Towards Resilient Critical Infrastructures: Understanding the Impact of Coastal Flooding on the Fuel Transportation Network in the San Francisco Bay

Abstract

Sea level rise (SLR) and storm surge inundation are major concerns along the coast of the San Francisco Bay (the Bay Area), impacting both coastal communities and critical infrastructure networks. The oil industry comprises a complex and critical infrastructure network located in the Bay Area. There is an urgent need to assess consequences and identify risk-based solutions to increase the resilience of this industrial network in the Bay Area to SLR and storm surge. In this study, a comprehensive multi-modal network model representing the fuel supply system was built. A total of 120 coastal flooding scenarios, including four General Circulation Models, two Representative Concentration Pathways, three percentiles of future SLR estimates, and five planning horizons (20 year intervals from 2000 to 2100) were considered. The impact of coastal flooding on fuel transportation networks was studied at two different scales: regional and local. At the regional scale, basic network properties and network efficiency were analyzed across multiple flooding scenarios. At the local scale, cascading effects of individual node disruptions were simulated. Based on this research, smarter and more holistic risk-based adaptation strategies can be established which could lead to a more resilient fuel transportation network system.

Modeling Operational Flow Capacity and Evaluating Disaster Interventions for Fuel Distribution

“…Descriptive and quantitative research to build scientific knowledge (Spearman and Hopp, 2021) is central to our approach. By explicitly modeling the OFC (He et al., 2021) we fill the highlighted gaps in literature. Although our models are motivated by downstream fuel distribution, our framework can be applied to several other last-mile relief distribution problems for commodities such as water, food, and medical supplies as well as facility operations with multiple cycles of picking, packing, loading, and off-loading.…”

Cross-boundary risks of hinterland hazards to city infrastructure

“…Destruction or blockages in roads or railroads can disrupt the transportation of fuel (e.g. petroleum, coal), thus interrupting fuel supply and reducing system capacity (Litman 2006, Cahoon et al 2015, Clark et al 2019, He et al 2021, Schweikert and Deinert 2021. Fuel supply can be affected by electricity outages in various ways.…”