| Hurricanes wreak havoc on many segments of an affected community: local municipalities must respond to the events; insurance companies incur significant losses; and extensive damage to structures occur. These effects illustrate not only the limitations of the current planning and design philosophies, but emphasize the need for a formal methodology to assess extreme-wind risk.; In this dissertation, a methodology is developed for extreme-wind risk assessment which combines a heuristic algorithm with the results of hurricane simulation. The result is an Extreme-Wind Risk Assessment System (EWRAS) that can be used to make statements about the expected damage to a single-family dwelling due to a particular hurricane, or a series of hurricanes, over a specified length of time.; Experts from the wind-engineering community were consulted in the development of the Hurricane Vulnerability Evaluation algorithm. The algorithm includes evaluations of parameters which have been identified as contributing to, or mitigating, the amount of hurricane-induced damage a dwelling experiences. Given that a hurricane has occurred and that the intensity of the hurricane is known, the vulnerability algorithm provides an estimate of the expected damage level to a single-family dwelling, or group of dwellings.; A Monte Carlo simulation procedure is used to generate a synthetic hurricane wind-field that is used in conjunction with the vulnerability algorithm. The hurricane wind-field model used for this dissertation was employed due to its ease of use and ease of adaptation to other geographical locations. The simulated hurricane wind-speeds provide cumulative distribution functions of wind-speed exceedance: the Hurricane Wind-speed Hazard.; Combining the Hurricane Wind-speed Hazard model with the Hurricane Vulnerability model provides a risk-assessment of hurricane wind-effects on houses. Examples of the deterministic approach (expected damage due to a specific hurricane) and the probabilistic approach (expected damage resulting from all hurricanes over a specified length of time) are presented. The method may be extended for use in other areas, and to other hazards, to evaluate disaster response, planning and mitigation strategies. |
