Identifying population vulnerable to hydrological hazards in San Juan, Puerto Rico

The hazards of place framework developed by Cutter (1996) has been applied to several areas across the United States. This article tests the applicability of that model for analysis of hydrological disasters in the municipio of San Juan, Puerto Rico. San Juan is chosen because it combines many socioeconomic attributes of a developing area while offering data availability befitting its status as a US commonwealth. The interoperability of principal components and arithmetically based methods for producing a social vulnerability layer are examined. For both methods, a basket of commonly cited demographic variables representing social and economic vulnerability is extracted from Census 2000 sample (SF-3) data at the census block-group level of analysis. These results provide insight on the strengths and weaknesses of the methods both methodologically and regarding policy implementation. A look at the neighborhood of La Perla suggests complex local positive and negative effects of local processes on vulnerability not captured by demographic analysis. These effects relate to possible census undercounts in peripheral areas and uncaptured coping ability provided by social networks.