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Award ID contains: 1847373

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  1. Abstract Rapid restoration of access to essential goods and services has long been regarded as paramount for community recovery. Yet, there remains ambiguity in how access should be defined, measured, or operationalized. Defining accessibility as the ability to use available goods and services with a reasonable level of effort and cost requires evaluating it across six dimensions (proximity,availability,adequacy,acceptability,affordability, andawareness) while considering the perspective of both users and providers in the evaluation. But common distance-based metrics that focus solely on physical access and travel time often fall short of fully capturing these requirements, overlooking the user's perception. This paper introduces a new spatio-temporal accessibility metric that combines four out of these six dimensions, including proximity, acceptability, adequacy, and availability. The metric considers uncertainty in measuring each dimension and addresses both user and provider perspectives in measuring the acceptability and adequacy dimensions. The variation in the metric across the disaster timeline serves as a proxy for community recovery. The metric aligns with common engineering-oriented functionality-based resilience frameworks as the functionality level of the providers has been incorporated in its development. Operating at the household level, the metric determines the ratio of post-disruption access time to the intended good or service against its pre-disruption access time and yields a unitless ratio between zero and one, with zero expressing a total loss in accessibility and one signifying the same level of accessibility as pre-disruption. The proposed metric, while being scientifically principled, is a practical tool whose output is easily understood even by non-expert individuals. The metric is illustrated for schools and pharmacies using the Lumberton Testbed and data collected following the 2016 flood in Lumberton, North Carolina after Hurricane Matthew. Findings provide new insight into recovery plan prioritization and can be used to trigger protective actions. The paper concludes by discussing issues and barriers related to developing and validating accessibility metrics while highlighting areas for future research. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available December 1, 2025
  2. Free, publicly-accessible full text available November 1, 2025
  3. 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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