Appropriate management of coastal flood risk is critical for creating resilient communities. An important part of this is estimating what buildings will become uninhabitable due to a flood event such as a tropical cyclone. To increase the accuracy of these estimations, habitability functions are developed to quantify the relationship between hydrodynamic hazards and the probability of a building becoming uninhabitable following Hurricane Irma. Hazards like maximum flood depths are determined by modeling Hurricane Irma flooding in Delft3D-FM coupled with the wave model SWAN. These modeled hazard levels are then extracted at building locations where Location Based Services (LBS) data provide information on buildings that were uninhabitable following Hurricane Irma. The developed habitability functions provide valuable insights into how different hydrodynamic parameters and regression models perform for estimating building habitability, where maximum unit discharge is generally the best predictor of habitability. Furthermore, we find that while wooden structure habitability is significantly influenced by hazard level, concrete structure habitability is not. These findings provide novel methods for estimating coastal flooding induced building uninhabitability, enhancing how planners can prepare for floods.

Hurricane Ike, which struck the United States in September 2008, was the ninth most expensive hurricane in terms of damages. It caused nearly USD 30 billion in damage after making landfall on the Bolivar Peninsula, Texas. We used the Delft3d-FM/SWAN hydrodynamic and spectral wave model to simulate the storm surge inundation around Galveston Bay during Hurricane Ike. Damage curves were established through the relationship between eight hydrodynamic parameters (water depth, flow velocity, unit discharge, flow momentum flux, significant wave height, wave energy flux, total water depth (flow depth plus wave height), and total (flow plus wave) force) simulated by the model and National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) insurance damage data. The NFIP insurance database contains a large amount of building damage data, building stories, and elevation, as well as other information from the Ike event. We found that the damage curves are sensitive to the model grid resolution, building elevation, and the number of stories. We also found that the resulting damage functions are steeper than those developed for residential structures in many other locations.