Collaborative Research: Home Mitigation for Hurricane Induced Multi-Hazards: A Multilevel Interdisciplinary Vulnerability and Resiliency Approach

About This Grant

Recent severe hurricanes have brought attention to the need for home mitigation approaches to reduce loss of life and property. Consideration of the impact on homes from simultaneous wind, wave, and surge hazards during hurricanes is critical for designing appropriate home structural retrofit strategies. This project will support research that looks to advance the understanding of the effectiveness of structural mitigation approaches at reducing damage to coastal households from wind-wave-surge hazards. This project will examine homeowners’ preferences and biases in the selection of retrofit strategies based on their risk perceptions and tolerance, leading to more precise targeting of education and funding aimed at increasing mitigation adoption. This is critically important due to the nation’s aging home infrastructure, increased hurricane intensity and frequency, and widespread hurricane damage in recent years with extensive economic and societal impacts. A user-friendly web application will be developed based on the research findings to allow users to compare retrofit options and make informed decisions. This award contributes to the National Science Foundation (NSF) role in the National Windstorm Impact Reduction Program. Data generated from this project will be archived and made publicly available in the NSF-supported Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) DesignSafe Date Depot (https://www.DesignSafe-ci.org). This project is a collaborative effort involving researchers at the University of Texas at Arlington and Chapman University. It seeks to develop and evaluate a multi-level interdisciplinary mitigation behavior model that will simulate household-level home retrofit decisions in response to hurricane hazard events. The model will be based on an occupant’s hurricane wind-wave-surge exposure and vulnerability indicators and will simulate how household and community-level vulnerability changes over time due to adoption of (or failure to adopt) structural mitigation. The benefit/cost of mitigation options and reductions in building fragility will also be explored. The approach will be applied to the Houston-Galveston and Coastal Bend regions of Texas, which have experienced severe wind and surge damage during recent hurricane events. The web application seeks to allow convenient selection of logical mitigation packages, based on the findings. An extensive dissemination, training, and outreach campaign will be conducted in coastal communities through workshops and the dedicated web site, with the goal of increasing awareness of home mitigation options among hurricane-affected populations. 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.