The impact of a storm surge on business establishments in the Houston MSA

This paper examines the possible storm surge damage from a major hurricane to hit the Houston Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA.) Using storm surge analysis on a unique data set compiled from the Texas Workforce Commission (QCEW), the paper estimates the expected industry-level damage for each county in the Houston MSA. The advantages of using GIS to analyze the expected storm surge damage estimation is that it provides an accurate estimation of the number of affected employees and probable wages losses, by industry and county, based on QCEW data. The results indicate that the ‘Basic Chemical Manufacturing’ and ‘Oil and Gas Extraction’ industries incur the highest employee and payroll losses while the ‘Restaurants and Eateries’ has the largest establishment damage if a major hurricane were to hit the Houston MSA. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011