Non-locality and spillover effects of residential flood damage on community recovery: Insights from high-resolution flood claim and mobility data

Abstract

Examining the relationship between vulnerability of the built environment and community recovery is crucial for understanding disaster resilience. Yet, this relationship is rather neglected in the existing literature due to limitations in the availability of empirical datasets needed for such analysis. In this study, we combined fine-resolution flood damage claim data (composed of both insured and uninsured losses) and human mobility data (composed of millions of movement trajectories) during the 2017 Hurricane Harvey in Harris County, Texas, to specify the extent to which vulnerability of the built environment (i.e., residential flood damage) affects community recovery (based on the speed of human mobility recovery) locally and regionally. We examined such relationship using spatial lag, spatial reach, and spatial decay models to measure the extent of spillover effects of residential flood damage on community recovery. The results indicate that: first, the severity of residential flood damage significantly affects the speed of community recovery. A greater extent of residential flood damage suppresses community recovery not only locally but also in the surrounding areas; second, the spillover effects of residential flood damage on community recovery decay with distance from the highly damaged areas with a spatial reach of up to 31.2 miles (49.92 Km); third, areas display heterogeneous spatial decay coefficients, which are associated with urban form and structure features such as the density of facilities and roads. These findings provide a novel data-driven characterization of the spatial spillover effects of residential flood damage on community recovery and move us closer to a better understanding of complex spatial diffusion processes that shape community resilience to hazards. This study also provides valuable insights for emergency managers and public officials seeking to mitigate the non-local effects of flood damage.