County Hazard Assessment
State Hazard Database
SHELDUS
Terrorism Book
Coastal Vulnerability
Conducting a GIS-Based Hazards Assessment at the County Level Go to top
HANDBOOK PDF
This handbook has been created to provide county emergency managers with a method for identifying those areas most vulnerable to hazards within their counties.
GEORGETOWN PDF
Example of a county based vulnerability assessment of Georgetown County, SC. (as seen in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers ).
VULNERABILITY TO HAZARDS PDF
The Vulnerability of Place Model. (as seen in Progress in Human Geography ).
State Level Hazard Events and Losses Database: 1975-1998 Go to top
All of the state-level data used in American Hazardscapes: The Regionalization of Hazards and Disasters (edited by S.L. Cutter and published by the Joseph Henry Press, 2001) is now available.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 9905352.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
Spatial Hazard Events and Losses Database for the U.S. (SHELDUS) (1960-Present) Go to top
SHELDUS is a county-level data set for the United States. on 18 different natural hazard events types such thunderstorms, hurricanes, floods, wildfires, tornados, etc. along with property and crop losses, injuries, and fatalities for the period 1960-Present.
Go to the SHELDUS database to retrieve your information.
The Geographical Dimensions of Terrorism Go to top
Edited by Susan L. Cutter, Douglas B. Richardson, and Thomas J. Wilbanks. Routledge: New York and London, 2003.
Click here for table of contents.
Coastal Vulnerability Go to top
Coastal Population Pressures:
As part of the contribution to the Heinz Center’s study on the "Social Causes and Consequences of Coastal Erosion" and in response to living along a hurricane coast, the HRL staff has prepared some background data on coastal population pressures. The first map shows changes in Gulf and Atlantic coastal populations form 1970 to 2000. Note the near doubling of the population (counties in dark red) in hurricane-prone areas in the metropolitan areas of Houston and Brownsville-Matamoros, Mexico.
Click here for the population change map.
These recent demographic changes are set within the larger context of historic population movements to the coast. Using an animated sequence from 1900-2000, population growth is charted, starting with the more urbanized (and thus more populated northeast) in the early part of the century, to the more recent population increases throughout the Gulf and Atlantic coast counties.
Click here for the animated sequence.
Coastal Vulnerability Assessment:
This study was recently presented at the Vulnerability Assessment Techniques Workshop (VAT III), December 4 to 5, 2002 at the Caribbean Development Bank Conference Center, Wildey, St. Michael, Barbados. This research has developed a method to link the social and physical aspects of vulnerability to environmental hazards. The goal was to develop an index of total vulnerability to compare coastal regions of the United States. We have used United States Census data in conjunction with the United States Geologic Survey's Coastal Vulnerability Index (CVI) to derive Place Vulnerability (PVI).
Click here to download a zip file of our Power Point presentation