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Abstract The eastern North Carolina Coastal Area Management Act region is one of the most hurricane-prone areas of the United States. Hurricanes incur substantial damage and economic losses because structures located near the coast tend to be high value as well as particularly exposed. To bolster disaster mitigation and community resilience, it is crucial to understand how hurricane hazards drive social and economic impacts. We integrate detailed hazard simulations, property data, and labor compensation estimates to comprehensively analyze hurricanes’ economic impacts. This study investigates the spatial distribution of probabilistic hurricane hazards, and concomitant property losses and labor impacts, pinpointing particularly hard hit areas. Relationships between capital and labor losses, social vulnerability, and asset values reveal the latter as the primary determinant of overall economic consequences.
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A novel framework to study community-level social and physical impacts of hurricane-induced winds through synthetic scenario analysis
Strong hurricane winds often cause severe infrastructure damage and pose social and economic consequences in coastal communities. In the context of community resilience planning, estimating such impacts can facilitate developing more risk-informed mitigation plans in the community of interest. This study presents a new framework for synthetically simulating scenario-hurricane winds using a parametric wind field model for predicting community-level building damage, direct economic loss, and social consequences. The proposed synthetic scenario approach uses historical hurricane data and adjusts its original trajectory to create synthetic change scenarios and estimates peak gust wind speed at the location of each building. In this research, a stochastic damage simulation algorithm is applied to assess the buildings’ physical damage. The algorithm assigns a damage level to each building using the corresponding damage-based fragility functions, predicted maximum gust speed at the building’s location, and a randomly generated number. The monetary loss to the building inventory due to its physical damage is determined using FEMA’s direct loss ratios and buildings’ replacement costs considering uncertainty. To assess the social impacts of the physical damage exposure, three likely post-disaster social disruptions are measured, including household dislocation, employment disruption, and school closures. The framework is demonstrated by its application to the hurricane-prone community of Onslow County, North Carolina. The novel contribution of the developed framework, aside from the introduced approach for spatial predicting hurricane-induced wind hazards, is its ability to illuminate some aspects of the social consequences of substantial physical damages to the building inventory in a coastal community due to the hurricane-induced winds. These advancements enable community planners and decision-makers to make more risk-informed decisions for improving coastal community resilience.
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- PAR ID:
- 10483642
- Publisher / Repository:
- Frontiers of the Built Environment, Wind Engineering and Science
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Frontiers in Built Environment
- Volume:
- 9
- ISSN:
- 2297-3362
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3389/fbuil.2023.1005264
