Christopher G. Burton

A Validation of Metrics for Community Resilience to Natural Hazards and Disasters Using the Recovery from Hurricane Katrina as a Case Study

How communities respond to and recover from damaging hazard events could be contextualized in terms of their disaster resilience. Although numerous efforts have sought to explain the determinants of disaster resilience, the ability to measure the concept is increasingly being seen as a key step toward disaster risk reduction. The development of standards that are meaningful for measuring resilience remains a challenge, however. This is partially because there are few explicit sets of procedures within the literature that outline how to measure and compare communities in terms of their resilience. The primary purpose of this article is to advance the understanding of the multidimensional nature of disaster resilience and to provide an externally validated set of metrics for measuring resilience at subcounty levels of geography. A set of metrics covering social, economic, institutional, infrastructural, community-based, and environmental dimensions of resilience was identified, and the validity of the metrics is addressed via real-world application using Hurricane Katrina and the recovery of the Mississippi Gulf Coast in the United States as a case study.

Integrated Hazards Mapping Tool

The Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000 formally establishes a national program for pre-disaster mitigation. As part of the mitigation planning effort, state and local governments are required to perform assessments of hazards vulnerability, including the development of multi-hazard maps. However, the number of communities possessing the technology, expertise, and time to create multi-hazard vulnerability maps is limited due to technical and resource constraints. The use of Internet mapping technology has the potential to overcome these hurdles because it does not require users to possess a high level of GIS expertise or costly software, and it standardizes the vulnerability mapping approach. This article describes the Integrated Hazards Assessment Tool, a web-based multi-hazard vulnerability mapping application for local and state hazard mitigation practitioners in the state of South Carolina. The initial findings suggest the application holds strong potential as a viable decision support tool for hazard mitigation planning.

Assessing Integrated Earthquake Risk in OpenQuake with an Application to Mainland Portugal

At the forefront of the risk assessment sciences is the development of standards, data, and tools for the assessment of earthquake risk. Countries such as Portugal have been targets of extensive earthquake risk assessments to communicate damage potential and to improve methodologies. Few studies, however, have gone beyond the estimation of direct physical impacts by integrating estimates of physical risk (i.e., human or economic losses) with quantified metrics of socioeconomic characteristics of populations. The purpose of this paper is to describe an end-to-end assessment of earthquake risk for mainland Portugal that accounts for physical and social attributes using the Global Earthquake Models (GEM) suite of risk assessment tools. The results indicate that the potential adverse effects from earthquakes in Portugal are related to interacting conditions, some conditional on geography, some due to the characteristics of the building stock, and some having to do with the social characteristics of populations.

Using Resilience Indicators in the Prediction of Earthquake Recovery

This paper presents a probabilistic methodology for the prediction of post-earthquake community recovery over time, based on a set of socioeconomic resilience parameters and a post-earthquake damage indicator. Pre-existing socioeconomic conditions are widely associated with the ability of a community to recover following an earthquake and, therefore, should be considered in a recovery prediction model. The city of Napa, California and the monitored recovery from the 2014 South Napa earthquake were used as a case study for the development and validation of the proposed methodology. The documentation of the recovery, which is herein associated with the recovery of the building stock, was accomplished via field surveys over a period of 18 months following the event. In addition to community-level recovery predictions in different areas over time, the methodology allows for the identification of the pre-existing socioeconomic parameters that most significantly affect the recovery trajectory. Thus, emergency managers can identify critical areas that take longer to recover, as well as identify strengths and weaknesses of their communities and respectively promote or address issues that facilitate recovery.