This is a study about disasters, vulnerability and power. With regards to social justice organizing a particular research problem guides the work, specifically that emancipatory projects are often initiated and steered by privileged actors who do not belong to the marginalized communities they wish to strengthen, yet the work is based on the belief that empowerment requires self-organizing from within. Through an ethnographic field study of social justice organizing in the wake of Hurricane Sandy in Rockaway, New York City, the thesis explores whether and how vulnerable groups were empowered within the Occupy Sandy network. It is a process study that traces outside activists attempts at empowering storm-affected residents over time, from the immediate relief phase to long-term organizing in the recovery phase. The activists aimed to put to practice three organizing ideals: inclusion, flexibility and horizontality, based on a belief that doing so would enhance empowerment. The analysis demonstrates that collaboration functioned better in the relief phase than in the long-term recovery phase. The same organizing ideals that seem to have created an empowering milieu for storm-affected residents in the relief phase became troublesome when relief turned to long-term recovery. The relief phase saw storm-affected people step up and take on leadership roles, whereas empowerment in the recovery phase was conditional on alignment with outside activists’ agendas. Internal tensions, conflicts and resistance from residents toward the outside organizers marked the recovery phase. It seems that length of collaborative projects is not the only factor for developing trust but so is complexity. The more complex the activities over which partners are to collaborate the less easy it is. Based on this we could further theorize that the more complex the work is the more challenging it is for privileged groups to give away control. The internal struggles of the organization partially explain the failures to influence an urban planning process that the organization attempted to impact, which connects the micro-processes with broader change processes toward transformation of vulnerability.

In the face of future uncertainties, many places are struggling with decisions about how to prepare for and adapt to climate change. The purpose of this research is to shed light on the concept of resilience, and uncover lessons for resilience-building exposed by a past disaster, Hurricane Wilma. The dissertation begins with an introduction (Chapter 1) detailing the research problem, key terms and overall research design. The study was conducted in three distinct phases. The first phase (Chapter 2), explored the concept of resilience to understand how it was defined in three South Florida communities. Content analyses of city and county documents were conducted to extract explicit definitions of resilience as well as implicit definitions based on carefully selected keywords. Results showed the engineering resilience concept was most prevalent across all three study areas. Furthermore, keywords related to the dimension of the built environment were most common in Broward and Lee Counties. While this may indicate a need for communities to shift toward more progressive, social-ecological conceptualizations of resilience, a more central conclusion was that local applications of resilience frameworks need to be more explicit about how they define resilience, and what resilience-building looks like in that particular context. Phase two (Chapter 3) explored the interplay between specified resilience, addressing resistance to known disturbances, and general resilience, addressing a system's capacity to deal with less predictable shocks. This phase entailed a content analysis of 172 Sun-Sentinel newspaper articles about Hurricane Wilma. Prominent themes that emerged included distribution of benefits and risks, social learning and memory, cross-scale issues, vulnerability and social networks. This chapter concludes with four specific recommendations for Broward County to enhance resilience to future storms and less predictable disturbances, like climate change and sea level rise. During the third phase (Chapter 4) a modified resilience activation framework was applied to analyze social factors that may limit or promote adaptive capacity in South Florida. Focus groups with homeowners were used to gain insight about past experiences with Hurricane Wilma, as well as perceptions and expectations regarding local climate adaptation efforts. Results showed that risk perceptions, insurance practices, and social networks may influence the willingness and ability of individuals to prepare for and adapt to disasters. Social limits to adaptation among participants included inaccurate risk perceptions based on past experiences and feelings of helplessness, and a lack of political trust at the state level. Social resources that can be leveraged to enhance adaptive capacity included knowledge reserves of long-term residents, strong bonding capital, and trust in local, non-elected government employees. Results from each phase of research were synthesized to create a novel procedural roadmap to guide how communities integrate resiliency into their planning documents.

Expected damages of environmental risks depend both on their intensities and probabilities. There is very little control over probabilities of climate related disasters such as hurricanes. Therefore, researchers of social science are interested identifying preparation and mitigation measures that build human resilience to disasters and avoid serious loss. Conversely, environmental degradation, which is a process through which the natural environment is compromised in some way, has been accelerated by human activities. As scientists are finding effective ways on how to prevent and reduce pollution, the society often fails to adopt these effective preventive methods. Researchers of psychological and contextual characterization offer specific lessons for policy interventions that encourage human efforts to reduce pollution. This dissertation addresses four discussions of effective policy regimes encouraging pro-environmental preference in consumption and production, and promoting risk mitigation behavior in the face of natural hazards. The first essay describes how the speed of adoption of environment friendly technologies is driven largely by consumers’ preferences and their learning dynamics rather than producers’ choice. The second essay is an empirical analysis of a choice experiment to understand preferences for energy efficient investments. The empirical analysis suggests that subjects tend to increase energy efficient investment when they pay a pollution tax proportional to the total expenditure on energy consumption. However, investments in energy efficiency seem to be crowded out when subjects have the option to buy health insurance to cover pollution related health risks. In context of hurricane risk mitigation and in evidence of recently adopted My Safe Florida Home (MSFH) program by the State of Florida, the third essay shows that households with home insurance, prior experience with damages, and with a higher sense of vulnerability to be affected by hurricanes are more likely to allow home inspection to seek mitigation information. The fourth essay evaluates the impact of utility disruption on household well being based on the responses of a household-level phone survey in the wake of hurricane Wilma. Findings highlight the need for significant investment to enhance the capacity of rapid utility restoration after a hurricane event in the context of South Florida.

Tropical Cyclones are a continuing threat to life and property. Willoughby (2012) found that a Pareto (power-law) cumulative distribution fitted to the most damaging 10% of US hurricane seasons fit their impacts well. Here, we find that damage follows a Pareto distribution because the assets at hazard follow a Zipf distribution, which can be thought of as a Pareto distribution with exponent 1. The Z-CAT model is an idealized hurricane catastrophe model that represents a coastline where populated places with Zipf- distributed assets are randomly scattered and damaged by virtual hurricanes with sizes and intensities generated through a Monte-Carlo process. Results produce realistic Pareto exponents. The ability of the Z-CAT model to simulate different climate scenarios allowed testing of sensitivities to Maximum Potential Intensity, landfall rates and building structure vulnerability. The Z-CAT model results demonstrate that a statistical significant difference in damage is found when only changes in the parameters create a doubling of damage.

Hurricanes are one of the deadliest and costliest natural hazards affecting the Gulf coast and Atlantic coast areas of the United States. An effective way to minimize hurricane damage is to strengthen structures and buildings. The investigation of surface level hurricane wind behavior and the resultant wind loads on structures is aimed at providing structural engineers with information on hurricane wind characteristics required for the design of safe structures. Information on mean wind profiles, gust factors, turbulence intensity, integral scale, and turbulence spectra and co-spectra is essential for developing realistic models of wind pressure and wind loads on structures. The research performed for this study was motivated by the fact that considerably fewer data and validated models are available for tropical than for extratropical storms. Using the surface wind measurements collected by the Florida Coastal Monitoring Program (FCMP) during hurricane passages over coastal areas, this study presents comparisons of surface roughness length estimates obtained by using several estimation methods, and estimates of the mean wind and turbulence structure of hurricane winds over coastal areas under neutral stratification conditions. In addition, a program has been developed and tested to systematically analyze Wall of Wind (WoW) data, that will make it possible to perform analyses of baseline characteristics of flow obtained in the WoW. This program can be used in future research to compare WoW data with FCMP data, as gust and turbulence generator systems and other flow management devices will be used to create WoW flows that match as closely as possible real hurricane wind conditions. Hurricanes are defined as tropical cyclones for which the maximum 1-minute sustained surface wind speeds exceed 74 mph. FCMP data include data for tropical cyclones with lower sustained speeds. However, for the winds analyzed in this study the speeds were sufficiently high to assure that neutral stratification prevailed. This assures that the characteristics of those winds are similar to those prevailing in hurricanes. For this reason in this study the terms tropical cyclones and hurricanes are used interchangeably.

abstract: Recent extreme weather events such the 2020 Nashville, Tennessee tornado and Hurricane Maria highlight the devastating economic losses and loss of life associated with weather-related disasters. Understanding the impacts of extreme weather events is critical to mitigating disaster losses and increasing societal resilience to future events. Geographical approaches are best suited to examine social and ecological factors in extreme weather event impacts because they systematically examine the spatial interactions (e.g., flows, processes, impacts) of the earth’s system and human-environment relationships. The goal of this research is to demonstrate the utility of geographical approaches in assessing social and ecological factors in extreme weather event impacts. The first two papers analyze the social factors in the impact of Hurricane Sandy through the application of social geographical factors. The first paper examines how knowledge disconnect between experts (climatologists, urban planners, civil engineers) and policy-makers contributed to the damaging impacts of Hurricane Sandy. The second paper examines the role of land use suitability as suggested by Ian McHarg in 1969 and unsustainable planning in the impact of Hurricane Sandy. Overlay analyses of storm surge and damage buildings show damage losses would have been significantly reduced had development followed McHarg’s suggested land use suitability. The last two papers examine the utility of Unpiloted Aerial Systems (UASs) technologies and geospatial methods (ecological geographical approaches) in tornado damage surveys. The third paper discusses the benefits, limitations, and procedures of using UASs technologies in tornado damage surveys. The fourth paper examines topographical influences on tornadoes using UAS technologies and geospatial methods (ecological geographical approach). This paper highlights how topography can play a major role in tornado behavior (damage intensity and path deviation) and demonstrates how UASs technologies can be invaluable tools in damage assessments and improving the understanding of severe storm dynamics (e.g., tornadic wind interactions with topography). Overall, the significance of these four papers demonstrates the potential to improve societal resilience to future extreme weather events and mitigate future losses by better understanding the social and ecological components in extreme weather event impacts through geographical approaches. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Geography 2020

This study uses the storm surge sediment beds deposited by Hurricanes Audrey (1957), Carla (1961), Rita (2005) and Ike (2008) to investigate spatial and temporal changes in sedimentation rates on the McFaddin National Wildlife Refuge in Southeast Texas. Fourteen sediment cores were collected along a transect extending from 90 to 1230 meters inland from the Gulf Coast. Storm-surge-deposited sediment beds were identified by texture, organic content, carbonate content, the presence of marine microfossils, and Cesium-137 dating. The hurricane-derived sediment beds are marker horizons that facilitate assessment of marsh sedimentation rates from nearshore to inland locations as well as over decadal to annual timescales. Near the shore, on a Hurricane Ike washover fan, where hurricane-derived sedimentation has increased elevation by up to 0.68 m since 2005, there was no measurable marsh sedimentation in the period 2008-2014. Farther inland, at lower elevations, sedimentation for the period 2008-2014 averaged 0.36 cm per year. The reduction in sedimentation in the period 2008-2014 on the nearshore part of the marsh is likely due to reduced flooding in response to increased elevation from hurricane storm surge sediment deposition. These results provide valuable knowledge about the sedimentary response of coastal marshes subject to storm surge deposition and useful guidance to public policy aimed at combating the effects of sea level rise on coastal marshes along the Gulf of Mexico.

When hurricane Gudrun occurred in 2005, the Swedish crisis management system was put on its head. New political reforms together with the aftermath of the tsunami in Southeast Asia challenged the professional actors during the crisis. As Sweden has been relatively spared from natural disasters, Gudrun became one of the worst crises in Swedish history. People died both directly during the storm but also later during the reconstruction phase. After the storm had passed, almost an entire annual felling of the Swedish forest had been lost, which caused enormous costs both for the forest owners but also for the electricity and telecommunications companies. Despite the fact that Sweden is often seen as a state with strong welfare with welldeveloped public assistance systems, Gudrun highlighted differences in people’s vulnerability during the disaster. Furthermore, the study intends to investigate how social capital can function as an underlying mechanism for people’s vulnerability. The study also leads to a critical discussion about the Swedish crisis management system and people’s trust in government officials. Through a qualitative content analysis, the study will examine inequalities in social capital can generate different access to resources. The crucial conclusion of the study is that people’s vulnerability during Gudrun was partly conditioned by individuals network positions and social capital, and that great emphasis had been placed on institutions ability to manage the disaster, which reduced the risk perception and people’s ability to activate their own social networks.

Acquiring GPR data at multiple frequencies is useful because higher-frequency profiles have better spatial resolution, although they suffer from reduced depth penetration. Lower-frequencies can generally resolve to greater depths, but at the cost of spatial resolution. For concise presentation of GPR data, it would be useful to combine the best features of each profile into a composite radargram. This study explores effective ways to present GPR data acquired at multiple frequencies. An example is shown from a survey of hurricane overwash deposits from Santa Rosa Island, Florida. The methodology used to create a composite radargram is dependent on which of two goals the composite radargram is designed to achieve. These goals are broadening the spectral bandwidth of GPR data to increase the effectiveness of deconvolution and enhancing the resolution and depth of GPR data by plotting high-frequency data at early two-way travel times, low-frequency data at late two-way travel times, and using filters to smoothly transition from high-frequency to lower-frequency data. The steps towards creating a composite radargram include: 1) applying standard processing to nominal frequency data sets, 2) creating spatially coincident data sets, 3) equalizing the amplitude spectra among each nominal frequency data set, and 4) summing nominal frequency data sets together. Spectral bandwidth broadening is achieved by applying optical spectral whitening and summing nominal frequency data sets using a single ramped. Deconvolving this composite radargram did not show the same success observed by Booth et al. (2009). Enhancing the resolution and depth of GPR data can be achieved by applying amplitude envelope equalization (AEE) and summation using double ramped filters. AEE calculates the coefficients required to make equivalent average amplitude envelopes for GPR data that has been gained with automatic gain control . Double ramped filters suppress low-frequency energy for two-way travel times when a higher-frequency data set has adequate signal strength and higher frequency energy for two-way travel times when higher- frequency energy exhibits significant attenuation. A composite radargram built with AEE and double ramped filters achieves the goal enhancing resolution and depth of GPR data. Shallow reflections are interpreted as dune and hurricane overwash stratigraphy.

Floods affect millions of people each year, with increasing frequency in the past decades. Floods, as any other natural phenomena, do not take place in a vacuum. Their impacts are modulated by the socioeconomic environments they affect, which are far from homogeneous and oftentimes characterized by deep disparities and inequalities. Ensuring sustainable development in a world where climate change is forecasted to increase the frequency and severity of flooding requires a nuanced understanding of these interactions between natural and socioeconomic systems. This dissertation sheds light on the impacts of flooding on economic outcomes of interest in two contrasting settings. First, Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the effects of flooding as a natural disaster in a developed country, the United States. Using evidence from Hurricane Sandy in 2012, these chapters explore how different neighborhoods, with different characteristics, responded to flooding. They conclude that heterogeneous responses led to an increased polarization along property value, racial, and income lines among neighborhoods. Then, Chapter 3 investigates the effects of seasonal flooding in the Malian Sahel. Unlike the previous setting, flooding brings about positive outcomes in this context, as livelihoods in this arid region are heavily dependent on surface water for agriculture. This chapter shows that lower seasonal flooding increases infant mortality. Thus, it provides evidence on the sort of long-term consequences that could affect low-income households after suffering short-lived resources shocks. Overall, this dissertation contributes to our understanding of the heterogeneous impacts of flooding. Increased awareness of these impacts would be key to formulate successful post-flood responses and policies to ensure future sustainable development.