In the coming months, the Blair County Hazardous Mitigation Committee will be surveying county residents in hopes of identifying problems that ought to be solved to make the community safer.

The survey is part of an update of the county’s hazard mitigation plan, required every five years, committee Chairman and Blair Planning Director Dave McFarland said at a committee meeting Monday.

Five years ago, the committee’s pre-update survey identified two problems that have received significant attention since then: inadequacies in broadband availability in many rural areas and the questionable long-term sustainability of first-responder services in municipalities where population and tax revenues are shrinking, McFarland said.

More work needs to be done on both issues, and both are likely to be cited by residents again, McFarland predicted.

During the past few years, broadband has been the focus of national, statewide, regional and local attention. During local meetings in December in Altoona, Tyrone, Williamsburg and East Freedom, residents pointed out gaps in internet service so that Blair Planning and Alleghenies Broadband Inc. can target broadband funding to eliminate those gaps with money provided by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

Police, fire and ambulance services in the region are potentially threatened in communities where there are fewer people, less tax money and fewer volunteers — trends that have led to talks about restructuring and consolidating some services, McFarland said.

The committee will not mass-mail the survey, but will soon announce that it will be available in places that will include the committee’s segment of the Blair County website, McFarland said. The committee will make paper surveys available, he said.

At Monday’s meeting, representatives examined maps to identify features that were absent, but which might be important to locate during emergencies.

Those included group homes for elderly people, for people with mental health issues and for people with developmental disabilities, all of whom might need help evacuating during floods, for example, McFarland said.

Those features also include streets that if not included might be overlooked during evacuations, small bridges over streams and culverts under streams that can be problematic during high water, rail crossings, hazardous materials locations, bottlenecks in watercourses, urbanized areas susceptible to flooding and “critical infrastructure.”

Altoona Fire Chief Adam Free promised McFarland to send the committee the addresses of city group homes by email.

Mirror Staff Writer William Kibler is at 814-949-7038.