Natural Hazards Research Summit 2024: Alternatives for Resilient Communities: A Tool to Inform Optimal Tornado Retrofits

Tornadoes can devastate impacted communities, razing buildings, uprooting trees, and destroying powerlines. To effectively reduce these disasters’ catastrophic impacts, improved models are needed to help decision-makers prioritize retrofit strategies under resource constraints. The Alternatives for Resilient Communities (ARC) software, first applied to riverine flooding and seismic hazards, is here extended to address tornadic hazards. ARC is an interactive tool to aid communities and stakeholders in developing sets of viable strategies to improve community-level resilience while meeting constraints related to system interdependencies and socioeconomic considerations. This generalization of ARC allows for the optimization of tornado adaptation strategies, including the installation of tornado shelters, structural wind retrofits of buildings, and improved power system maintenance, such as strengthened poles or vegetation management. Under various potential tornado intensity scenarios and budgetary constraints, the optimal resilience enhancement strategies to minimize the expected economic losses are determined within the mathematical programming framework. This development creates a flexible and interactive tool for community use, demonstrating different trade-offs in resilience planning for tornados, and helping compare potential alternatives and prioritize investments to create more tornado-resilient communities. As a case study, the model is run and validated for the testbed city of Joplin, Missouri, which was devasted by an EF5 tornado in 2011, highlighting the strong predictive ability of the model, quantifying the magnitude of potential savings from adopting tornado retrofits, and informing the most effective actions to enhance resilience.