Tumwater adopts county’s updated hazard mitigation plan

Tumwater City Council adopted the fourth edition of the county’s hazard mitigation plan on Tuesday, March 5.

The council adopted the current edition of the regional mitigation plan in 2017. City planner Erika Smith-Erickson told the council that the document needs to be updated every five years as required by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) so that the city remains eligible for federal mitigation grants.

The plan includes an annex for Tumwater, which contains several initiatives to address hazards specific to the city.

The initiative with the highest priority is to update the city’s building code to conform with the state’s Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) Code, which establishes minimum building requirements for designated areas to limit the spread of wildfire.

This initiative is related to developing a vegetation management plan to establish a list of drought-tolerant trees and plants to reduce the severity of fire incidents. The plan will also set minimum setback requirements for the listed trees.

Another high-priority initiative new to the Tumwater annex is to update the city’s street tree, tree preservation, and landscape codes, which the city has been working on since 2021. The changes to these codes seek to increase the city’s tree cover and reduce the impact of rising surface temperature.

Other initiatives new to the document include:

• Updating the city map to reflect the wildland-urban interface and intermix zones as established by the WUI code,
• Updating the city’s critical area and development code as part of its ongoing comprehensive plan update,
• Routinely inspecting fire hydrants,
• Installing backup power to the city’s main well and water supply utilities and
• Installing auxiliary power and battery storage in the city hall and the Tumwater Timberland Library.

The initiatives were selected by a mitigation planning team using criteria that evaluated how large a risk the initiative addresses, the cost to implement, the social benefit, the impact on the city’s development code, and several other factors.