Module 5: Damage Assessment

This lab assignment had many moving parts which required skills learned in previous classes and labs, for which I'll share on of the required deliverables.

With a set of pre/post storm images the required these to be placed as a mosaic layer to use to perform an assessment of structure damage caused by a storm. Once these were created and added to a map with the parcel and assessment boundary. It was easy evaluate the structures using the Mosaic Layer -> Swipe or Flicker tool to create point features identifying structures and assigning it level of damage from a domain of five categories.

The methodology used to determine a structures damage was by first reviewing the overall assessment area. The first indicator all the structures within the area were affected is by the amount of sediment and debris deposited by the storm surge. Streets and parking lots where covered completely with sediment and could not be seen. This was an indicator that the structures where likely flooded and therefor affected. Reviewing each structure parcel by parcel, given those which did not have any visible structure in the post-storm image where code as destroyed. Those with a majority of the structure standing but sections severely damage where code as major damage, those with visible roof damage, but the integrity of the structure remained enacted, coded as minor damage. Below is a screenshot of the points collected during the evaluation.

Once the structure damage evaluation was completed, a line feature was added which represented the coastline adjacent to the subject area. Leveraging the multi-ring (buffer) tool the line feature used to create a 100, 200, and 300 buffer area. That area was then spatially joined to the structure damage feature and a summary statistics table was generated counting the structure damage types by the joined distance. Below is the results of my analysis.

Structure Damage Category	Count of Structures 0-100 m from coastline	Count of Structures 100-200 m from coastline	Count of Structures 200-300 m from coastline
No Damage	0	0	0
Minor Damage	0	17	3
Major Damage	2	9	0
Destroyed	8	4	0
Totals	10	39	29