MTC/ABAG Resilience Tools Help You Plan Ahead

The nine-county Bay Area is a place with tremendous amounts of natural beauty: the Pacific Ocean, the San Francisco Bay, mountains, forests, urban landscapes and everything in between.

Staff from MTC and the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) want to help residents and planning professionals better understand the risks from natural hazards that exist in our region.

MTC/ABAG staff have created a suite of tools to help residents, transportation and housing planners, students, and other interested people determine the severity of risk from certain types of natural hazards in the Bay Area, including earthquake, tsunami, flooding, landslides and wildfires.

• The interactive Hazard Viewer Map is intended to provide general information related to natural hazard potential and impact severity. Users can choose one (or more than one) type of hazard, and see how they overlay for a particular area.
• The Home Quake Quiz is an interactive tool that Bay Area residents can use to assess how resilient their home will be in the event of a major earthquake.
• MTC/ABAG’s working group for Wildfires – How to Preserve & Protect Housing offers recordings and other materials from past sessions on the basics of wildfires and housing, defensible space and home hardening, evacuation, and land use planning.
• The Soft Story Retrofit guidance document can help city staff set up an earthquake retrofit program for residential buildings that have a first-floor that is vulnerable to earthquakes.
• Pre-disaster recovery planning resources help local governments set up a plan  before a natural disaster strikes. By planning in advance, communities can recover more quickly from a major emergency.

The ABAG website lists a whole catalog of resilience resources, including investigations on funding implications.

The ABAG Technical Assistance Portal offers additional tools from MTC and ABAG, as well as regional partners including the San Francisco Estuary Partnership, Bay Conservation Development Commission, Cal-Adapt, Bay Area Regional Collaborative and others.