Preliminary Documented Recovery Patterns and Observations from Video Cataloged Data of the 2011 Joplin, Missouri, Tornado

Abstract

The 2011 Joplin, Missouri, tornado was one of the deadliest and costliest tornadoes in US history, damaging approximately 8,000 structures and causing more than $2 billion in economic damages. As with most extreme events, reports following the tornado documented the widespread damage, including complete destruction of one of the local hospitals along with various schools. However, recovery processes have not been documented and evaluated at the same level of spatial detail. Following the 2011 Joplin tornado, researchers periodically revisited neighborhoods at 6-month intervals for the first 2 years, then yearly for the following 3 years, with the goal of collecting spatial video data in order to document when structures were fully repaired or rebuilt. This case study documents the building repair time (time to reach full building functionality) patterns based on that data set for the first 2 years following the devastating Enhanced Fujita (EF) 5 tornado that struck Joplin, Missouri. The preliminary results comprehensively show a longer average building repair time for older (pre-1970) buildings and areas of lower population count, while rebuild times were quicker for areas where a relatively small amount of the population did not have access to a vehicle and the median age was lower. Within this Joplin recovery study, however, the year built for the structures was concluded to be a stronger factor in delaying recovery time than income, which is typically considered a primary contributor to repairing and rebuilding a structure following an extreme event. Overall, buildings ranging from minimal to severe damage were typically fully repaired within the first year, while buildings that were completely destroyed reached full functionality evenly across 6-month, 1-year, 1.5-year, 2-year, and greater than 2 years recovery times.