Spatial video street-scale damage assessment of the Washington, Illinois Tornado of 2013

This paper advances a growing body of mobile mapping work which captures building scale tornado damage in order to reveal vulnerabilities, or protections, within an otherwise apparently homogenous damage path. The hope is to find how micro geography, or built environment structure patterning might lead to policy advances with regards to rebuilding of critical infrastructure in tornado prone areas. This paper will use spatially encoded video to record damage patterns for the Washington, Illinois tornado of November 17, 2013. What makes this event notable is the location and time of year which can be considered outside the norm. Individual building damage data are coded using the Tornado Injury Scale (TIS) and then analyzed using two forms of local area spatial analysis a Getis-Ord (Gi) z-score analysis to identify hotspots of damage, and a Local Moran’s I to identify building outliers within hotspots.