The purpose of this initiative is to produce an assessment of multiple geologic and hydrologic hazards and potential losses in a five county area in the Puget Sound basin. Project scientists will work with federal, state, and local authorities and the private sector to develop information relevant to disaster mitigation, planning, and response decisions. Scientific investigations conducted during this 5-year initiative will provide a geotechnical basis for the Federal Emergency Management Agency's "Project Impact" which will focus on building disaster resistant communities. The City of Seattle and King and Pierce counties have been selected by FEMA as one of the disaster resistant communities and the United States Geological Survey has signed on as a partner on this project. It is expected that the methods and conclusions developed for the Puget Sound area can be applied to other urban areas.

As a contributor in this effort, the National Mapping Division (NMD) is providing data and analysis in a number of areas:

• Elevation data is being enhanced to improve horizontal accuracy and vertical integrity.
• NMD is evaluating new technologies to produce terrain representation accurate to within several centimeters.
• NMD is supporting and developing new web-presentation resources to provide USGS and the public with access to project-related data and reports via the internet.
• NMD is conducting temporal urban mapping and urban growth modeling in the Seattle and Tacoma metropolitan areas to help define where urban growth has occured in the past and where it may occur in the future. This information will be analyzed with hazards data to determine whether past and future growth is tending to occur in areas with high risk for natural hazards.

Please visit the official USGS Seattle Area Natural Hazards web site:
http://seattlehazards.usgs.gov/