Sobis is excited to announce our support to Virginia Tech with their Hazard Mitigation Plan. This project continues our collaboration with Virginia Tech on hazard risk assessment and mitigation projects in the Commonwealth. The Team will be providing cutting edge technical support using detailed, University-maintained datasets to help create a safer, more resilient university community. Quantifying the value of research in campus facilities will be one of the challenges the Team will face. The project is expected to continue through 2021 and into 2022 and needs to be approved by both the State of Virginia and FEMA.

“Building on our work with the Virginia Planning District Commissions, we will be implementing advanced models to better quantify the risk to the university community and identify specific mitigation actions,” said Bill Bohn, the Sobis Project Manager. “Our previous collaboration resulted in best practices FEMA Region III shared with mitigation planners in their region. We expect this project to advance how universities approach their mitigation planning.”

Available Resources for Your Institution

For more information on how institutes of higher education are developing partnerships to support hazard mitigation can be found here: https://www.fema.gov/pdf/library/femacollege_bro_final.pdf. More information on building a disaster resistant university may be found in FEMA 443: https://mitigation.eeri.org/resource-library/building-professionals/building-a-disaster-resistant-university-fema-443