Community Resilience-Focused Technical Investigation of the 2016 Lumberton, North Carolina Flood: An Interdisciplinary Approach

Published

August 1, 2020

Author(s)

John W. van de Lindt, Walter G. Peacock, Judith Mitrani-Reiser, Nathanael Rosenheim, Derya Deniz, Maria Dillard, Tori Tomiczek, Andrew Graettinger, Patrick Crawford, Kenneth W. Harrison, Andre Barbosa, Jennifer Tobin, Jennifer Helgeson, Lori Peek, Mehrdad Memari, Elaina Sutley, Sara Hamideh, Donghwan Gu, Stephen Cauffman, Juan Fung

Abstract

In early October 2016, Hurricane Matthew crossed North Carolina (NC) as a Category 1 storm, with some areas receiving 0.38 m to 0.46 m (15 to 18 in) of rainfall on already saturated soil. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) funded Center for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning teamed with researchers from NIST's Engineering Laboratory (Disaster and Failure Studies Program, Community Resilience Group, and the Applied Economics Office) to conduct a field study focused on impacts of the Lumber River flooding in Lumberton, NC. Lumberton is a racially and ethnically diverse community with higher than average poverty and unemployment rates, a typical civil infrastructure for a city of 22,000 residents, and a city council form of government. The field data described in this paper are from the first wave in an ongoing longitudinal research project documenting the impacts and subsequent recovery processes following the 2016 riverine flooding in Lumberton. The initial data collection for for this longitudinal community resilience-focused field study had two major objectives: (1) document initial conditions after the flood for the longitudinal study of Lumberton's recovery, with a focus on improving flood-damage and population-dislocation models, and (2) develop multidisciplinary protocol providing a quantitative linkage between engineering-based flood damage assessments and social science-based household interviews that capture socio-economic conditions (e.g., social vulnerabilities related to race, ethnicity, income, tenancy status, and education levels).

Citation

Natural Hazard Review-ASCE

Pub Type

Journals

Keywords

Lumberton, Community Resilience, Recovery, Flood Damage, Population Dislocation, Race/Ethnicity, Poverty

Citation

van de Lindt, J. , Peacock, W. , Mitrani-Reiser, J. , Rosenheim, N. , Deniz, D. , Dillard, M. , Tomiczek, T. , Graettinger, A. , Crawford, P. , Harrison, K. , Barbosa, A. , Tobin, J. , Helgeson, J. , Peek, L. , Memari, M. , Sutley, E. , Hamideh, S. , Gu, D. , Cauffman, S. and Fung, J. (2020), Community Resilience-Focused Technical Investigation of the 2016 Lumberton, North Carolina Flood: An Interdisciplinary Approach, Natural Hazard Review-ASCE (Accessed October 9, 2025)