Hurricanes and extreme weather events can cause widespread damage and disruption to infrastructure services and consequently delay household and community recovery. A subset of data from a cross-sectional survey of 989 households in central and south Florida is used to examine the effects of Hurricane Irma on post-disaster recovery eight months after the landfall. Using logistic regression modeling, we find that physical damage to property, disruption of infrastructure services such as loss of electric power and cell phone/internet services and other factors (i.e., homeowner’s or renter’s insurance coverage, receiving disaster assistance and loss of income) are significant predictors of post-disaster recovery when controlling for age and race/ethnicity.

The need exists to build knowledge toward addressing issues related to international disaster migrants into the United States, a phenomenon that the United Nations perceives as increasingly imminent in the next few decades due to potential refugees fleeing climate change-related events. There is a gap however in scholarly work on the role of diaspora groups and host communities in post-disaster recovery and reconstruction. The Haitian diaspora in the United States will be a lifeline as Haiti recovers and rebuilds from the devastating earthquake disaster of January 12^th2010. This article reports on observations and findings from our research to understand the specific roles of the Haitian diaspora associations based in South Florida, as well as the role of host communities, nongovernmental organizations and government agencies that assisted earthquake survivors and displacees in the South Florida region. The findings are based on twenty-six interviews conducted within the time-frame of June 2010 to December 2010. Half of these interviewees represented the diaspora associations based in South Florida. Findings indicate that these organizations and host communities played a vital role in disaster relief and response processes.

With the aim of fostering the development of robust tools to simulate the impact of natural hazards on structures, lifelines, and communities, the Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure Computational Modeling and Simulation Center gathered 60 researchers, developers, and practitioners working in natural hazards engineering (NHE) for a workshop to prioritize research questions and identify community needs for data and computational simulation capabilities. Participants used their wide-ranging expertise in earthquake, coastal, and wind hazards from engineering, planning, data sciences, and social sciences perspectives to identify five major thrusts of recommended future work, including detailed suggestions for each: (1) development of housing and household recovery models; (2) integration of existing models into flexible computational workflows; (3) investment in the collection of high-value open data; (4) commitment to sharing and utilizing high-value data; and (5) development of versatile, multidisciplinary testbed studies. Participant responses and workshop data were analyzed with the help of an ontology that the authors designed to support data classification in a broad range of NHE applications. The paper also includes observations and suggestions for planning and conducting interactive workshops of this type.