If you are getting unusual errors or crashes while doing HAZUS runs in New York state, the problem may be due to a broken census tract in your study region.

There is a lake in eastern New York that was incorrectly labeled as a valid census tract on the HAZUS data DVD.
The lake is listed as census tract 36013000000 in HAZUS, and it is located in Chautauqua County in the easternmost part of New York state.

You will not run into any problems when creating the study region for New York state. However, the incorrectly-labeled lake may cause HAZUS to crash when you run one of the models. If your study region includes Chautauqua County, then this may be the source of any mysterious crashes that you are experiencing.

Fortunately, there is a workaround to this problem: Whenever you are creating a study region in New York that includes Chautauqua County (and this includes STATEWIDE study regions!) you must make sure to exclude the invalid census tract. When making a new study region for New York state, choose Census tract as the aggregation level, and select your study region as per usual, making sure to DESELECT census tract 36013000000 from the Census Tract Selection screen. Your study region will work fine after that.

To do this, I recommend clicking the Show map button, and selecting your study region using the mouse. Then, at the end, deselect census tract 36013000000 by hand. Also, DO NOT CHECK Auto select all to make your study region, as it will obviously include the broken census tract that we are trying to avoid.

It was a tricky nut to crack the first time, but hopefully this will save you some time and headaches.

This thread is now closed.

(If you have found a better workaround, or if a new HAZUS update corrects this error. Please post the details in a new topic and I will re-open this thread.)