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The 2030 Global Sustainable Development Agenda of United Nations highlighted the critical importance of understanding the integrated nature between enhancing infrastructure resilience and facilitating social equity. Social equity is defined as equal opportunities provided to different people by infrastructure. It addresses disparities and unequal distribution of goods, services, and amenities. Infrastructure resilience is defined as the ability of infrastructure to withstand, adapt, and quickly recover from disasters. Existing research shows that infrastructure resilience and social equity are closely related to each other. However, there is a lack of research that explicitly understands the complex relationships between infrastructure resilience and social equity. To address this gap, this study aims to examine such interrelationships using social media data. Social media data is increasingly being used by researchers and proven to be a reliable source of valuable information for understanding human activities and behaviors in a disaster setting. The spatiotemporal distribution of disaster-related messages helps with real-time and quick assessment of the impact of disasters on infrastructure and human society across different regions. Using social media data also offers the advantages of saving time and cost, compared to other traditional data collection methods. As a first step of this study, this paper presents our work on collecting and analyzing the Twitter activities during 2018 Hurricane Michael in disaster-affected counties of Florida Panhandle area. The collected Twitter data was organized based on the geolocations of affected counties and was compared against the infrastructure resilience and social equity data of the affected counties. The results of the analysis indicate that (1) Twitter activities can be used as an important indicator of infrastructure resilience conditions, (2) socially vulnerable populations are not as active as general populations on social media in a disaster setting, and (3) vulnerable populations require a longer time for disaster recovery.
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Power Resilience Assessment from Physical and Socio-Demographic Perspectives
Urban resilience is a multifaceted concept including the recovery of the physical infrastructure and various urban activities that depend on that physical infrastructure. It is relatively straightforward to quantify infrastructure resilience by tracking the recovered facilities in time and marking the time that the infrastructure is fully functioning again. However, the physical infrastructure recovery does not necessarily indicate that the urban activities bounce back to the predisaster conditions. The restoration of urban activities depends on the areas that a particular infrastructure serves (e.g., residential, commercial) and the connections with other critical facilities (e.g., health, education). It is important to investigate the infrastructure recovery and “resilience divide” with respect to the enabled services and affected populations in order to achieve all-inclusive resilience. For this purpose, we examined the resilience of different physical elements such as power feeders (i.e., underground or overhead lines), critical facilities (e.g., fire and rescue services, hospitals) and different socio-demographic segments of the population (i.e., different age groups, ethnicities, and income levels) which constitute an urban environment. The analyses were conducted using the power outages experienced after Hurricane Hermine in Tallahassee, as a case study. The findings show that overall resilience performance can be distinct and/or not homogeneous for the resilience of different physical elements, urban services, and population groups.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1737483
- PAR ID:
- 10162684
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 4th International Conference on System Reliability and Safety (ICSRS)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 421 to 428
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSRS48664.2019.8987673
