Hurricane Mitigation for the Built Environment

Focusing on coastal regions affected by tropical cyclones, this book highlights vulnerability, natural hazards, risk, damage, emergency management, and hazard mitigation as they relate to the threat and occurrence of hurricanes. It uses case studies and imagery from recent storms to show some of the strengths and weaknesses of infrastructure, landscaping, and city planning. It also addresses long-term issues such as beach erosion and struggling tourism economies while suggesting specific, realistic, and essential mitigation measures for reducing the damage potential of future hurricanes.

"Alvarez drives home the point that for buildings and communities located in hurricane-prone regions, it is not a question of whether the area will be impacted, but when it will be impacted. The book makes a strong case for taking responsibility to understand the vulnerabilities of buildings and structures to hurricane impacts."
—Timothy Reinhold, PhD, from the Foreword

Focusing on coastal regions affected by tropical cyclones, Hurricane Mitigation for the Built Environment highlights vulnerability, natural hazards, risk, damage, emergency management, and hazard mitigation as they relate to the threat and occurrence of hurricanes. The product of more than 25 years of the author’s experiences with post-event assessments and studies of hurricane damage, it looks particularly at common sequences of failures and oversights in planning for a hurricane that amplify the damage caused by storms.

This book combines observations of actual damage to the built environment in coastal regions caused by hurricanes with applied research and testing. It uses case studies and imagery from recent storms to show some of the strengths and weaknesses of infrastructure, landscaping, and city planning. The case studies also illustrate, in great detail, what community planning efforts have worked and those that have failed.

The book also goes beyond analyzing immediately visible structural damages following a hurricane. It addresses long-term issues such as beach erosion and struggling tourism economies. It also describes specific, realistic, and essential mitigation measures for reducing the damage potential of future hurricanes and urges developers, designers, and owners to incorporate new knowledge into the design of new buildings or into the retrofitting of existing buildings. By applying the information presented in this book, communities susceptible to recurring hurricanes can reduce storm damage as well as the potential for extended losses that frequently follow a hurricane.