Probabilistic assessment of tropical cyclone recovery burden across US Atlantic and Gulf Coast counties

Simona Meiler , Nikola Blagojevic, Meredith Lochhead, Avantika Gori, Jack W. Baker 

Tropical cyclones cause widespread damage to housing and infrastructure, and recovery is often slow and uneven. Climate risk assessments quantify the likelihood and direct impacts of extreme events, but post-disaster recovery remains largely absent from these models, limiting our ability to assess long-term resilience. We therefore integrate simplified recovery modeling into probabilistic tropical cyclone risk assessment for all counties along the US Atlantic and Gulf coasts. We quantify county-level repair demand for residential buildings using a large synthetic set of tropical cyclone events and compare it with baseline local construction capacity, proxied by residential building permits. The resulting recovery burden expresses the modeled repair workload in months of baseline construction activity. The relative importance of repair demand and construction capacity depends on how recovery burden is summarized. Expected annual recovery burden is dominated by rare, high-impact events and closely tracks the expected annual repair demand. For the median damaging event in each county, construction capacity becomes more important, and counties with comparable repair demands can face substantially different recovery burdens. A joint screening identifies 60 high-risk, low-capacity counties that are particularly susceptible to post-disaster construction bottlenecks. Incorporating baseline construction capacity into risk assessment can therefore inform where reconstruction support would complement efforts to reduce tropical cyclone risk.