Assessing post-hazard damage costs to a community’s residential buildings exposed to tropical cyclones

Abstract

Assessment of the potential for damage to community’s residential buildings exposed to extreme natural hazards is essential for measuring and optimising resilience enhancement strategies for communities. This paper develops a probability-based method to estimate the potential for damage and losses to a community’s residential building portfolio due to tropical cyclones (TC) by aggregating the performance of individual buildings quantitatively. The proposed approach reflects the fact that the total building damage of a community depends on the specific TC scenario and the correlation in performance of different individual buildings due to correlations in intensity in the wind field and common construction practices. The estimated damage potential, conditioned on the maximum TC wind speed, is determined from the TC fragilities. The mean value and variance of the cyclone-induced damage losses are estimated using an approximate closed-form approach. The applicability of the proposed method is demonstrated for a small coastal community in North Australia and the sensitivity of the estimated TC damage losses to the key characteristics of the TC wind field and building portfolio is investigated. It is found that correlations in building performance due to common TC demand and construction practices have a significant impact on losses to the community.

Keywords:

• Building performance
• community resilience
• risk-informed decision
• tropical cyclones
• uncertainties
• wood frame residential buildings

Acknowledgements

The sources of support are gratefully acknowledged. The first author would like to thank the staff at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, CO, for the insights gained during his study leave taken there in April, 2018.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research has been jointly supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2016YFC0701404) and the Faculty of Engineering and IT PhD Research Scholarship (SC1911) from the University of Sydney. Partial support was also provided by the Center for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning, a Center of Excellence funded through a cooperative agreement between the U.S. National Institute of Science and Technology and Colorado State University, under NIST Financial Assistance Award Number 70NANB15H044.