricanes to hit the US in his book Planning for Disaster.

The Great Storm that hit Galveston, Texas, at the end of August in 1900, with 15-foot wave surges and a death toll estimated at 8,000 to 10,000 killed and 3/4 of the city washed away.
The 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane on 10 September 1928, struck Puerto Rico leaving over 300 dead before making landfall in Florida, resulting in at least another 2,500 casualties, though nobody really knows.
The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 hit the Florida Keys on the 2nd of September, completely destroying Matecumbe Key with a 15-foot storm surge resulting in over 400 people drowned.
Hurricane Betsy skirted Florida then built to Category 5 in the Gulf of Mexico before making landfall in Louisiana at Category 3 the evening of 9 September 1965. This storm killed 76 people and flooded over 160,000 homes, with storm damage estimated at nearly $1.5 billion (not adjusted for inflation). 40 years later when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the US Army Corps of Engineers was still rebuilding the damaged levees on the Mississippi River.
Hurricane Andrew made landfall on 24 August 1992, hitting Homestead and parts of Miami-Dade County with wind speeds in excess of 175 mph. More than 60 people died and 250,000 people were left homeless.
Hurricane Katrin made landfall three times: At 6:30 pm on 25 August 2005 near North Miami Beach, Florida at Category 1; strengthening to Category 5 over the Gulf of Mexico before hitting Louisiana at 6:10 am on 29 August at Category 3; then after going back out to the Gulf, returning ashore near the Louisiana/Mississippi state line. Then the levees broke. About 1,200 direct deaths were attributed to this storm event.

The United States experiences more tornadoes than any other country, and the nation’s highest-risk corridor runs through the rural Great Plains and Midwest—where I grew up and live these days. Nebraska alone averages about 45 tornadoes each year — FEMA recently approved disaster declarations for eight Nebraska counties following May 2026 storms, including Jefferson, Nemaha, and Thayer counties where I have worked. Tornadoes are only one part of the threat: severe thunderstorms and straight-line winds can topple trees, tear roofs from buildings, damage grain storage and irrigation equipment, interrupt electric and communications service, and devastate crops and livestock operations.

That familiarity can obscure the capacity of tornadoes to produce catastrophic loss. The 2011 Joplin, Missouri, EF5 tornado killed 161 people, damaged nearly 8,000 buildings, destroyed more than 4,000 homes, and caused an estimated $2.8 billion in damage —the costliest single tornado in U.S. history. The Tuscaloosa–Birmingham tornado that same year caused roughly $2.4 billion in losses, and the 2013 Moore, Oklahoma, EF5 caused about $2 billion. These were not simply meteorological disasters. Their extraordinary costs reflected where the storms struck: established neighborhoods, schools, hospitals, commercial districts, transportation corridors, utility systems, and other critical facilities lay directly in their paths.

Note: Older tornadoes are rated on the original Fujita Scale (F0–F5), while U.S. tornadoes since 2007 and Canadian tornadoes since 2013 use the Enhanced Fujita Scale (EF0–EF5), which estimates wind intensity from more detailed, engineering-based assessments of observed damage.

The planning lesson is not that a community can predict a tornado’s path or avoid development throughout a region where tornadoes are part of life. It is that communities can reduce the consequences of the next event. A comprehensive plan should identify where people lack timely access to safe shelter—especially in manufactured-home parks, campgrounds, schools, workplaces, and scattered rural residential areas—and connect those gaps to capital-improvement priorities. It should also support reliable emergency access, redundant communications and power for critical facilities, tree and utility management, and construction and retrofit practices that improve life safety and speed recovery.

The 1980 Grand Island “Night of the Twisters,” which killed five people, injured more than 400, and caused an estimated $300 million in damage, remains a Nebraska reminder that tornado resilience is fundamentally a local planning responsibility. Thayer County, Nebraska, makes the shelter question especially concrete. Its hazard-mitigation chapter identifies a shortage of community safe rooms and calls for shelters in vulnerable settings such as mobile-home parks, campgrounds, and schools. In 2003, the Deshler tornado killed one person, injured seven, damaged 400 homes, and destroyed six businesses. A statement that tornadoes are a local risk is not enough; the meaningful question is whether the community has mapped shelter access and made safe shelter, emergency access, and resilient infrastructure part of its future-development decisions.

Mitigation for tornado risk also needs to account for the fact that risk is not distributed evenly. Residents of manufactured homes, older rental housing, temporary lodging, campgrounds, and isolated rural homes may have less access to basements, safe rooms, reliable warnings, transportation, insurance, or immediate assistance after an event. The same is true for people who are working outdoors, traveling on rural highways, living alone, or dependent on electrically powered medical equipment. Mapping the location of vulnerable populations and shelter gaps is therefore as important as mapping historical tornado tracks.

Physical design matters as well. A safe room does not have to be a stand-alone public building; it can be incorporated into a school, community center, fire station, apartment complex, workplace, or new residential development. Local governments can also encourage wind-resistant connections between roofs and walls, garage-door reinforcement, impact-resistant openings, secure anchoring of manufactured homes, and protection of backup generators, communications equipment, water systems, and emergency operations facilities. These measures cannot prevent property damage in every tornado, particularly the most violent storms, but they can reduce injuries, preserve essential services, and allow a community to begin recovery sooner.

Tornado planning should also recognize the difference between warning and protection. Outdoor warning sirens, phone alerts, weather radios, and public education are vital, but none of them substitute for a nearby place of refuge. A warning received by a family in a mobile-home park, a traveler at a campground, or a worker in a warehouse is only useful if that person can reach shelter in time. In that sense, shelter coverage is infrastructure: it should be assessed, mapped, funded, maintained, and expanded as development occurs.

Finally, recovery should be considered before disaster strikes. Tornadoes can damage or destroy housing at a scale that overwhelms local rental markets, displaces workers, interrupts schools and businesses, and reduces the local tax base just when demands on public services are rising. A resilient comprehensive plan should anticipate temporary housing needs, debris-management sites, post-disaster permitting procedures, mutual-aid arrangements, and strategies for rebuilding damaged neighborhoods in safer and stronger ways. The goal is not merely to survive the tornado warning; it is to help the community remain functional and recover equitably after the storm has passed.

Economic costs of severe storms

Severe summer and winter storms impose large economic costs in the United States, but they do so in different ways. Summer convective storms are especially frequent and property-damage intensive; winter storms often impose major disruption costs through transportation shutdowns, power failures, cold exposure, and lost business activity.

NOAA’s billion-dollar disaster database records 203 severe-storm events and 24 winter-storm events in the U.S. from 1980–2024. In NOAA’s CPI-adjusted accounting, severe storms caused about $514.4 billion in losses, while winter storms caused about $104.2 billion—but these figures include only events surpassing the database’s $1 billion threshold and therefore do not represent every local storm loss. (Note the current Federal administration suspended continued maintenance of this data set.)

Hazard category	NOAA events, 1980–2024	NOAA total losses	Average loss per qualifying event
Severe storms	203	$514.4 billion	$2.5 billion
Winter storms	24	$104.2 billion	$4.3 billion

Source: NOAA

In Canada, severe weather losses have risen sharply as well. Statistics Canada reports that catastrophic weather claims reached $8.6 billion (Canadian) in 2024 (with C$9.1 billion in total catastrophic claims), and that uninsured losses exceed insured losses—meaning insurance figures materially understate the total economic burden. Public Safety Canada’s National Risk Profile cites a rise in annual losses from floods, ice storms, blizzards, and extreme-cold events from roughly C$2.1 billion to C$5 billion annually in recent comparisons; it also reported C$3.12 billion in uninsured disaster losses in 2022.

Summer-type severe storms account for about half of all NOAA billion-dollar weather/climate events in that period. Winter storms are less frequent in this dataset, but their average cost per qualifying event is higher.

The largest direct losses of summer severe storms usually involve damage to roofs, siding, windows, vehicles, commercial buildings, crops, power lines, and public infrastructure. Economic effects include:

Property and insurance losses: Hail is particularly costly because it can damage thousands of roofs and vehicles across a metropolitan area in a short period. A Calgary hailstorm in August 2024 accounted for about C$3.0 billion in insured losses in a little over an hour—the country’s second-costliest insured event, according to IBC/CatIQ.
Business interruption: Power outages, damaged premises, impassable roads, and reduced customer activity halt or constrain operations.
Agricultural losses: Wind, hail, and excess rainfall damage crops, farm buildings, equipment, livestock facilities, and rural electrical systems.
Public-sector costs: Debris clearance, emergency response, road and utility repairs, shelters, and reconstruction impose unplanned costs on local governments.
Supply-chain disruptions: Damage to logistics facilities, rail/road networks, and the electric grid can affect production and distribution beyond the impact area.

For perspective, NOAA attributed $1.7 billion in losses to the April 2024 central tornado outbreak that damaged communities including Elkhorn, Bennington, Blair, and Eppley Airfield near Omaha, Nebraska. It separately identified multiple May–June 2024 central-region storm outbreaks with losses ranging from $1.2 billion to $6.6 billion.

Direct costs of winter severe storms include roof and building damage, frozen and burst pipes, vehicle crashes, tree and utility-line damage, and repairs to roads and public facilities. Their broader economic burden can be substantial:

Transportation: Highway closures, flight cancellations, delayed freight, and unsafe access can prevent workers, customers, medical providers, and supplies from reaching destinations.
Power and communications: Ice and wind damage may cause outages lasting days, which in turn stop commerce, disrupt digital services, spoil inventory, and increase emergency costs.
Energy demand: Cold drives up heating demand and utility bills, while outages can damage water, wastewater, and fuel systems.
Lost activity: Construction, hospitality, retail, and some service-sector activity are particularly sensitive to severe winter conditions. A Chicago Fed analysis found the macroeconomic effect is often significant but generally short-lived, with utilities, construction, hospitality, and—more modestly—retail among the most affected sectors.
Rural impacts: Snow-blocked roads can isolate farms and homes, interrupt deliveries, and endanger livestock; removal, repair, and lost-business costs can weigh heavily on small towns with limited reserves.

NOAA estimated the December 2022 Central and Eastern Winter Storm/Cold Wave at $9.0 billion in damage; it affected more than 200 million people under winter advisories or warnings, left more than one million customers without power, and caused widespread frozen-pipe damage.

Damage estimates are not the same as the full economic cost. They typically capture physical damage more readily than uninsured losses, foregone wages, missed school or work, household displacement, health effects, long recovery periods, lost tax revenue, and the compounding effect of repeated storms on a community’s insurance availability and affordability.

US Drought Monitor Map for August 4, 2026

Drought & Extreme Temperatures

Long-term drought is among the most economically damaging hazards facing rural agricultural counties, yet it receives almost no attention in most comprehensive plans. The USDA Drought Monitor provides weekly drought condition data going back decades. Counties that overlay that data with agricultural land use patterns, groundwater recharge areas, and municipal water supply sources begin to see drought not as a background condition but as a land use challenge — one that affects where development can sustainably occur and what agricultural practices the county’s water supply can support.

While extreme cold is a common seasonal event across the northern US and Canada, extreme heat is the leading weather-related cause of death in the United States, and its death toll is likely substantially undercounted. For example, 619 heat-related deaths were attributed to a heat dome over British Columbia in 2021. In rural areas, the risk is concentrated among elderly residents, agricultural workers, and residents without reliable cooling. The land use connection is indirect but real: compact development patterns near services and cooling centers are more resilient to extreme heat than scattered rural residential areas where isolation compounds vulnerability.

Natural Hazards — Geophysical

Earthquakes

Geophysical hazards arise from Earth processes rather than weather or climate. In the United States and Canada, the most important are earthquakes, earthquake-triggered ground failure and fires, tsunamis, landslides, volcanic activity, and—in certain regions—subsidence and sinkholes. During an earthquake, sudden fault movement produces ground shaking, surface rupture, building and bridge damage, utility failure, and sometimes fire or hazardous-material releases.

The highest U.S. earthquake risk is concentrated in Alaska, California, Hawaii, the Pacific Northwest, and parts of the Intermountain West, although damaging earthquakes can occur elsewhere. USGS identifies California and Alaska as especially active, and its national hazard mapping also recognizes risk in regions such as the central Mississippi Valley/New Madrid seismic zone and parts of the eastern U.S.

The most famous earthquake may be the San Francisco earthquake and fire on 18 April 1906. The U.S.’s deadliest earthquake at an estimated 7.9 on the Richter scale, the original estimate of roughly 700–800 fatalities is now considered a major undercount of the likely 3,000 or more deaths. Ramroth includes a chapter in his book devoted to how earthquakes in California influenced the evolution of building codes. This includes the San Francisco earthquakes of 1865 and 1868, their resulting fires, and lessons learned (and not learned) which influenced how buildings were impacted — or better survived — in 1906. He also discusses quakes in 1925 at Santa Barbara, in 1933 at Long Beach, in 1989 at Loma Prieta (during the World Series in San Francisco), and the 1994 Northridge earthquake in the Los Angeles area in which more than 7,000 people were injured, with 33 deaths.

Tsunamis are also a natural hazard in much of the world. These large waves usually caused by major undersea earthquakes, but also by submarine or coastal landslides and volcanic eruptions. Ramroth chronicles historic tsunami events such as followed a 1947, 7.8 magnitude earthquake off the Alaskan Aleutian Islands which resulted in a 24-foot wave washing over Hilo, Hawaii, killing 159. In 1964, an 8.4 magnitude earthquake off the coast of Alaska triggered a series of tsunami waves which washed down the Pacific Coast, causing 106 deaths in Alaska and 4 in Oregon. He also tells the tragic stories of the 2004 Inidan Ocean Tsunami, which killed about 100,000 people, primarily on Sumatra.

Natural Hazards — Environmental

Wildland Urban Interface low-intensity prescribed underburn, western Oregon. — *Wildland-Urban Interface. Source: BLM* on flickr

Wildfire and the Wildland-Urban Interface

Wildfire has long been a hazard of forests, grasslands, and rural settlements, but it is no longer possible to treat it as a remote rural concern. The central planning issue is the wildland–urban interface (WUI): the area where homes, businesses, infrastructure, and public facilities are built within or immediately adjacent to flammable vegetation. According to the US Fire Administration, more than 60,000 U.S. communities face WUI-fire risk, including communities far outside the West.

Historical experience makes clear that wildfire has always had the capacity to become a community-scale disaster. The 1871 Peshtigo Fire in Wisconsin—the deadliest wildfire in U.S. history—killed an estimated 1,200 to 2,500 people. The 1910 Great Fire in Idaho and Montana burned roughly 3 million acres, killed 87 people—78 of them firefighters—and destroyed multiple communities. In Canada, the 1825 Miramichi Fire burned an estimated 15,500 square kilometres of northeastern New Brunswick, killed hundreds of people, left thousands homeless, and prompted what Parks Canada describes as pre-Confederation Canada’s largest disaster-relief effort.

What has changed is the scale and pattern of development in hazardous landscapes. More people now live in the WUI, and fire-prone vegetation, drought, extreme heat, wind, and ignition sources can combine to turn a vegetation fire into a fast-moving urban conflagration. A community need not be deep in a forest to be vulnerable: WUI fires can begin in or near developed areas and spread through grasses, brush, ornamental vegetation, fences, decks, sheds, and structures.

The Camp Fire that destroyed much of Paradise, California, in 2018, remains a stark U.S. example. It killed 85 people, destroyed 18,804 structures, displaced roughly 54,000 residents, and caused estimated economic losses exceeding $16.5 billion. The Marshall Fire which swept across Colorado’s Denver-Boulder suburbs in 2021, likewise showed that rapidly moving grass fire can devastate suburban neighborhoods, not only mountain and forest communities.

Canada offers a parallel lesson. The 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire forced the evacuation of more than 90,000 people, destroyed about 2,400 homes and businesses, damaged another 530 buildings, and caused two evacuation-related fatalities. Public Safety Canada estimated total costs at more than $4.0 billion, while Statistics Canada reported insured losses of $3.7 billion and an estimated 0.4 percent reduction in national real GDP in the second quarter of 2016 because the evacuation disrupted oil-sands production. In 2023, Canada’s record wildfire season burned approximately 15 million hectares, forced 232,000 evacuations, and killed eight firefighters, even though no civilian fatalities were recorded.

Wildfire is not solely a forest-and-mountain issue. Clay County, Nebraska, identifies grassfire risk during drought, long water-haul distances for volunteer firefighters, and the absence of both WUI standards and defensible-space requirements. The Jefferson County, Nebraska, 2023 Rock Creek Fire burned an estimated 2,600 acres and threatened homes and historic-park buildings. These are planning issues: access roads, water supply, structure siting, site maintenance, and development standards determine whether a grassfire remains a rural incident or becomes a community disaster.

The Spokane-area fires this past week reinforce that destructive wildfire is not defined by acreage alone. Reports indicate that the fires burned roughly 12,000 acres and destroyed over 900 structures, with some early accounts suggesting the total could rise. Tens of thousands of residents were ordered to evacuate, yet no fatalities had been reported at the time of those accounts. That contrast is important: a relatively modest fire footprint can still produce extraordinary losses when fire enters populated areas during extreme wind and low-humidity conditions.

Wildland firefighting is a dangerous occupation. Author Norman MacLean wrote about his quest for understanding of the Mann Gulch fire in the Gates of the Mountains near Helena, Montana, in 1949, and how it led to the deaths of 13 wildland firefighters. We have recently seen several U.S. wildland-firefighting fatalities which have come from both extreme fire behavior on the ground and aviation accidents—underscoring that risk extends well beyond direct flame contact.

Snyder (formerly Knowles) Fire, Mesa County, Colorado — June 27–July 24, 2026. Helitack firefighters Emily Barker, 38; Nicholas “Nick” Hutcherson, 27; and Sydney Watson, 27 died after a fast-moving fire overran their crew during initial attack. Nathan Matthews, 43, later died from the burn injuries he sustained in the same incident. Investigations remain underway.
Gold Mountain Fire, Colorado — July 12, 2026. Helicopter pilot Nicholas Dale was killed when his firefighting aircraft crashed into Silver Jack Reservoir while supporting the fire.
Wrights Spring Fire, near Chiloquin, Oregon — August 6–7, 2026. Dozer operator Jason Ensign, 47, died when rapidly changing fire conditions cut off the route from his equipment to a designated safety area.
Widemouth 2 Fire, near Kanosh, Utah — August 7, 2026. A contracted USFS firefighting helicopter crashed; the pilot and one crewmember were fatally injured. The cause is under investigation by the FAA and NTSB, and their names had not been released in the information available.

The immediate causes differ—burnover/entrapment, heavy-equipment exposure, and aircraft crashes—but they reflect recurring operational hazards: abrupt wind and weather changes, rapid fire spread, limited escape routes, remote terrain, fatigue, and aviation risk. Historically, aviation and vehicle incidents, medical events, and entrapments/burnovers have been among the leading categories of U.S. wildland-firefighter fatalities. We cannot thank our wildland firefighters enough, especially these days with the dysfunction in Washington, DC.

Wildfire is an Urban and Rural Concern

These lessons apply to urban and rural townships, cities, and counties alike. Comprehensive plans, zoning ordinances, subdivision regulations, capital-improvement programs, and hazard-mitigation plans should address wildfire risk before development occurs. Key actions include:

Mapping wildfire hazard, evacuation constraints, critical facilities, and existing WUI development.
Directing the most vulnerable uses away from areas with severe fire exposure or inadequate evacuation capacity.
Requiring more than one safe egress route where feasible and ensuring that roads, bridges, gates, and street networks can support evacuation and emergency access.
Adopting ignition-resistant construction and retrofit standards, including fire-resistant roofs, vents, siding, decks, and windows.
Requiring and maintaining defensible space around structures, while recognizing that vegetation management must be sustained over time.
Protecting water supply, communications, power, and other lifeline infrastructure during fire and power-shutoff events.
Coordinating land-use decisions with evacuation planning, public alerts, shelters, and outreach to residents who may need transportation or other assistance.

Wildfire resilience is therefore not simply a matter of firefighting capacity. It is a land-use, housing, infrastructure, public-health, and equity challenge—and one that comprehensive planning is uniquely positioned to address.

Natural Hazards — Water

Coastal and Inland Flooding

Flooding is the most costly natural hazard in the United States — and also the one where the connection between land use decisions and hazard exposure is most direct and most extensively documented. Development in the floodplain, removal of riparian vegetation, and increases in impervious cover all increase flood risk downstream.

Floodplain management deserves its own treatment but it also belongs in any comprehensive inventory of natural hazards. The comprehensive plan’s future land use map should explicitly reflect floodplain boundaries as a constraint on development location, and as direct support for implementation through floodplain regulations.

We’re going to dedicate an entire long-read to this hazard, coming the week after next.

FEMA local hazard mitigation planning process — community meeting rural county hazard assessment

From Acknowledgment to Policy: What the Plan Should Do

Consider two counties facing similar tornado risk. The first acknowledges and inventories tornado risk in its comprehensive plan and notes that residents should be aware of shelter locations. The second maps tornado shelter coverage relative to population distribution, identifies gaps in shelter access in rural residential areas, requires storm shelters as a condition of development approval in areas beyond a defined shelter access radius, and coordinates with the county emergency manager to update shelter locations in the capital improvement plan.

Both counties have acknowledged the hazard. Only one has planned for it.

The difference is not information — both counties have access to the same FEMA data, the same NOAA storm records, the same state hazard mitigation plan. The difference is whether the comprehensive plan uses that information to drive policy, standards, and investment decisions.

Practical steps for moving from inventory to policy:

Map your hazards explicitly in the natural resources or public safety chapter. Use FEMA National Risk Index data, state hazard mitigation plan maps, and NOAA storm event records to create a county-level hazard inventory that identifies which hazard types pose the greatest risk to life and property — and where in the county that risk is concentrated. Even better yet, incorporate your local hazard mitigation into the comprehensive plan with it’s own specific element, even if it’s simply adoption by reference.

Overlay hazard maps with your future land use map. Identify conflicts: areas where development is planned or permitted in high-hazard locations. Those conflicts should drive policy responses — higher standards, restricted uses, or redirection of growth to lower-risk areas.

Connect hazard data to zoning and subdivision standards. Tornado shelter requirements in high-risk areas. Defensible space and emergency egress standards in wildfire interface zones. Grading and drainage standards that account for extreme precipitation events. These are the mechanisms that translate hazard awareness into development outcomes.

Reference the state hazard mitigation plan. Every state produces a hazard mitigation plan that identifies the major hazard types, their probability and magnitude, and the mitigation actions recommended for local governments. Most comprehensive plans never reference it. Cross-referencing the state plan — and aligning local comprehensive plan policies with its recommendations — strengthens both documents and improves eligibility for FEMA hazard mitigation grants.

From data to safer communities

Hazard Data

FEMA NRI · NOAA · State Hazard Mitigation Plan

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County Hazard Inventory & Maps

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Future Land Use Map

Conflicts identified

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Zoning & Subdivision Standards

Updated to reflect hazard risk

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Capital Improvement Plan

Aligned with mitigation priorities

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Safer, more resilient communities

📋 Planning Takeaway

If your comprehensive plan includes a list of natural hazards but no map showing where those hazards are most likely to occur — and no policy language connecting that risk to land use decisions — your plan is acknowledging hazards without mitigating them. That distinction matters when the next event occurs and the county is asking whether it could have done more.

The Cumulative Exposure Problem

Individual hazard events are unpredictable. The pattern of development that determines how exposed a community becomes to those events is not. A county that approves twenty years of rural residential development in tornado-prone corridors without shelter requirements, in wildfire interface zones without defensible space standards, and in drought-vulnerable areas without water supply analysis is making a series of individually small decisions that cumulatively increase the community’s hazard exposure — one subdivision at a time.

This is the planning argument for natural hazard integration that goes beyond compliance. FEMA requires local hazard mitigation plans as a condition of certain grant funding. State programs may require hazard elements in comprehensive plans. But the strongest argument for connecting natural hazard data to land use policy isn’t regulatory — it’s the simple observation that the decisions counties make today determine the hazard exposure of the residents who will live in those developments for decades.

As we discussed in last week’s article on public safety and land use, the comprehensive plan is where individual decisions accumulate into patterns — and where the consequences of those patterns, good or bad, become visible long before the next disaster makes them undeniable.

wildfire interface zone comprehensive plan — rural landscape with fire risk and agricultural fields

From Hazard Awareness to Land Use Action

The good news is that communities do not need to begin from scratch. Local hazard-mitigation plans, FEMA flood maps and National Risk Index data, National Weather Service records, state hazard plans, watershed studies, and local knowledge already identify much of the risk. The task for comprehensive planning is to move that information out of a stand-alone hazard chapter and into the decisions that shape development on the ground.

Grand Island provides a useful example. Its flood-control investments—including detention cells, a diversion channel, and upland detention dams—removed 600 structures from the floodplain. When flooding returned in 2019, the city estimated that the project avoided $47 million in potential damage. That is the value of connecting risk analysis, capital investment, and land-use planning before the flood arrives.

Other examples point to the work still ahead. Thayer County has identified the need for safe rooms in vulnerable locations such as mobile-home parks, campgrounds, and schools; the 2003 Deshler tornado killed one person, injured seven, damaged 400 homes, and destroyed six businesses. Clay County has identified grassfire and wildfire risk, limited rural water access for firefighting, and the absence of WUI and defensible-space standards. In Jefferson County, the Rock Creek Fire demonstrated that wildfire can threaten homes, historic resources, and rural infrastructure in Nebraska as readily as it can in the better-known fire-prone West.

The core question is not whether a plan contains a list of hazards. It is whether that list changes anything. Does it change where growth is directed? Does it change subdivision access, shelter expectations, drainage design, building standards, infrastructure priorities, or the protection of critical facilities? Does the capital-improvement program invest in the roads, culverts, detention, backup power, communications, and water systems that will allow a community to function during and after an event?

A comprehensive plan cannot stop the next tornado, flood, drought, grassfire, or winter storm. It can, however, determine how many people and how much property are placed in harm’s way—and whether the places we build today will give residents a safer, more resilient future when the next event arrives.

Next Sunday, August 16th, we turn to the hazards that don’t appear on most natural hazard maps at all: man-made hazards and the land use decisions that create or compound them.

Questions about integrating natural hazards into your comprehensive plan? I’m between jobs, looking for my next big thing. Get in touch and let’s see what we can do.

comprehensive plan and hazard mitigation plan binders with GIS overlay map on desk — further reading local hazard mitigation plan integration

Resources

Rural-Ready Engagement: Practical Tools for Small Town Planners

Watch the full replay: youtube.com/@Engaging-Communities (February 2026)

Community engagement can look very different in small towns and rural communities. This webcast was co-sponsored by the APA Community Engagement Interest Group and the Small Town & Rural Planning Division.

Dynamic Decisions Podcast (Season 2 Episode 15)

“Stop Chasing Smokestacks. Grow What You Have” with Teasha Cable of cModel Data, now playing on Youtube (audio), Apple Podcasts, Spotify (May 2026). Other listening links here.

The Rural Impact Podcast (Episode #86)

“Pathways to Powering Rural America” My guest spot on Michelle Rathman’s podcast. Episode page here, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or watch (!) on youtube. We talked about energy, data centers, and good governance, plus so much more.

Hazards Are a Land Use Problem