Inglewood Safety Week

Hazard mitigation describes long-term actions that reduce the loss of life, personal injury, and property damage following a natural disaster. The City of Inglewood is currently in the process of updating its local Hazard Mitigation Plan from 2010 as well as its  General Plan Safety Element  from 1995. These updates strive to identify and reduce vulnerability of the City's residents, visitors, and infrastructure to future hazard events.

Thank you for taking the time to learn more about Inglewood's HMP and Safety Element updates! We want to hear from you. What hazards are important to you? What parts of the city are you most concerned about?

Visit  mitigatehazards.com/inglewood-hmp  to learn more about how to get involved in the planning process by attending public outreach events, taking a survey, and reviewing draft plans.

By understanding the natural hazards that have the potential to affect your local area, you can tailor a plan to reduce your household's risk in a meaningful and effective way. The 2022 Hazard Mitigation Plan Update will profile the following hazards specific to the City of Inglewood:

The first steps to mitigation at home is to know your risk. By understanding the risk around your home and in the region, you can start small and grow your mitigation skills over time with larger projects. Discover more information about each hazard using the links and mapping tools outlined below.

As a  municipal water provider  for over two-thirds of the city's residents and businesses, the City of Inglewood draws its water supply from a mix of local groundwater, recycled water, and purchased imported water which comes from the California and Colorado River Aqueducts. All three of these water sources can be compromised by drought, which is expected to increase in frequency and severity over the next century. ( California's Fourth Climate Change Assessment, 2018 ) Drought can damage local water infrastructure and costs the regional economy  billions of dollars , the impacts of which are felt far outside just the agricultural sector.

As of April 2022, the western U.S. is entering its third consecutive year of drought. California has declared a  statewide drought emergency,  and the City of Inglewood has declared a Level 1 water shortage. The  U.S. Drought Monitor  provides weekly updates of drought conditions nationwide.

As any resident knows, Southern California is no stranger to the impacts of severe earthquakes. The  1971 San Fernando Earthquake  and the  1994 Northridge Earthquake  both witnessed massive damages and loss of life in the Los Angeles Area.

Major  improvements  to building codes have been made in the following decades, but vulnerabilities still exist, particularly for older buildings constructed prior to 1980 and "soft-story" apartment buildings. A soft-story building is a building with multiple stories and an "open" ground floor, such as a tuck-under garage or large retail windows. Additional concerns include buildings occuring on top of a liquefaction zone - an area with loose soils which lose structural stability, or liquefy, when exposed to shaking during an earthquake event.

One way to assess earthquake vulnerability across a large area is to determine the population and infrastructure that would be exposed to different levels of shaking under modeled earthquake scenarios. Inglewood's 2022 HMP update features two model scenarios, developed by the US Geological Survey: a 7.2 earthquake with an epicenter on the Newport-Inglewood Fault, and a magnitude 7.7 earthquake, occuring offshore along the Palos Verdes fault. (See below)

By summing the total count and value of parcels, critical facilities, and utility lines occuring within severe shake zones for each scenario earthquake, we can better understand the City's vulnerability to a future severe earthquake event. What's clear from these two scenarios is that earthquake events are likely to affect all people and buildings within the City of Inglewood. Use the interactive web map below to see where your home address lies in proximity to specific earthquake hazards, as well as shaking levels at your location for the two scenario earthquakes.

Believe it or not, extreme heat contributes to more fatalities than any other weather-related natural disaster. Climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme heat days and warm nights in Inglewood. Already, extreme heat kills an estimated 600 people in the United States annually. ( CDC, 2021 ) These impacts are not distributed equally: some groups are more vulnerable to the affects of hot weather than others, including children and senios, outdoor workers and athletes, and people with chronic health conditions. Extreme heat impacts are also higher for poor and minority communities who are more likely to live in neighborhoods with lower tree cover and/or open space access, and who also experience compounding risks including exposure to air pollution and higher rate of underlying health conditions.

Within the same area, some neighborhoods may experience hotter temperatures than others over the course of a day due to differences in the built environment. For example, mobile homes heat more quickly than apartment buildings. Older buidlings are also less efficient and retain more heat than newer, more energy-efficient construction. Dense urban development generates and retains more heat than suburban and rural areas, a phenomenon known as the  urban heat island effect . Increasing street-level  tree shade and green space s is a part of the solution to mitigating a hotter future in LA County.

Use the map below to explore tree cover across Los Angeles County. What patterns do you notice within and among communities? How does tree cover in Inglewood compare to the rest of South Bay and to different parts of the County?

Visit Cal-Adapt to explore peer-reviewed climate data for Inglewood and learn more about how climate change is affecting extreme weather events and average temperatures in your area.

Periods of heavier than normal precipitation can create localized flooding, life threats, and extreme damage to property and infrastructure. In urban areas such as Inglewood, high cover of impervious surfaces can generate large volumes of runoff during heavy rain events which exceed the capacity of local stormwater infrastructure. If left unmitigated, flood-related damages could increase over the next century as climate models predict increased frequency of extreme rainfall events in Southern California.

FloodFactor is an innovative mapping tool that can be used to assess your home's present and future flood risk. Use the link below to search your home's address.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected every part of daily life, and has not gone away. Assessing Inglewood's ongoing and future risk to highly contagious variants of COVID-19 and other diseases will help the City to identify structural solutions to reduce impacts to residents, businesses, and services.

The best things you can do as a resident to protect yourself and your community against COVID-19 are to get vaccinated and take a test if you develop symptoms.

Visit the links below for current updates on the City and County's response to COVID-19.

• Fema's  National Risk Index  is a new online mapping application that identifies community-scale risk to 18 natural hazards. The National Risk Index includes information about expected annual losses as well as social vulnerability and community resilience.

• Use the CalOES  MyHazards  address search tool to discover natural hazards specific to your area (including earthquake, flood, fire, and tsunami) and learn steps to reduce personal risk.

Mitigation is the act of reducing risk or harm from any undesireable event. There are concrete steps you can take to reduce damages to your home following a natural disaster. Visit the link below to learn more.