Luzerne County’s new hazard mitigation plan details lurking potential dangers

Worrywarts may not enjoy a 353-page document up for Luzerne County Council discussion today: the 2020 hazard mitigation plan.

Required every five years, the document describes in great detail possible dangers facing the county and their potential impact on people and structures.

Flooding, winter weather, drought and crop failure, landslides, wildfires, nuclear and hazardous material releases, earthquakes, land subsidence, dam failure and radon are among the possible events carried over from the last 2014 plan, which expired Sept. 20.

Added in the latest plan were cyber terrorism, hailstorms, levee failure and opioid addiction. The “wind event” category also was expanded to two possibilities — tornado/windstorms and hurricanes/tropical storms/Nor’easters.

Council is set to discuss the plan during its work session this evening, which follows a 6 p.m. voting meeting. Directions on attending the virtual session are posted on council’s online meeting link at www.luzernecounty.org, while the proposed plan is attached to the meeting agenda.

Completed by Michael Baker International Inc., the plan identifying natural and man-made vulnerabilities and actions to reduce risk is required by the Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000 to preserve eligibility for pre- and post-disaster mitigation funds.

A plan team ranked hazards after crunching statistics on probability, impact, spatial extent, warning time and duration.

Three made it into the high-risk ranking: the obvious flooding and winter storms and the less expected hazard of drought.

According to the study:

The county is under a drought warning or emergency between 10% and 15% of the time, or every three to five years. The Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency cites uncertainty on the future occurrence of droughts due to the potential impacts of climate change.

“A drought in Luzerne County can have significant detrimental effects on the domestic water supply, especially for well-water, agriculture, and water-dependent recreational activities,” it said.

The economic impact would include crop loss. Prolonged drought would affect 451 farms in the county that sold approximately $17.8 million in agricultural products in 2017.

About 75% of that figure come from crops, while the remaining sales are livestock.

Some county residents also face the possibility of their private wells drying up. There are at least 8,800 domestic wells in the county, with 29 municipalities containing more than 100 domestic wells.

The hazards ranked low are landslides, dam failure, subsidence/sinkholes, tornadoes, hailstorms, cyber-terrorism, hazardous materials release and radon. The rest were placed in the moderate risk category.

A document section on landslides repeats a past “possible worst-case scenario” in which a rock block slides off the Shickshinny Mountain, filling the Susquehanna River with a deposit that acts as a dam.

“It is difficult to estimate the volume of material that would be deposited, but the upstream inundation area could potentially include communities upstream of the slide to the northern limits of Luzerne County, like the City of Wilkes-Barre,” it said.

The material “acting as a dam” eventually would breach, sending a flood wave downstream, it said. A 1989 Geological Society of America report had identified 13 potential “rock block” slides on the Shickshinny Mountain, it said.

“Although the probability of a Shickshinny Mountain rock block slide is low, the impacts would be substantial,” it said.

The likelihood of a large-scale future landslide is low because the county is positioned over a geological formation with low landslide potential, the plan said, cautioning that “mismanaged intense development in steeply sloped areas could increase the frequency of occurrence.”