Brief
Estimates of annual losses from hurricane damage may understate the real total by more than 80%, thus undervaluing hurricane-resistant construction, according to MIT researchers. The error is traced to the failure to take into account the density of a neighborhood and how buildings are configured in regard to a particular building, the research concludes.
Insight
In Florida, June typically marks the beginning of hurricane season. Preparation for a storm may appear as otherworldly as it is routine: businesses and homes board up windows and doors, bottled water is quick to sell out, and public buildings cease operations to serve as emergency shelters.
What happens next may be unpredictable. If things take a turn for the worse, myriad homes may be leveled. A 2019 Congressional Budget Office report estimated that hurricane-related wind damage causes $14 billion in losses to the residential sector annually.
However, new research led by Ipek Bensu Manav, an MIT graduate student in civil and environmental engineering and research assistant at MIT’s Concrete Sustainability Hub, suggests that the value of mitigating this wind damage through stronger construction methods may be significantly underestimated.
In fact, the failure of wind loss models to account for neighborhood texture — the density and configuration of surrounding buildings with respect to a building of interest — may result in an over 80 percent undervaluation of these methods in Florida.
Methodology
Hazus, a loss estimation tool developed and currently used by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), estimates physical and economic damage to buildings due to wind and windborne debris. However, the tool assumes that all buildings in a neighborhood experience the same wind loading.
Manav notes that this assumption disregards the complexity of neighborhood texture. Buildings of different shapes and sizes can be arranged in innumerable ways. This arrangement can amplify or reduce the wind load on buildings within the neighborhood.
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