City of Hillsboro

The City of Hillsboro is subject to a wide range of natural and human-caused hazards, including: floods, winter storms, earthquakes, dam failures, hazardous material spills, and many others. The impact of a hazard event on the community may be minor - a few inches of water in a street - or it may be major, with damages reaching hundreds of millions of dollars.

Mitigation simply means actions that reduce the potential for negative impacts from future disasters. That is, mitigation actions reduce future damages, losses and casualties.

This Mitigation Plan addresses all levels of natural hazard events and some human-caused hazards as well. The Plan includes events such as winter storms or localized storm water flooding that may happen in some locations almost every year and localized events such as landslides or debris flows. The plan also includes larger events such as major floods or earthquakes that may affect large numbers of residents in Hillsboro, with high levels of damages and losses, albeit with much lower probabilities of occurrence in a given year.

The Hillsboro mitigation plan has several key elements.

Each hazard that may impact Hillsboro significantly is reviewed to determine the probability (frequency) and severity of likely hazard events.
The vulnerability of Hillsboro to each hazard is evaluated to estimate the likely extent of physical damages, casualties, and economic impacts.
A range of mitigation alternatives are evaluated to identify those with the greatest potential to reduce future damages and losses in Hillsboro, to protect facilities deemed critical to the community’s well being, and that are desirable from the community’s political and economic perspective.

Red die with mitigation strategy choices on each of the sides