Critical milestones of population activity recovery and their spatial inequality in disasters

Keywords: recovery, resilience, human mobility, credit card transaction, big data
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Natural hazards cause significant disruptions to people’s daily lives. Post-disaster recovery is an essential progress to re-build the impacted communities. The speed and quality of a community’s post-disaster recovery provides insightful understanding of a community’s disaster resilience. Recovery includes not only rebuilding the damaged infrastructures, but also helping impacted population return to normal lifestyles. This study uses visitation patterns and credit card transactions to define critical recovery milestones and to identify spatial inequality at the community-level. Specifically, this study first defines critical post-disaster recovery milestones and provides quantitative measurements of when each community reached these milestones. Secondly, an integrated metric is created for an overall measurement of each community’s recovery progress. Lastly, exploratory statistical analyses are conducted to examine whether a community's recovery progress is correlated to its flood status, socioeconomic characteristics, and demographic composition. Results of this study can benefit post-disaster recovery resource allocation as well as improve community resilience towards future natural hazards.