Quantifying post-disaster community well-being: A case study of Hurricane Harvey

Natural hazards such as hurricanes affect various aspects of the community members’ lives and their post-disaster well-being by causing significant disruptions in the key community activities in the immediate recovery phase. Furthermore, natural hazards leave behind short-term socio-economic impacts such as stress, anxiety, huge recovery expense, and lack of affordable housing. There is a need for incorporating both immediate and short-term impacts of natural hazards when measuring disaster recovery. This study aims to address this need by introducing community well-being as the metric for the recovery of communities from natural disasters. From this perspective, community resilience is defined as the capability of community to reach its pre-disaster state of well-being, in a timely and efficient manner. The study leverages Bottom-Up Spillover Theory and the existing literature to introduce a community well-being model. This model quantifies how the functionality of infrastructure systems can affect various aspects of community well-being based on 6 domains, 17 sub-domains, and 51 indicators. The indicators were quantified using survey data and 211-call data for the City of Houston, and data on the impact of Hurricane Harvey at the zip code level. The results showed that various dimensions of well-being were affected heterogeneously and followed different recovery patterns. The proposed framework can serve decision makers as a dashboard for identifying the well-being domains and sub-domains that should be addressed to enhance post-disaster well-being in the immediate-to short-term. Furthermore, the study introduces the phone call data as an inexpensive and timely replacement for multiple rounds of survey questionnaires for quantifying community well-being.