Assessment of long term housing recovery after Hurricane Sandy
Date
2015
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Disaster recovery, involving people and their properties, is considered to be a continuous process that spans from a very short time to years after the initial event depending on the severity of the damage. Recovery has many dimensions that include repairing, restoring, rebuilding, and reshaping the physical, built, social, economic, and natural environment through pre-event planning and post-event actions as mentioned by Smith & Wenger, 2007. Among all the fundamental issues, according to Peacock et al., 2007, reestablishing permanent housing is the most important one because it accelerates recovery process by helping households return in their normal regular activities. Hence the purpose of this thesis is to explore the progress rate in reconstruction/repair/reshaping of damaged buildings as an indicator of housing recovery in one of the Hurricane Sandy affected areas, Sea Bright, New Jersey, which is still experiencing recovery after two and half years. The study focuses on the development of a methodological approach to (a) track housing recovery and (b) help in approaching quick recovery of the damaged area based on the condition of permanent houses. The effort uses several sources of data including questionnaire data from an ongoing project, FEMA damage data, airborne Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data and remote sensing images. The data are analyzed quantitatively to fulfill the objective of assessing housing recovery rate over time. Geographic Information System (GIS) based image processing are done to delineate locations that have recovered, unrecovered or less recovered or continuing recovery. Maps compare the status of damaged buildings (no damage, minor damage, major damage, affected, or destroyed) in disaster and repaired buildings in specified time intervals based on available data. Thus the study findings will help the policy makers, emergency management personnel, coastal managers, decision makers and relevant professionals to focus more on the identified location experiencing differential progress in reconstruction, rebuilding, and repairing of houses and take necessary actions to help those localities in accelerating their recovery process.