A unified framework for post-disaster hazard and structural assessment data collection across hazards and infrastructure typologies

Post-disaster field observations of the built environment are critical for advancing fundamental research that links hazard data to structural performance, cascading community impacts, and the development of effective mitigation strategies. Yet, data collection efforts remain fragmented across hazard types and infrastructure systems due to varying objectives, methodologies, protocols, and standards among investigators and organizations. To address this, a Unified Assessment Framework has been developed for standardized post-disaster hazard and structural assessment data and metadata collection across multiple natural hazards (earthquake, windstorm, coastal events) and infrastructure typologies. The framework encompasses a tiered performance assessment of infrastructure with increasing rigor and fidelity levels: Basic Assessment (BA), Load Path Assessment (LPA), and Detailed Component Assessment (DCA). The framework has been implemented as an open-access mobile application, the Structural Extreme Events Reconnaissance Network’s “StEER Unified App”, hosted on Fulcrum, a commercial data collection platform by Spatial Networks Inc. Along with unification of data fields, preliminary mapping rules were developed to map out existing hazard-specific damage rating scales (e.g., wind, surge/flood, rainwater ingress) to the European Macroseismic Scale (EMS-98) compatible unified damage scale, enabling consolidation of global damage ratings into a common data field, facilitating the unification of multiple hazards within a single app. In the mapping process, care was taken to retain the overarching damage level definitions (e.g., slight, moderate, severe damage) while customizing the specific descriptors to reflect hazard-specific damage mechanisms. Two use cases are presented to demonstrate the application of this framework through the StEER Unified App: a supervised pilot after the 2022 Hurricane Ian, Florida and an unsupervised deployment for the 2023 Turkey earthquake sequence. These deployments highlight the framework’s flexible and scalable nature, demonstrate the feasibility of standardized assessments, and offer insights into how data quality is influenced by assessor pre-deployment training and assessment tier, particularly for more complex tasks such as load path evaluation. This work advances the field by providing a scalable, standardized, and hazard-agnostic approach to structural field reconnaissance, enabling more consistent and coordinated data collection across events. The open-access framework and app not only support real-time deployments but also allow integration of legacy datasets into a unified platform—laying the foundation for longitudinal analyses, cross-hazard comparisons, and expanded data reuse within the Natural Hazards Engineering community.