Module 5 – Damage Assessment

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The lab for Module 5 focused on damage assessment near Atlantic City, New Jersey from Hurricane Sandy in October of 2012. We first looked at the path and intensity of Hurricane Sandy shown on the map below.





















We then used pre-storm and post-storm images to determine the category of damage inside the damage assessment study area. This involved a tedious process of comparing the differences between the before and after images for each building structure. A multiple ring buffer was used to determine how severe the damage was depending on how far it was from the coastline.





















Summary of Structural Damage and distance from coastline.







It makes sense that most of the structures that were destroyed or had major damage occurred within the distance of 100 and 200 meters from the coastline. The data would be more reliable if the tides had been considered in creating the coastline creation. This digitizing step does not consider the tides either at the time the aerial was created or the time the storm made land fall.

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