DOI: 10.17603/ds2-d4se-nw93
title: Hurricane Wind Impact on Informally-Constructed Houses: Current and Climate Change Scenarios
title: in Building Capacity for Safer Post-disaster Shelter: Leveraging Local Understanding and Advanced Engineering Assessments

description: There is an urgent need to improve community capacity to recover more effectively after disasters through safer design and construction practices. To do this, training programs need to foster an improved understanding of shelter design and construction to withstand future wind and earthquake events. This project analyzed perceptions of those working in the informal construction sector of housing safety in Puerto Rico (after 2017's Hurricane Maria and the 2019-2020 earthquake swarm) and homeowner’s perceptions of housing safety in Philippines (after 2013's Typhoon Haiyan and 2017's Ormoc earthquake) to: (1) assess local understanding of shelter safety in multiple hazards, including causal factors influencing this understanding, through a household survey in the Philippines and a survey to of builders in Puerto Rico (Venable et al. 2020; Goldwyn et al. 2021; Goldwyn et al. 2022); (2) assess the expected performance of various post-disaster shelter typologies to quantify safety during future earthquake and wind events using performance-based engineering methods (see citations associated with the data sets); (3) identify conflicts between perceived and assessed safety of shelter, and why these conflicts exist, by comparing engineering assessments with local perceptions (Venable et al. 2021 and Goldwyn et al. 2022); and (4) create and assess a communication design for organizations assisting with training for safer housing construction (Goldwyn et al. 2023).
description: This study investigates the resilience of informally-constructed light-frame timber houses in Puerto Rico, a region where households with limited resources face significant risks from climate hazards, notably hurricanes. This study conducts a component-based, performance-based wind engineering assessment of informally-constructed house typologies, defined based on extensive fieldwork, under both existing and projected future climate conditions. Key findings highlight the effectiveness of certain mitigation strategies, such as reinforcing roof-to-wall connections, in significantly reducing the probability of failure. Fully-mitigated cases, which involve applying mitigation measures to the roof envelope, roof-to-wall connections, and shear walls, exhibited annual probabilities of failure that are much closer to, but do not necessarily meet, the threshold targeted by American building standards (i.e., ASCE 7). The results also show a dramatic increase in probability of failure of these houses projected by the adopted climate change model scenarios, driven by the increased frequency and intensity of hurricanes in Puerto Rico. Results from feedback from those working in the informal construction sector also identify challenges hindering the effective implementation of mitigation measures in Puerto Rican communities, including a lack of knowledge about how to implement the mitigation strategies and barriers related to real and perceived costs. Taken together these results underscore the urgent need for changes in building practices and revising building standards and suggesting potentially feasible mitigation strategies to improve those practices.