Amidst wildfires raging on the west coast and hurricanes threatening the east coast, Army officials released a new directive to installations for resilience measures against rising extreme weather conditions.
“This practice will enhance installation readiness and safety because it informs the installation master planning process and facility design requirements,” Alex A. Beehler, assistant secretary of the Army for ASA (IE&E), said in the release as reported by Military.com.
“In the event of a climate-related event, our Army installations will be better prepared to provide the critical capabilities essential to the Army’s ability to deploy, fight and win our nation’s wars,” he said.
The new Army directive instructs installation commanders to develop emergency plans for extreme weather events. Furthermore it instructs added climate change projection analysis tool results to infrastructure plans, policies and procedures.
“Installations need to start engineering for the future,” said Stephen Dornbos, science and technology policy fellow in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Installations, Energy and Environment, or ASA (IE&E).
“Designing based on historical conditions is insufficient to engineer buildings that will be serving the Army in 20 or 30 years, when we will have increasingly damaging weather events, so I think the timing of this is right.”
AP PHOTO/DAVID GOLDMAN
