Cost-Benefit Framework to Generate Wind Hazard Mitigation Recommendations for Homeowners

Abstract

Wind hazards are responsible for the majority of hazard losses in the United States; however, little customized information is available to provide actionable information to homeowners to support individual mitigation decision making. Therefore, there is a need for decision support tools to calculate, evaluate, and present the economic benefits of mitigation over variable decision-making time horizons for unique building configurations in specific geographical locations. This paper presents a mitigation recommendation framework that is based on comparison of the economic effectiveness of multiple mitigation scenarios to identify and recommend those with the highest net benefit, NB, and net benefit to lifecycle cost ratio, NBCR. The framework is focused on supporting homeowner decision making through reliance on key inputs, such as mitigation budget and decision-making time horizon, along with specification of building attributes and location. The intended audience of this paper is researchers, design professionals, and loss modelers familiar with basic concepts of wind engineering and loss modeling who are interested in the development of tools and methods that support owner-centered adaptation approaches to resilience. To demonstrate the framework, retrofit mitigation of a wood-framed single family home is considered with a $15,000 budget and a decision-making time horizon of 30 years. The case study resulted in 10 acceptable mitigation options with construction costs ranging between $1,700 and $15,098 and NB ranging between $1,024 and $39,520.