HAZUS: FEMA’S GIS-Based risk assessment tool
The HAZUS-MH Hurricane Model will allow users in the Atlantic and Gulf Coast
regions of the U.S. to estimate hurricane winds and potential damage and loss to
residential, commercial, and industrial buildings. It will also allow users to estimate
direct economic loss, post-storm shelter needs, and building and tree debris quantities.
The HAZUS-MH Flood Model will be capable of assessing riverine and coastal flooding.
It will estimate potential damages to all classes of buildings, essential facilities,
transportation lifelines, and utility lifelines, vehicles, and agricultural crops. The model
will address building debris generation and shelter requirements. Direct losses will be
estimated based on physical damage to structures, contents, and building interiors. The
effects of flood warning will be taken into account, as will flow velocity effects. The
Flood Information Tool (FIT), released in July 2002, allows users to prepare local flood
hazard and other pertinent data for use in the HAZUS-MH Flood Model.
The HAZUS-MH Earthquake Model, an updated version of HAZUS99-SR2, will
continue to provide loss estimates of damage and loss to buildings, essential facilities,
transportation lifelines, and utility lifelines, and population based on scenario or
probabilistic earthquakes. The model will address debris generation, fire-following,
casualties and shelter requirements. Direct losses will be estimated based on physical
damage to structures, contents, inventory, and building interiors. It also will include the
new Advanced Engineering Building Module for single and group building mitigation
analysis. The updated earthquake model being released with HAZUS- MH will include:
The HAZUS-MH Earthquake Model, an updated version of
HAZUS99-SR2, will
continue to provide loss estimates of damage and loss to buildings, essential facilities,
transportation lifelines, and utility lifelines, and population based on scenario or
probabilistic earthquakes. The model will address debris generation, fire-following,
casualties and shelter requirements. Direct losses will be estimated based on physical
damage to structures, contents, inventory, and building interiors. It also will include the
new Advanced Engineering Building Module for single and group building mitigation
analysis. The updated earthquake model being released with HAZUS- MH will include:
- The new (September 2002) National Hazard Maps
- Project '02 attenuation functions
- Updated historical earthquake catalog (magnitude 5 or greater)
- New Advanced Engineering Building Module for single and group building
mitigation analysis
Additionally, HAZUS-MH will be capable of multi-hazard analysis by providing access
to the average annualized loss and probabilistic results from the wind, flood and
earthquake models and combining them to provide integrated multi-hazard reports and
graphs. HAZUS-MH also will contain a third party model integration capability in
HAZUS-MH that will provide access and operational capability to a wide range of
natural, man-made and technological hazard models (nuclear and conventional blast,
radiological, chemical and biological) that will supplement the natural hazard loss
estimation capability (earthquake, flood & hurricane) in HAZUS-MH.
