The degree of housing damage model for a flood affected area

Abstract

Floods can cause damage like slightly damaged, significantly damaged or destroyed to homes and possessions as well as disruption to communications. Inherently, victims should be given temporary or permanent houses depending on the degree of damage to their houses. Therefore, an assessment on the levels of damage must be carried out in the aftermath of a flood as a direction for recovery effort, for example housing resettlement. The fact is, in Malaysia, there is still no standardized damage assessment used by the relevant authorities in assessing the degree of housing damage after a disaster. As a result, errors in assessing the degree of housing damage and providing inaccurate type of assistance might occur. Thus, this research emphasis on the understanding the degree of house damage and recommend the significant input in developing the damage assessment model in Malaysia. To achieve the objective, this research applies a self-developed model that is derived from the literature review (framework or model of the degrees of housing damage after flood) and the observation at the case study area to see the actual conditions of the affected houses. After that, questionnaires were distributed to 50 respondents consist of engineers (n=10), architects (n=10), quantity surveyors (n=10), real estate valuers (n=10) and building surveyor (n=10) by using purposive sampling to gauge their perceptions on attributes of degree of housing damage and eventually conducting a focus group consist of ten (10) technical experts involved in MERCY Malaysia in assessing the housing damage for model validation. The findings indicate that the degree of damage can be classified as ‘minor’, ‘major’ and ‘destroyed’. Research findings will give input in the form of a Housing Damage Assessment Framework for the government, NGOs, MERCY, insurers or other appropriate bodies involve in assessing or evaluating the condition of houses affected by floods.