FEMA Awards U. of Louisville Approximately $95,000 to Become Resistant to Disasters

The University of Louisville has received a $94,958 grant to implement a sustained pre-disaster natural hazard mitigation program.

This grant will reportedly enhance existing efforts to make the University more disaster resistant and provide further protection to its significant resources from research, its facilities, and facility, staff and students to reduce overall risk to students, faculty, facilities and research assets.

The grant is part of $3.2 million being awarded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Emergency Preparedness & Response Directorate (EP&R)/Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), under FEMA’s Disaster Resistant University (DRU) program.

“The University of Louisville should be proud of their selection as a participant in FEMA’s Disaster Resistant University program,” said Mary Lynne Miller, FEMA RIV’s acting regional director. “To be selected as a recipient of a grant in such a competitive arena is truly noteworthy.”

In the past decade, disasters have reportedly affected university and college campuses with increasing frequency, bringing with them injuries and in some instances deaths. Nearly all instances have brought monetary losses and disruptions of the institution’s teaching, research and public service functions.

Damage and interruption to the institutional mission can result in significant losses that can be measured by faculty and student departures, loss of irreplaceable research assets, decreases in research funding and increases in insurance premiums. The DRU program is designed to lessen or eliminate such losses.

In fiscal year 2004, the DRU funds were competitively awarded with a national priority of ensuring that program funds benefit a representative range of universities, based on hazard type as well as size, location and academic community served, which included consideration of historically black colleges and universities and tribal colleges and universities.