Disaster Recovery Curve Analysis

Disaster recovery curve analysis represents the recovery of a community or system after a disaster as a trajectory of functionality over time and uses that trajectory to quantify resilience. Building on the resilience-triangle concept and formalized for community recovery by Scott Miles and Stephanie Chang in 2006, the approach tracks a performance indicator — population, employment, housing occupancy, service capacity, or composite functionality — from its pre-event baseline, through the abrupt drop caused by the disaster, along the path back toward (or beyond) the baseline. From the curve, analysts read the magnitude of the initial loss, the speed and shape of recovery, the time to return, and the cumulative resilience loss represented by the area between the baseline and the recovery path. Comparing curves across communities or scenarios reveals what drives faster, fuller recovery and complements loss-estimation models that stop at the moment of impact.