Vulnerability and Robustness of Civil Infrastructure Systems to Hurricanes

Abstract

Civil infrastructure systems play an important role in community resilience. Without proper functioning of the infrastructure, especially power delivery, society will not recover quickly from disruptive events, such as hurricanes. In this paper, the vulnerability, response, and recovery of selected infrastructure at the system level for several hurricanes in the USA are modeled using geostatistical methods, employing post-event data. Inoperability is the main variable modeled for each infrastructure system. In this paper, robustness is a property considered to be the opposite of vulnerability, and it plays an important role in the resiliency modeling. The infrastructure systems examined in this paper are electric power delivery and telecommunications. Connections among the systems are briefly explored.

Flood Impact Assessments on Transportation Networks: A Review of Methods and Associated Temporal and Spatial Scales

“…Resilience, in the context of impact assessment, is defined as the ability of a network to withstand an extreme event, adapt, and recover any loss in functionality from the event (Serre and Heinzlef, 2018;Zhang and Alipour, 2019). For a flood event, resilience can be defined as the ability of a network to withstand the impacts through physical measures like reinforcement, minimize the damages in extreme events, restore the functionality of the network, and potentially reduce the network's future uncertainties (Hammond et al, 2015;Wang and Reed, 2017;Serre and Heinzlef, 2018;Zhang and Alipour, 2019). Multiple cities are adopting the concept of resilience as part of flood risk management and mitigation (Hammond et al, 2015), with the majority of research being focused on society's capacity to adapt and respond appropriately based on the specific disaster (floods in this case).…”