This Collaborative Rapid Response Research Grant (RAPID) project will collect perishable damage data caused by Hurricane Sandy that made landfall on October 29, 2012. It was a very large storm (almost 800 miles in diameter according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) that affected large areas of coastlines of New York (Long Island and New York Metropolitan area) and New Jersey. The storm was judged to be Category 1 based on its wind speed. However, because of its size and coinciding with high lunar tide, it generated high storm surge. The coastline regions received serious damage by the flood due to surge and impact forces of waves. Residential structures along the coastlines sustained severe damage and destruction.
This collaborative project will collect field data of damaged residential buildings focusing on the New Jersey coastal area. Two major goals for collection of data are: (1) to collect perishable data on residential building damage levels, failure modes, and building characteristics (elevation, specific connections/members failed, age); and (2) to find damage gradients, and to identify and quantify their causes. Small teams will evaluate and record data for every residence in the selected region. Data taken will include location, elevations, house type and size, approximate age, large scale storm erosion/accretion, local scale foundation scour, approximate waterlines, visible damage from wind/waves, damage levels, damage/failure modes, specific connection and member failures, and environmental exposure (sheltered behind buildings/dunes, open to sea). Numerous GPS-tagged pictures will be taken of each house from multiple angles. With 3-4 teams of 2 people each, 400-600 houses will be surveyed for the database. These damage data will be used in future research in developing storm surge resistant residential structures.
This one-year RAPID project investigated wind, wave and surge damage to coastal areas around Ortley Beach, New Jersey shortly after Hurricane Sandy made landfall. A group from the University of Notre Dame led by Andrew Kennedy, in partnership with a team from Princeton University led by Ning Lin, collected detailed damage data for almost 500 individual structures, most of which were wood-framed single family residences. When combined with other publicly available records, this created a damage database that was then analyzed for factors contributing to damage. As expected, damage was largest at the open oceanfront, and diminished moving inland where wave and current magnitudes were lower. Many houses failed because of poor connections with their foundations and simply slid off their sites more or less intact. Others remained better connected, but suffered severe damage to walls and other structural components from waves and surge. Foundation scour was important in some cases, but these were the minority. Local sheltering by dunes or other features significantly decreased damage when compared to nearby unsheltered locations. Wind damage was relatively minor in most instances, with loss of shingles the most commonly observed damage. The damage database developed here is being made available to other researchers in the field. Wave and surge simulations were then used to model the environmental conditions leading to structural damage. Simulations are still ongoing, but show a relatively low steady inundation depth over most of the area with occasional large, low frequency fluctuations leading to short instances of high loading. For some structures, this low frequency loading appeared to be the source of much of the damage while steady components of loading were negligible. This low frequency inundation and loading is not presently a component of professional loading standards but appears to be the dominant loading contribution for many near-coast structures. Waves and surge have been the most costly US natural disasters over the past decade, but their relationships to near-coast structural damage are not as well developed as some other hazards such as earthquakes. Results from this project will help to mitigate against future storms, and are being used as inputs for additional research into wave and surge loading on near-coast structures. On the Princeton side, one undergraduate student, two graduate students, and a postdoc participated in the damage survey. The undergraduate student continued to analyze the damage data and develop damage databases, leading to her senior thesis, which was well received by the Civil and Environmental Department at Princeton. She also wrote a conference paper as the lead author, and she presented the paper at the International Conference for Structural Safety and Reliability (ICOSSAR) at Columbia University in June 2013, as one of very few undergraduate presenters. The project and generated databases have induced on-going larger projects to create physically-based surge damage models, estimate economic losses and evaluate FEMA insurance policies, and develop coastal adaptation strategies; two PhD students at Princeton are working on these topics with initial support from this project. This project also inspired our collaboration with a research team at Rutgers University to develop new methods for LiDAR-based damage assessment and documentation. A Princeton journalist interviewed the team at the site and wrote an article for the Princeton Alumni Weekly, which was well received by the general public. Ning Lin continues to disseminate the research results to policy makers and the general public, through various media exposures and through her membership of the New York City Panel on Climate Change, which advises the Mayor’s Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability on recent developments in climate science and reviews and recommends updated climate projections for the city, and of the numerical modeling review group for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers North Atlantic Coast Comprehensive Study.
