Natural hazard mitigation in Southern California

cooperative and some simply refused to provide the plan. In other cases, it was impossible to
see the plans because they ‘were being updated’, ‘were unavailable’ or because the city
claimed not to have one. It is hard to tell whether these statements are true, or that the local
governments are simply afraid of their plans being judged and maybe found inadequate.
Therefore, the selection of the 8 cities in the case study was mainly based on their willingness
to provide the general plan. It is important to keep in mind that it is possible that through this
selection only the cities that have quite adequate plans were selected. Another point of
attention is the possibility that some cities might have more elaborate hazard mitigation plans.
Therefore all cities were asked whether they had more specific hazard mitigation plans or not.
They did either not respond to this question or explained they did not have one. Therefore, the
starting point of this study is that the information gathered is complete.

4.2 County characteristics

4.2.1 Orange County

Orange County takes up 785 square miles, of which
about 25% consists of unincorporated areas. The cities
that were selected in Orange County are Anaheim, Costa
Mesa, Dana Point, Fullerton, Irvine, Orange, San
Clemente and San Juan Capistrano (see figure 4.1). These
cities form a good profile of Orange County: they vary in
population and in per capita income, so that not only
small or only large cities were selected, and not only poor
or only rich cities (see table 4.1).

Figure 4.1 Cities used in Orange County

Table 4.1 Census data Orange County (US Census 2000)

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