Process of Development of a County-wide Crisis Care Plan – Riverside County, California, 2016-7

This article describes the process taken by the County of Riverside, California to construct its own crisis care plan, presently the 10th largest county in the United States by population, and to document the manner, methods, successes and challenges encountered during its design and systemization. Background Riverside County, California, with its county seat of Riverside approximately 60 miles east of Los Angeles, was established in 1893 as one of the state’s 58 counties. It is presided over by a five-member Board of Supervisors and serviced by an almost 25,000-employee municipal workforce. With a population of over 2.3 million4 it extends east from San Diego and Orange counties all the way to the Colorado River and the Arizona state line for 7,208 land square miles. Its large rural areas, 17 general acute-care hospitals, 52 skilled nursing homes and significant numbers of residents below the federal poverty level present unique challenges to local readiness efforts. Existing hazard analyses of the County show that the vast majority of presidential disaster declarations have come from flooding, almost three times as many as from wildfires.5 Wildfires remain a chronic threat due to the arid climate of Southern California, however, as well as earthquakes due to the presence of the infamous San Andreas Fault and numerous smaller seismic faults throughout. The county’s large population size and proximity to Los Angeles also put it at risk of pandemics and bioterrorism, ei...
Source: PLOS Currents Disasters - Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Source Type: research