GIS4048 - Module 5 - Damage Assessment

For this module, we were tasked with assessing structural damage caused by 2012 Hurricane Sandy along the New Jersey coastline using aerial imagery provided to us. The goal was to simulate a FEMA style damage assessment by manually digitizing structures and determining damage severity, and even creating a practice survey.

The pre-storm and post-storm imagery was relied on heavily to inspect structures in a defined study area within Ocean County, NJ. A Structure Damage feature class was and was used to digitize each structure and classified its level of damage using FEMA coded domains (e.i. Structural Damage, Wind Damage, Inundation, etc.). Parcels were sometimes divided into multiple units (such as duplexes), which meant placing multiple points on a single building footprint to reflect the actual number of properties which can actually be seen from the image below.

To analyze the severity of damage to proximity from the coast, I created a new Coastline line feature class and digitized the shoreline using the pre-storm imagery. I attempted to use the Near tool in ArcGIS to categorize the distances but then realizes it would be much easier if I used the Multiple Ring Buffer tool to generate three buffer zones at 100 m, 200 m, and 300 m instead. After that, I used the Spatial Join tool to assign each structure point a distance value based on which buffer it fell within. This let me query the attribute table and determine the number of structures in each damage category by proximity to the coast to create this table

These results show a general trend of greater damage closer to the shoreline, but since the points were digitized with only observations, there was plenty of room for human error, making this method fairly unreliable.

This lab was great in my opinion and showed all the different application GIS can be used to support real world disasters. I also used plenty of tools that I either haven't used before or haven't used in a long time, so it felt great getting to both apply my current knowledge and learn useful tools.