Post-Katrina Property Damage Assessments by Address

New Orleans city inspectors conducted detailed damage assessments for properties affected by Hurricane Katrina. The dataset includes percentage damage estimates for structural components like foundations, electrical systems, and plumbing, published by address. Data was released by data.nola.gov and last updated in August 2015.

Use Cases

• Model FloodDepth and FloodDuration as predictors for total Percentage damage using regression.
• Analyze correlations between specific damage categories like Electrical_DamagePer and Superstructure_Framing_Masonry_DamagePer to identify common failure modes.
• Cluster properties by damage profiles (e.g., high Plumbing vs. high ExteriorFinish_DamagePer) to identify distinct impact patterns.
• Geocode addresses (Add1, Add2, etc.) to create spatial maps of damage intensity across New Orleans neighborhoods.
• Assess the financial impact of disasters by linking damage percentages (Percentage) to property valuation data via TaxBill or Owner fields.

Strengths

• Contains 30 specific columns detailing damage to individual building components.
• Data is geolocated via address fields (Add1, Add2, etc.) for spatial analysis.
• Assessments were conducted by official City inspectors, providing authoritative ground truth.

Limitations

• The dataset's last update was in 2015, making it a historical snapshot with no recent data.
• Unknown total row count prevents estimation of sample size or geographic coverage completeness.
• Many columns (Add3, Add13, Add14, etc.) have unclear semantics without additional documentation.

Provenance

Source

data.nola.gov (City of New Orleans).

Collection Method

Damage assessments conducted by City inspectors, formerly supporting a 'Damage Assessment Wizard' tool.

Time Range

Post-Hurricane Katrina (2005).

Freshness

Last updated 2015-08-25; no update frequency provided.

Geography

New Orleans, Louisiana, USA.