Damage Assessment

Assessment of disaster impacts is crucial to the many different aspects of response, recovery, and mitigation activities occurring post disaster. Not only must damage assessments be completed in a timely fashion for initial responders and search-and-rescue (SAR) teams, but they must also accurately quantify both areal extent and level (limited to catastrophic) of the disaster impact for higher-level decision making, long-term response planning, and recovery operations. Imprecise damage assessments can have dire consequences at all levels of disaster response and management. The criticality of damage assessments to U.S. disaster operations is evidenced in the Homeland Security Geospatial Concept of Operations. Damage assessments supported by location-based technologies such as geographic information systems (GIS), global positioning systems (GPS), and remote sensing (RS) are recognized as crucial missions and provide important components of the essential elements of information (EEIs), which inform decision-making processes during initial response and recovery operations and influence longer-term rebuilding and mitigation efforts. Incomplete or inaccurate assessments may slow the procurement and delivery of assets to the affected area and can lead to complex or complicated disaster events that sometimes result in even more devastating impacts in the long run. Damage assessments are part of routine emergency operations at the local level, but assessments for larger events that surpass local capabilities are not regularly trained for or undertaken in a standardized fashion from place to place. Different methods, achieved using disparate means and yielding divergent results, were not uncommon until very recently, when automated procedures began replacing flawed computations and human introduction of error and bias. This technologic innovation, although welcomed and useful, does not completely replace human intellect within the disaster decision-making process but rather provides a rapidly deployable additional resource to the emergency manager's arsenal.