Towards the R package sheldus: Part 2: Losses from Natural Disasters in the US

In my earlier post I summarized the work on my upcoming R package on the SHELDUS database. This is a database on human and property losses from natural disasters in the United States. Although the data is free, downloading the data is tedious and so is cleaning and analyzing it. My goal is to package the data efficiently so it could be accessed and analyzed easily through R. And some day, develop one package for loss information analysis from various databases (e.g., SHELDUS, EM-DAT, and FEMA’s Flood Insurance Program).

• At this point the code has all the data retrieval functionality available through the GUI from SHELDUS – only in a matter of seconds!
• retrieval by year
• retrieval by hazard type
• adjustment for inflation
• [TODO] Presidential Disaster Declarations data and also data prior to 1960 needs to be included (these amount to about 40,000 records of the total 820,000 records)

In this second post, I will be extract the entire SHELDUS data and create some interesting graphics. Please see – https://github.com/RationShop/sheldus/blob/master/publish_part2.md

All the graphics and code are available at my GitHub site – https://github.com/RationShop/sheldus

Any help or comments appreciated.