The Wasatch Front Regional Council Pushes its "Natural Disasters Mitigation Plan"

Something additional for WFRC planners to consider, perhaps?

This morning's Standard-Examiner reports that the Wasatch Front Regional Council is pushing full steam ahead to push cities, counties and the state to adopt a disaster mitigation plan for the Wasatch Front region. Mitch Shawn's opening paragraphs provide the gist:

LAYTON — If the Top of Utah ever has a major disaster, it will likely be measured by Richter scale.
The Wasatch Front Regional Council has released the final draft of the 2008 Natural Hazards and Pre-Disaster Mitigation Plan and will be looking for cities, counties and the state to adopt it in the next few months.
The plan identifies possible hazards in Davis, Morgan, Salt Lake, Tooele and Weber counties and includes strategies to eliminate or minimize the effects of wildfires, floods, severe weather, earthquakes or any other major disaster.
“Our Katrina will be a major earthquake,” said DeeEll Fifield, WFRC pre-disaster mitigation planner. “This region’s No. 1 identified risk is an earthquake.”

More from this morning's Std-Ex story:

According to the plan, which is available for review at wfrc.org, the Top of Utah’s Wasatch Fault Zone is an active fault zone that can produce a large 7.3 to 7.5 Richter magnitude earthquake on average every 300 to 400 years.
Davis County contains the highest density of faults in the entire state of Utah. Weber County has had two earthquakes with a Richter magnitude between 5.0 and 5.5 since 1894. Weber County has also felt earthquakes that did not have their epicenters within the county.

While the WCRC is working on this, we're hoping these government bureaucrats haven't completely overlooked another potential local natural disaster just waiting to happen, one which would make a 7.5 Richter scale earthquake seem like a pleasant stroll on the beach:

• The Yellowstone Supervolcano

In this latter connection, (and in a truly serendipitous coincidence of timing,) here's something interesting that popped up just this morning on the TYWKIWDBI Blog:

• Is the Yellowstone caldera becoming more active?

From the above-linked blog 12/28/08 article:

There was a swarm of sixteen earthquakes in 24 hours this weekend (map above, updates at this link). It probably is not significant, but it is worth remembering that the Yellowstone caldera is a hotspot above a supervolcano, the eruption of which would mean theendoflifeasweknowit, at least for the United States. The Yellowstone one has erupted approximately every 600,000 years, and the last eruption was... lets see... 600,000 years ago.

Something additional for WFRC planners to consider, perhaps?