Regional Recovery Modeling and Postdisaster Model Updating: The Case of the 2010 Kraljevo Earthquake in Serbia

Modeling disaster consequences and postdisaster recovery is a key enabler of holistic community disaster resilience planning and implementation. An important step toward the application of such models in practice consists in ensuring that model parameters can be reliably estimated, building trust in model outputs, as well as reducing output uncertainty. This study aims to tackle these issues first by constructing a regional housing recovery model and validating its results for a real event, the 2010 Kraljevo, Serbia earthquake, and second, by presenting how regional recovery models can be updated following a disaster using early-arriving damage inspection data to reduce output uncertainty. The model outputs are updated postevent using 600 building damage assessment reports, reducing the uncertainty in recovery time predictions. The results confirm the practical applicability of the proposed regional recovery model and postevent updating, while identifying its main shortcomings, such as the lack of consideration for the weather conditions affecting the recovery process and the need for better methods to estimate the communitys ability to mobilize its recovery resources. ; ISSN:0733-9445 ; ISSN:1943-541X