Assessing Urban Post-Earthquake Community Recovery to Inform Pre-Disaster Planning

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Significant effort has been devoted to predicting physical damage to the built environment from disasters, but much less is understood about simulating disaster recovery, and how mitigation actions influence recovery. Further, it is well understood that there are existing socioeconomic inequalities in disaster risk and resilience. This Disaster Resilience Research Grants (DRRG) project aims to develop models to simulate housing and business operations recovery after a disaster. New insights will be gained into how a community's physical/demographic/economic characteristics interact in the recovery process. The models will be used to quantify a region's current ability to recover from disaster and evaluate the efficacy of actions that could be taken before disasters occur. Given the enormous costs of post-disaster disruption, and the significant resources committed for mitigation, insights on improving recovery will significantly benefit society, by improving disaster resilience and efficiently allocating limited societal resources to promote equity. Programs to involve underrepresented researchers, engage with city planners, and publicly release the modeling software will also contribute to the broader impacts of this work.This project will develop a new generation of high-resolution computational simulation tools for disaster recovery simulation, to support enhanced and more equitable housing recovery. High-resolution simulations of the built, natural, and human environment (including household and company behavior) will be combined with mechanisms to quantify the benefits of resilience-enhancing policies. The housing recovery will be jointly simulated with the recovery of infrastructure and businesses, constrained by the availability of resources and affected by socioeconomic factors. The recovery process of individual households will be simulated, providing great flexibility in examining results and assessing the benefits for different groups of resilience-enhancing policies. This work will enable a holistic understanding of the community recovery process after earthquakes. The research will advance our capabilities to assess, before a disaster, the extent to which disaster preparedness interventions can reduce initial disaster consequences, speed recovery, and ensure that all groups participate in the benefits. This project's deliverables will be a modeling framework for assessing post-earthquake recovery and case-study analysis of recovery in San Francisco.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.