The University’s Oregon Natural Hazards Workgroup hopes to limit the campus’ risk of natural disaster with a risk mitigation plan.
The workgroup, a program of the University’s Community Service Center, announced Friday that it had received a $100,000 Disaster Resistant University Grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to offset the cost of the project.
The plan would be the first natural hazard risk mitigation applied to the University, sources said.
ONHW Director Andre LeDuc said the workgroup earned the grant because of its leading role in natural hazard mitigation at the national level.
“(We’ve) been working with communities and state agencies since 2000,” said LeDuc, who joined ONHW’s staff in 1999. “For the last five years, we’ve been a national leader.”
The University’s mitigation plan will address seismic and flood events. It will also deal with severe ice and wind storms, both of which have descended upon the University in recent years.
As part of a comprehensive plan for the University, LeDuc said he hopes to address vulnerabilities in older buildings on campus, which aren’t completely equipped for earthquakes or inclement weather.
“We like to spend about a year (on projects),” LeDuc said. “We use a very collaborative planning approach. We need to look at all the different facets of how the
University functions.
“We’re building off of the county and the city’s plans (and) benefiting from the things that
they’ve developed.”
Flood hazard mitigation planning will include determining what kind of flood plain the University lies on and assessing how much danger storm waters present to facilities.
The workgroup will even look into business losses the University might incur at the hands of a natural disaster.
“The University of Oregon is one of only four universities in the western United States to receive new funding under the Pre-Disaster Mitigation Disaster Resistant University Program,” FEMA Region 10 Director John Pennington said in a press release. “Oregon has been a national leader in disaster mitigation.”
ONHW is an educational program offered by the University that both serves the state and helps to teach graduate students.
The program is small, LeDuc said, but provides the highest level of the graduate learning experience. It is mentor-based and embeds students in the target communities for a year.
The workgroup uses partnerships with communities, cities and the state to work on mitigation plans in every corner of the state.
“We really try to build that bridge between academia and the real world,” LeDuc said.

[email protected]