Comprehensive Assessment for Post-Disaster Recovery Process in a Tourist Town

This paper develops a comprehensive assessment of post-disaster housing and tourism resource recovery. It enables us to address how many natural and man-made features in a tourist town have recovered after a hurricane event. The assessment uses a variety of sources, at different spatial scales and at different points in time. Furthermore, this study develops a measurement scale to quantify damage and recovery appropriate for the available resources. In particular, the study focuses on the development of a methodological approach to tracking housing and tourism resource recovery and helping local communities recover faster the damaged areas after disaster. The effort uses multiple sources of data, including questionnaire data, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) damage data, airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data, and remote sensing satellite images. The data are quantitatively analyzed to fulfill the objectives of assessing housing recovery rate over time and are represented on maps. The maps are used to represent the status of damaged buildings (e.g., no damage, minor or major damage, affected or destroyed). Furthermore, repaired buildings in specified time intervals are represented on the maps. Eventually, this study develops two schematic diagrams illustrating the average damage and the weighed recovery from multiple data sources. The outcomes of this study will help decision makers emphasize on the locations identified as experiencing differential progress in the reconstruction, rebuilding, and repairing of houses or tourism resources.