Robert Witkop

Emergency managers face challenges in understanding and communicating potential hurricane hazards. Preparedness typically emphasizes the last event encountered, the potential implications of future hazards may thus be underestimated. Risk assessment models (e.g., basic HAZUS) that emphasize accumulated damages in economic terms do not provide actionable data regarding specific local concerns, such as access by emergency vehicles and potential communications disruptions. Qualitative methods conventionally used to identify these concerns, however, lack the specificity necessary to incorporate the managers’ knowledge into hazard models (e.g., highly exact geographic location of the vulnerability or cascading consequences). This research develops a method to collect rich, actionable, qualitative data from critical facility managers that can be utilized in combination with hydrodynamic, wind, and precipitation models to assess potential hazard consequences. A pilot study was conducted with critical facility managers in Westerly, RI, United States, using semi-structured interviews and participatory mapping. Interview methods were based on existing practices for vulnerability assessments, and further augmented to obtain data based on hurricane modeling requirements. This research identifies challenges and recommendations when collecting critical facility manager’s knowledge for incorporation into storm simulations. The method described enables local experts to contribute actionable knowledge to natural hazard models and augment more traditional engineering-based approaches to risk assessment.

The potential of using ADvanced CIRCulation model (ADCIRC) to assess the time incremented progression of hazard impacts on individual critical facilities has long been recognized but is not well described. As ADCIRC is applied to create granular impact models, the lack of transparency in the methods is problematic. It becomes difficult to evaluate the entire system in situations where modeling integrates different types of data (e.g., hydrodynamic and existing geospatial point data) and involves multiple disciplines and stakeholders. When considering increased interest in combining hydrodynamic models, existing geospatial information, and advanced visualizations it is necessary to increase transparency and identify the pitfalls that arise out of this integration (e.g., the inadequacy of data to support the resolution of proposed outputs). This paper thus describes an all numerical method to accomplish this integration. It provides an overview of the generation of the hydrodynamic model, describes the all numerical method utilized to model hazard impacts, identifies pitfalls that arise from the integration of existing geospatial data with the hydrodynamic model, and describes an approach to developing a credible basis for determining impacts at a granular scale. The paper concludes by reflecting on the implementation of these methods as part of a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Integrated Emergency Management Training Course (IEMC) and identifies the need to further study the effects of integrated models and visualizations on risk perception.