Florida's emergency relief operations were significantly affected by recent hurricanes such as Hermine and Irma that caused massive roadway and power system distributions. During these recent devastating hurricanes, the problems associated with providing accessibility and safety became even more challenging, especially for those vulnerable communities and disadvantaged segments of the society, such as aging populations were considered - that is, those who need and benefit from the emergency services the most. This complexity is magnified in states like Florida, considering the diverse physical, cognitive, economic and demographic variation of its population. As such, with a major focus on real-life data on roadway closures and power outages for the Hurricane Hermine, combined resilience (co-resilience) of emergency response facilities in the City of Tallahassee, the capital of Florida, was extensively studied based on the (a) temporal reconstruction of the reported power outages and roadway closures, and (b) development of co-resilience metrics to identify and visually map the most affected power system feeders and transportation network locations. Results show those regions with reduced emergency response facility accessibility, and those power lines and roadways under a disruption risk after Hermine hit Tallahassee.
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Statistical and Spatial Analysis of Hurricane-induced Roadway Closures and Power Outages
Hurricanes lead to substantial infrastructure system damages, such as roadway closures and power outages, in the US annually, especially in states like Florida. As such, this paper aimed to assess the impacts of Hurricane Hermine (2016) and Hurricane Michael (2018) on the City of Tallahassee, the capital of Florida, via exploratory spatial and statistical analyses on power outages and roadway closures. First, a geographical information systems (GIS)-based spatial analysis was conducted to explore the power outages and roadway closure patterns in the city including kernel density estimation (KDE) and density ratio difference (DRD) methods. In order to provide a more detailed assessment on which population segments were more affected, a second step included a statistical analysis to identify the relationships between demographic- and socioeconomic-related variables and the magnitude of power outages and roadway closures caused by these hurricanes. The results indicate that the high-risk locations for roadway closures showed different patterns, whereas power outages seemed to have similar spatial patterns for the hurricanes. The findings of this study can provide useful insights and information for city officials to identify the most vulnerable regions which are under the risk of disruption. This can lead to better infrastructure plans and policies.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1832068
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10188009
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Energies
- Volume:
- 13
- Issue:
- 5
- ISSN:
- 1996-1073
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1098
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Natural disasters have devastating effects on the infrastructure and disrupt every aspect of daily life in the regions they hit. To alleviate problems caused by these disasters, first an impact assessment is needed. As such, this paper focuses on a two-step methodology to identify the impact of Hurricane Hermine on the City of Tallahassee, the capital of Florida. The regional and socioeconomic variations in the Hermine’s impact were studied via spatially and statistically analyzing power outages. First step includes a spatial analysis to illustrate the magnitude of customers affected by power outages together with a clustering analysis. This step aims to determine whether the customers affected from outages are clustered or not. Second step involves a Bayesian spatial autoregressive model in order to identify the effects of several demographic-, socioeconomic-, and transportation-related variables on the magnitude of customers affected by power outages. Results showed that customers affected by outages are spatially clustered at particular regions rather than being dispersed. This indicates the need to pinpoint such vulnerable locations and develop strategies to reduce hurricane-induced disruptions. Furthermore, the increase in the magnitude of affected customers was found to be associated with several variables such as the power network and total generated trips as well as the demographic factors. The information gained from the findings of this study can assist emergency officials in identifying critical and/or less resilient regions, and determining those demographic and socioeconomic groups which were relatively more affected by the consequences of hurricanes than others.more » « less
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Hurricane-induced storm surge and flooding often lead to the closures of evacuation routes, which can be disruptive for the victims trying to leave the impacted region. This problem becomes even more challenging when we consider the impact of sea level rise that happens due to global warming and other climate-related factors. As such, hurricane-induced storm surge elevations would increase nonlinearly when sea level rise lifts, flooding access to highways and bridge entrances, thereby reducing accessibility for affected census block groups to evacuate to hurricane shelters during hurricane landfall. This happened with the Category 5 Hurricane Michael which swept the east coast of Northwest Florida with long-lasting damage and impact on local communities and infrastructure. In this paper, we propose an integrated methodology that utilizes both sea level rise (SLR) scenario-informed storm surge simulations and floating catchment area models built in Geographical Information Systems (GIS). First, we set up sea level rise scenarios of 0, 0.5, 1, and 1.5 m with a focus on Hurricane Michael’s impact that led to the development of storm surge models. Second, these storm surge simulation outputs are fed into ArcGIS and floating catchment area-based scenarios are created to study the accessibility of shelters. Findings indicate that rural areas lost accessibility faster than urban areas due to a variety of factors including shelter distributions, and roadway closures as spatial accessibility to shelters for offshore populations was rapidly diminishing. We also observed that as inundation level increases, urban census block groups that are closer to the shelters get extremely high accessibility scores through FCA calculations compared to the other block groups. Results of this study could guide and help revise existing strategies for designing emergency response plans and update resilience action policiesmore » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3390/en13051098
