Modeling Building Downtime Due to Hurricane Impacts

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This project aims to develop a procedure for estimating building downtime as a function of hurricane intensity, structural response, building content damage/loss, and failure of infrastructure networked systems. Extensive losses due to property damage, business interruption, and infrastructure failure in recent natural disasters - 500,000 houses damaged/destroyed, 18,000 businesses closed, and 1.75 million people were displaced in Hurricane Katrina - have magnified the need to accurately predict these losses in future events. Given the impact of past hurricanes on losses due to business interruption and population displacement, it is imperative to provide a methodology for more accurate estimation of building downtime for use in performance-based wind engineering. Performance-based engineering (PBE) is a methodology that incorporates desired performance levels, relevant to various types of stakeholders, into the design process. This effort will be combined with an ongoing hurricane insured loss estimation study of Florida in order to perform a hurricane vulnerability assessment of a case study region. This work will build on previous work by the applicants to develop damage and failure models (accounting for network interconnection) for the following lifelines: electricity, water distribution, and telecommunication. The results from these models will be used to estimate the secondary effects that utility network disruptions have on the recovery of buildings. The downtime model developed in this study will be used to calculate downtime-related losses and population displacement for typical single family homes in a Florida coastal study area. These results will be compared to historical data to validate the model.The downtime model developed in this project will serve as a vehicle to bring together cutting edge research from various disciplines that addresses a glaring need for downtime modeling of buildings exposed to hurricane force winds. The incorporation of the downtime model developed in this project into MAEviz, an open-source loss assessment visualization tool ensures transparency in the methodology as well as broad and easy dissemination of the work to other researchers. Additionally, the results of this project will not only provide a critical new tool (downtime modeling) to a new paradigm of design (performance-based wind engineering), but it will also educate a future generation of professionals in multidisciplinary thinking. The results of this project will be directly integrated into courses taught by the PIs, covering performance-based engineering, HMAC, risk analysis, and policy analysis.