High urban flood risk and no shelter access disproportionally impacts vulnerable communities in the USA

Flood risk and access amalgamated

We revisit the risk of flooding by studying FEMA’s Riverine Flood Risk Index and auto access to shelters in tandem. We use the Bivariate Local Indicator of Spatial Autocorrelation (BiLISA) clustering technique to spatially capture and visualize the characteristics of block groups under the concurrent influence of flooding risk and their neighboring block groups’ access to shelters (e.g., educational, community, health, civic, religious centers). Figure 1 depicts the results of cluster analysis. Three observations are discerned. First, shelter…