Hurricane Vulnerability, One Building at a Time
HurricaneVuln tells insurers and lenders how a specific building responds to a specific storm. It is calibrated on buildings that Hurricane Michael passed over and FEMA-inspected homes from storms.
The vortex is drawn from the same wind-field model the product uses.
October 9, 2018
A tropical storm two days earlier, Michael deepens over warm water at a rate forecasters rarely see.
October 10, 17:30 UTC
Peak sustained winds of 140 knots, the first Category 5 landfall in the contiguous United States since Andrew in 1992.
The next six hours
The core races north-east into Georgia faster than most storms weaken, which is why inland Jackson and Seminole counties saw damage too.
What FEMA saw from the air
Every orange cell is a 500-metre block of buildings that FEMA's imagery analysts marked as damaged. This is the record HurricaneVuln learns from, building by building.
Storm Replay
Pick a storm, press play, and watch its wind field build from the official best track. Click anywhere on land to place a building and read the peak wind it would have felt.
Your Building
The building uses the configuration below. Wind is the peak 1-minute wind at 10 m in open terrain, the same reference as the best track.
Open in the ConfiguratorBuilding Unit
Choose what the property record says. Options marked with a dot are recorded in the data but the evidence does not support pricing them separately, so they are scored as the reference option.
Repair Cost If FEMA Inspects a Damaged Home
Repair costs are FEMA-verified real property losses in 2024 dollars under FEMA's current inspection practice. They measure what it takes to make a home safe and habitable, which is below a full insured loss.
Chance of visible damage from 60 to 160 knots, compared with the typical wood-frame house.
Effect of each recorded attribute on the odds of damage, with 90% ranges from resampling map tiles.
For Insurers and Lenders
Paste a schedule of buildings with coordinates and values, choose a historical storm, and every building is scored in your browser. Nothing leaves the page. The rows loaded below are examples.
Columns: id, lat, lon, construction (wood, masonry, concrete, steel, manufactured), use (single_family, mobile_home, condo, multi_family, commercial, industrial, institutional, other), storeys (1, 2, 3), year_built, sqft, value, loan, insured (1 or 0). Blank fields are treated as unknown.
Evidence
Two models, two tests. The loss model is scored on each of 19 storms after training on the other 18. The fragility model is scored on map tiles and counties it was not fitted to.
Continuous ranked probability score of the full loss distribution in 2024 dollars, mean over withheld storms. Lower is better.
Bars are the 80% range predicted before the storm; dots are what FEMA inspectors verified.
Within assessed counties, new map tiles. Lower Brier and higher AUC are better.
Records
The model card, where every number came from, what we assumed, and how to rebuild it all. Model risk teams can audit this page end to end.