ResilienceHurricanes: From Resilience to Adaptation

Published 26 May 2020

Natural disasters are getting worse. According to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration the years 2016, 2017 and 2018 have been historic: in each of those years, the average number of disasters costing at least $1 billion was more than double the long-term average. As the number and cost of disasters continue to increase, communities are looking for ways to adapt and become more resilient.

Natural disasters are getting worse. According to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration the years 2016, 2017 and 2018 have been historic: in each of those years, the average number of disasters costing at least $1 billion was more than double the long-term average. As the number and cost of disasters continue to increase, communities are looking for ways to adapt and become more resilient.

A resilient community, as defined by the National Academy of Sciences, should be able to prepare and plan for, recover from, and better adapt to actual or potential disasters. Resilience can be assessed in terms of the robustness of a community’s physical infrastructure, how its social response is organized, casualty rates and the success of its public policies. These systems are connected, with a disturbance in one propagating through many, affecting overall resilience.

Researchers in the field of disaster science study all of these systems—however, it’s a massive field, and specialists are often compartmentalized. University of Michigan Civil and Environmental Engineering researchers, led by Professor Sherif ElTawil, developed the Interdependencies in Community Resilience (ICoR) project to break down the barriers, bring all of this data together, and enable researchers to see the full picture. This is a fundamental step toward building communities that are resilient to disasters.

El-Tawil explained, “Consider a hurricane. The various aspects of a hurricane disaster can be represented by specific models, for example, the wind pressure, building response, people’s behavior, etc. All of these models can be made to work in concert with one another to represent the overall disaster scenario. That is what is so unique about this project: it allows for the highest level of integrative research to be done.”

Michigan says that to address the complex nature of the problem being addressed, the ICoR project team includes experts in a variety of areas. CEE Professor Vineet R. Kamat and Associate Professor Jason McCormick serve as Deputy Directors, and CEE Associate Professor Carol Menassa and Assistant Professor Seymour Spence serve as Co-Principal Investigators. The focus of this project is developing a computational platform that researchers from different disciplines can use to plug in their models and work together on a disaster scenario. This project’s integrative platform will serve as the link between the research models from diverse fields.