Quantifying the influence of coastal flood hazards on building habitability following Hurricane Irma

Appropriate management of coastal flood risk is critical for creating resilient communities. An important part of this is estimating what buildings will become uninhabitable due to a flood event such as a tropical cyclone. To increase the accuracy of these estimations, habitability functions are developed to quantify the relationship between hydrodynamic hazards and the probability of a building becoming uninhabitable following Hurricane Irma. Hazards like maximum flood depths are determined by modeling Hurricane Irma flooding in Delft3D-FM coupled with the wave model SWAN. These modeled hazard levels are then extracted at building locations where Location Based Services (LBS) data provide information on buildings that were uninhabitable following Hurricane Irma. The developed habitability functions provide valuable insights into how different hydrodynamic parameters and regression models perform for estimating building habitability, where maximum unit discharge is generally the best predictor of habitability. Furthermore, we find that while wooden structure habitability is significantly influenced by hazard level, concrete structure habitability is not. These findings provide novel methods for estimating coastal flooding induced building uninhabitability, enhancing how planners can prepare for floods.