In the event of natural disasters, public health officials must be able to respond quickly and efficiently. Tim Frazier, a Binghamton University geography professor, explained the obstacles communities face while planning for a catastrophe.

Frazier was the keynote speaker at “Healthography: How where you live affects your health and well-being,” a conference hosted by the Center of Excellence on Thursday. He discussed how access to resources like evacuation routes and emergency care are important in the event of a natural disaster.

The day-long conference featured speakers including an anthropology professor and a speaker from the Decker School of Nursing. Each presented on public health in their respective fields.

The conference was held in memory of Florence Margai, a BU geography professor who studied the impact the floods in Binghamton on public health. The late professor’s passion inspired her colleagues to begin a public health conference.

According to Frazier, the federal government provides funding to carry out hazard mitigation plans or plans to reduce the risk of long-term issues from natural disasters that affect people and their property. However, he said, there is little regulation over the quality of these plans. Frazier said that states frequently hire external contractors to create emergency plans that are “copied and pasted” from one state to the next without giving much thought to the uniqueness of local hazards.

“The plans do not match what is happening locally,” Frazier said. “The plans aren’t very good and they don’t always focus on physical exposure that is right for the community and when they do, there are minimal standards.”

To better understand gaps in hazard mitigation plans, Frazier went to Idaho to study communities at risk of various scenarios. He mapped locations of at-risk populations for hazards like landslides, flood, wildfires, earthquakes and pandemic influenza.

“What we’re looking for is residual risk — the risk that remains after mitigation efforts have been implemented,” he said.

Frazier measured residual risks by examining and mapping the physical and social vulnerabilities of populations to natural disasters. He looked at three factors: how weak a community is against a hazard, how sensitive the community is to that hazard and the ability of a community to adapt to it.

“Exposure is something as simple as living in a flood zone,” he said. “Sensitivity is how sensitive are you to that expose, you might live in the flood plane but your house is 20 feet up on stilts, adaptive capacity is talking about what’s your ability to adapt to that problem. Do you have access to resources?”

Frazier explained that while physical vulnerabilities are a product of topography, social vulnerabilities are a product of social stratification and inequality, which can be exacerbated by natural disasters.

“An example is there is a percentage of population that lives within 100 yards of a flood plane,” Frazier said. “And we need to calculate social vulnerability, which is the intensity of population with low socioeconomic status.”

He used an equation of hazard probability and the severity of the consequences of that hazard on the community. According to Frazier, factors like age, income, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status and education influence the severity of the consequences that a hazard inflicts on a community.

By mapping the most vulnerable areas, counties can then calculate the impact on health. Frazier worked with emergency managers, agents of public health and hospital administrators to score and rank the ability of the public health administrators to equip communities with the tools they need to best respond to a hazard and channel resources to places where they are needed the most. This could include providing more hospital beds or providing more ventilators in the event of a pandemic crisis.

“What we try to do is build them a map to target or spend mitigation dollars to overcome some of those gaps in public health and emergency response,” Frazier said.