Arleen Hill

Quantitative assessment of post‐disaster housing recovery: a case study of Punta Gorda, Florida, after Hurricane Charley

Quantitative assessment of post-disaster housing recovery is critical to enhancing understanding of the process and improving the decisions that shape it. Nevertheless, few comprehensive empirical evaluations of post-disaster housing recovery have been conducted, and no standard measurement methods exist. This paper presents a quantitative assessment of housing recovery in Punta Gorda, Florida, United States, following Hurricane Charley of August 2004, including an overview of the phases of housing recovery, progression of recovery over time, alternative trajectories of recovery, differential recovery, incorporation of mitigation, and effect on property sales. The assessment is grounded in a conceptual framework that considers the recovery of both people and place, and that emphasises recovery as a process, not as an endpoint. Several data sources are integrated into the assessment--including building permits, remotely sensed imagery, and property appraiser data--and their strengths and limitations are discussed with a view to developing a standardised method for measuring and monitoring housing recovery.

Measuring, Monitoring, and Evaluating Post-Disaster Recovery: A Key Element in Understanding Community Resilience

The process of community recovery in the aftermath of a disaster is complex, long lasting, resource intensive, and poorly understood. Insights described here result from an ongoing project that aims to monitor, quantify, and evaluate the process of post-disaster recovery for two events, Hurricane Charley (2004, Charlotte County and Punta Gorda, Florida) and Hurricane Katrina (2005, Harrison County and Biloxi, Mississippi). A mixed-methods approach using statistical data, interviews, and remote sensing-derived data is applied in an effort to understand as well as monitor, measure and evaluate the recovery process and its outcomes. Observations associated with the post-disaster course of moving residents from temporary to transitional, and ultimately permanent housing serves as the focus for this paper. This work represents a discrete portion of a multi-sector project where Economic, Environmental, Housing/Infrastructure, and Social elements of community recovery are explored. Understanding community recovery can inform community resilience-building strategies.

A Revised Paleo‐Earthquake Chronology on the Southeast Reelfoot Rift Margin near Memphis, Tennessee

A trench was excavated across the southeastern Reelfoot rift margin for paleoseismic research purposes and for the 2011 Seismological Society of America national meeting field trip. The trench was parallel to and 6 m southwest of the Oldham trench described in 2006. In this 2011 trench, faulted alluvial fan stratigraphy and liquefaction deposits less than 4000 yr old were exposed. The trench revealed three tectonic deformation events. The first event (graben formation) and the second event (sand blow, minor faulting, and injection of sand dikes) both post-date a paleosol circa 4000 yr B.P. and pre-date a surficial colluvial soil deposit circa 2000 yr B.P. The third event (minor shallow liquefaction and surface deformation) post-dates a 2000-year-old surface colluvial soil. These age constraints allow this third event to be attributed to the 1811-1812 New Madrid earthquakes or a remotely triggered earthquake related to the 1811-1812 earthquake sequence. Although we cannot rule out that the deformation revealed in this trench was caused by earthquakes on other faults in the New Madrid seismic zone, our favored interpretation is that the deformation was caused by rupture on an underlying fault at the base of the Mississippi River bluff that was previously imaged in a shallow reflection profile near this site.

Community-Scale Damage, Disruption, and Early Recovery in the 2010 Haiti Earthquake

This study seeks to assess the levels of community-scale building damage and socioeconomic disruption following the January 2010 Haiti earthquake. Damage and disruption were analyzed for pre-event, post-event, and early recovery time periods in seven Haitian communities—three inside and four outside Port-au-Prince. Damage datasets from the Global Earth Observation-Catastrophe Assessment Network (GEO-CAN) postdisaster assessment were combined with analyses of fine-resolution satellite and aerial imagery to quantify building damage and recovery status, and were verified with field data. Disruption was assessed using community-level data obtained from interviews conducted in May 2010 with community leaders, NGOs, and government utility providers. The data pertain to 11 sectors, including shelter, livelihoods, and social networks. The findings document severe disruption and uneven restoration four months after the earthquake. Disruption showed little correlation with physical damage. Observations suggest that the impacts of the earthquake must be understood in the context of chronic disruption, and many consequences of the earthquake are merely deferred during recovery.