M5 - Damage Assessment

This module involved a holistic look at 2012's Hurricane Sandy, from path to shore, and a damage assessment of some of the aftermath. It starts with translating an excel file containing latitude/longitude, strength, wind speed, and time data for the hurricane across its week-long existence. With the course translated from data points to a point feature class, then converted the points to a line. The culmination of that transformation of data is below. 

After the track was established, we switched our focus to the actual damage itself. For this assessment we use a before and after image for the appropriate study area. With the study area identified I digitized points for each of the structures and built out an attribute table combined with predefined information domains. 

Above is a look at the study area in the post-hurricane scene. While it's not a full map with labeling, the Red and Black triangles indicate total destruction, red highlights major damage, orange, minor structural damage, and yellow represents affected structure. Nearly everything here is affected in some way, but several structures appear intact from this view, those are the green circles.   

From there, part of the analysis turned to looking at damage rates in 100-meter zones. This allows us to extrapolate damage predictions for other areas. Now there are several variabilities, and any given adjacent area may have more or less destruction for a multitude of factors. 

In the above, the line in the center of the buffer is the baseline. Its adjacent to the study area, and shows a visual depiction of 100m bands the study area houses fall in. 

One of the other aspects of the module was to explore external GIS tools, like survey123.arcgis.com which allows for custom survey creation that responders or local citizens can use to submit information. UWF Members can view an example here: https://arcg.is/1CeafO

This comprehensive analysis was definitely time consuming. But it is amazing to see all of the data come together in this way. Thank you.

v/r

Brandon