Community Resilience Research Using IN-CORE - Case Study with 2011 Tornado Event at Joplin, MO

Community resilience research is essential for anticipating, preventing, and mitigating the impacts of natural and anthropogenic disasters. To support this research, the Center for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning, funded by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), developed the measurement science and metrics that can help communities in planning, adapting and recovering from disasters. This measurement science is implemented on an open source platform called the Interdependent Networked Community Resilience Modeling Environment (IN-CORE). On IN-CORE, users can run scientific analyses that model the impact of natural hazards and community resilience against these impacts.

This Jupyter Notebook uses the Joplin, MO community and the historical 2011 EF-5 Tornado event as an example of how to use IN-CORE to analyze community resilience. The city of Joplin, Missouri, USA, was hit by an EF-5 tornado on May 22, 2011 (NIST Report). Note that IN-CORE supports various hazards including earthquake, tornado, tsunami, flood, and hurricane.

The notebook includes analyses of structural damage to buildings, electric power network damage, building functionality, economic impact on the community, population dislocation, household recovery, and retrofit options for buildings. It also demonstrates how to visualize the results of these analyses. These analyses are powered by pyIncore, a Python client for IN-CORE, which provides a high-level interface for interacting with IN-CORE services, offering specific models (e.g., representing a tornado) and ensuring a consistent and controlled interface.

Lastly, the core logic of this notebook is used to power the IN-CORE Community Resilience Playbook, an interactive guide for community resilience planning. It has been used in workshops with the city planners and government officials, making it a valuable resource for resilience planning.