Enhancing Hurricane Emergency Response by Rapid Assessment of Tree Damage

North American coastal cities face escalating challenges from hurricane-induced multiple hazards. Among these, the damaged trees due to strong winds during hurricane pose substantial threats to coastal cities and result in prolonged service interruptions. These challenges highlight the urgent need for an effective decision-making framework to enhance system resilience, not only during pre-hazard preparedness but also throughout post-hazard recovery. To support the decision making for emergency response, it is important for emergency responders to be prepared for what damage may be done to the trees. For this case study, we are looking at how New York City trees fail and the damage and debris they will produce. By using computational fluid dynamics models of the hurricane-city system, coupled with the use of wind tunnels to better understand tree fragility, we can achieve our goal of creating a model that describes how trees fail by a certain wind load for emergency responders to use. 

The student will be expected to have a complete understanding of how urban trees interact and fail with hurricane wind conditions. This understanding will be used to create a model that describes wind speed in relation to tree failure. Having an overall understanding of tree failure and which types of trees are fragile is important to implement into the urban tree setting. Having knowledge of wind load and wind fields in an urban setting is also important, so that this model can be applied in other areas outside of the case study the student is using. The student should also be able to write and revise a well thought out report of their research and other findings; this includes formatting and citations. 

Reading seminal articles or books.

civil engineering, hurricane, resilience, emergency response, wind