Tidy Disaster Data

The goal of tidyDisasters is to create a queryable data set that unites information from the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (Belgium) EMDAT, the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (United States of America) GTD, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (United States of America) FEMA; three sources that complement each other. Standard information about the types and classes of disasters is from the United Nation’s 2020 Hazard Definition and Classification Review (UN Hazards). Whereas FEMA reports the county-level location of a natural event, EMDAT estimates the number of killed and wounded of that natural event, the GTD contains the terrorism events, and the UN Hazards table contextualizes each disaster by class.

Installation

Our package is currently being revised by CRAN. The development version of tidyDisasters:: can be installed from this GitHub repository by

library(devtools)
install_github("ccani007/tidyDisasters")

Please note that using compiled code from GitHub may require your computer to have additional software (Rtools for Windows or Xcode for Mac). Also note that installing this development version may result in some errors. If you find problems, please submit a bug ticket.

Examples

This is a basic example which shows how to search for a disaster event. This code finds Hurricane Harvey and shows how it affected Texas in 2017.

library(tidyDisasters)
library(lubridate)
library(tidyverse)

data("disastDates_df")
data("disastCasualties_df")
data("disastLocations_df")
data("disastTypes_df")

disastTypes_df %>%
  left_join(disastDates_df) %>%
  left_join(disastCasualties_df) %>% 
  left_join(disastLocations_df) %>% 
  mutate(Year = year(eventStart)) %>% 
  filter(Year == 2017 & state == "TX" & incident_type == "Hurricane") %>% 
  distinct() %>% 
  rmarkdown::paged_table()

This is another example that shows the number of counties affected by fires since the 90s.
We found the the 2000-2001 Western United States wildfires.

library(tidyDisasters)
library(lubridate)
library(tidyverse)

data("disastLocations_df")
data("disastTypes_df")
data("disastDates_df")

fires_df <- 
    disastLocations_df %>%
  left_join(disastTypes_df) %>%
  left_join(disastDates_df) %>%
  mutate(Year = year(eventStart)) %>% 
  filter(hazard_cluster == "Environmental degradation (Forestry)") %>%
  group_by(state, county, Year) %>%
  summarise(Fire = n() >= 1L, .groups = "keep") %>%
  group_by(Year) %>%
  summarise(Count = sum(Fire))
  
ggplot(fires_df) +
  theme_classic() +
  theme(axis.text.x = element_text(size = 10, angle = 90)) +
  aes(x = Year, y = Count) +
  labs(
    title = "Number of Counties Affected by Fires Since the 90s",
    caption = "Data from the tidyDisasters R Package",
    y = "No. Counties affected by fires"
  ) +
  scale_x_continuous(breaks = 1990:2020) +
  scale_y_continuous(breaks = seq(0, 1000, by = 100)) +
    geom_vline(xintercept = 2000) +
    geom_vline(xintercept = 2001) +
  geom_point(size = 2, color = "#DA3330")