The research detailed in this report aims to better understand the impact of Hurricane Harvey on food access in Harris County and Southeast Texas. This report summarizes how disruptions to critical infrastructure (i.e. transportation, water, electricity, buildings, and communications) impacted the functioning of food suppliers and how that change in functioning affected food access. The findings indicate that infrastructure failures, especially transportation and electricity, negatively affect food access. This report highlights the importance of non-infrastructure factors, such as impacts to people, in helping to understand changes in food access that occur after a disaster. This research contributes to the fields of natural hazard research and food access by providing newly developed survey tools. These tools can be applied to future research on the intersection of critical infrastructure interruption and their effect on food suppliers’ ability to provide food access to communities. This archive includes the report, project management files, and code required to fully replicate all figures and tables.Food insecurity is a chronic problem in the United States that annually affects over 40 million people under normal conditions. This difficult reality can dramatically worsen after disasters. Such events can disrupt both the supply and demand sides of food systems, restricting food distribution and access precisely when households are in a heightened need for food assistance. Often, retailers and food banks must react quickly to meet local needs under difficult post-disaster circumstances. Residents of Harris County and Southeast Texas experienced this problem after Hurricane Harvey made landfall on the Texas Gulf Coast in August 2017. The primary data collected by this project relate specifically to the supply side. The data attempt to identify factors that impacted the ability of suppliers to help ensure access to food, with a focus on fresh food access. Factors included impacts to people, property and products due to hurricane-related damage to infrastructure. Two types of food suppliers were the foci of this research: food aid agencies and food retailers. The research team examined food aid agencies in Southeast Texas with data collection methods that included secondary data analysis, a focus group and an online survey. The second population studied was food retailers with in-person surveys with store managers. Food retailers were randomly sampled in three Texas counties: Jefferson, Orange, and Harris. The data collection methods resulted in 32 food aid agency online survey responses and 210 completed food retail in-person surveys. Data were collected five to eight months after the event, which helped to increase the reliability and validity of the data. The time-sensitive nature of post-disaster data requires research teams to quickly organize their efforts before entering the field. The purpose of this project archive is to share the primary data collected, document methods, and to help future research teams reduce the amount of time needed for project development and reporting. This archive does not contain Personally or Business Identifiable Information.
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Food Access Restoration Model:Food Access Impact Survey for Harris County and Southeast Texas after Hurricane Harvey in 2017
Access after disasters to resources such as food poses planning problems that affect millions of people each year. Understanding how disasters disrupt and alter food access during the initial steps of the recovery process provides new evidence to inform both food system and disaster planning. This research takes a supply-side focus and explores the results from a survey of food retailers after Hurricane Harvey in three Texas counties. The survey collected information on how the disaster affected a store’s property, people, and products and the length of time a store was closed, had reduced hours, and stopped selling fresh food items. We find that a focus only on store closures and property damage would underestimate the number of days residents have limited fresh food access by nearly two weeks. Further, stores in lower-income communities with chronic low-access to supermarkets (food deserts) were closed longer than other stores, potentially compounding pre-existing inequalities. We conclude that to plan for a more equitable food supply post-disaster, planners should embrace more dimensions of access, encourage retailer mitigation, and assess the types of retailers and their distribution within their communities. This mission includes social science collections related to models for predicting days to restoration of food access after a disaster. These collections include the programed workflow to replicated results for the journal article: Rosenheim, Nathanael, Maria Watson, John Cassels Connors, Mastura Safayet, Walter Gillis Peacock. “Food Access After Disasters: A Multidimensional View of Restoration After Hurricane Harvey”. Journal of the American Planning Association. doi.org/0.1080/01944363.2023.2284160Food insecurity is a chronic problem in the United States that annually affects over 40 million people under normal conditions. This difficult reality can dramatically worsen after disasters. Such events can disrupt both the supply and demand sides of food systems, restricting food distribution and access precisely when households are in a heightened need for food assistance. Often, retailers and food banks must react quickly to meet local needs under difficult post-disaster circumstances. Residents of Harris County and Southeast Texas experienced this problem after Hurricane Harvey made landfall on the Texas Gulf Coast in August 2017. The primary data collected by this project relate specifically to the supply side. The data attempt to identify factors that impacted the ability of suppliers to help ensure access to food, with a focus on fresh food access. Factors included impacts to people, property and products due to hurricane-related damage to infrastructure. Two types of food suppliers were the foci of this research: food aid agencies and food retailers. The research team examined food aid agencies in Southeast Texas with data collection methods that included secondary data analysis, a focus group and an online survey. The second population studied was food retailers with in-person surveys with store managers. Food retailers were randomly sampled in three Texas counties: Jefferson, Orange, and Harris. The data collection methods resulted in 32 food aid agency online survey responses and 210 completed food retail in-person surveys. Data were collected five to eight months after the event, which helped to increase the reliability and validity of the data. The time-sensitive nature of post-disaster data requires research teams to quickly organize their efforts before entering the field. The purpose of this project archive is to share the primary data collected, document methods, and to help future research teams reduce the amount of time needed for project development and reporting. This archive does not contain Personally or Business Identifiable Information.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1638273
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10505086
- Publisher / Repository:
- Designsafe-CI
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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The food aid agency survey design was informed by the focus group discussion and aimed to gain quantitative data from all food aid agencies affiliated or associated with the Southeast Texas Food Bank. A list of affiliated food aid agencies, their managers, and email addresses was obtained from the Southeast Texas Food Bank. The list included the 89 food aid agencies active in Southeast Texas prior to Hurricane Harvey. Each of these food aid agencies was emailed a personalized invitation to the online survey. The survey of food aid agencies was conducted online using the survey software program Qualtrics XM (Qualtrics, 2019). The online surveys integrated data collected from the Southeast Texas Food Bank Primarius system to tailor specific questions to specific food aid agencies. The survey was designed to collect information on (1) physical damage to the food aid agency, disruption or damage to infrastructure, and transportation and access problems; (2) impact on workers or volunteers; and (3) disruptions to operations and inventory, which included changes in the food distribution schedule, food categories distributed, and sources of food.Food insecurity is a chronic problem in the United States that annually affects over 40 million people under normal conditions. This difficult reality can dramatically worsen after disasters. Such events can disrupt both the supply and demand sides of food systems, restricting food distribution and access precisely when households are in a heightened need for food assistance. Often, retailers and food banks must react quickly to meet local needs under difficult post-disaster circumstances. Residents of Harris County and Southeast Texas experienced this problem after Hurricane Harvey made landfall on the Texas Gulf Coast in August 2017. The primary data collected by this project relate specifically to the supply side. The data attempt to identify factors that impacted the ability of suppliers to help ensure access to food, with a focus on fresh food access. Factors included impacts to people, property and products due to hurricane-related damage to infrastructure. Two types of food suppliers were the foci of this research: food aid agencies and food retailers. The research team examined food aid agencies in Southeast Texas with data collection methods that included secondary data analysis, a focus group and an online survey. The second population studied was food retailers with in-person surveys with store managers. Food retailers were randomly sampled in three Texas counties: Jefferson, Orange, and Harris. The data collection methods resulted in 32 food aid agency online survey responses and 210 completed food retail in-person surveys. Data were collected five to eight months after the event, which helped to increase the reliability and validity of the data. The time-sensitive nature of post-disaster data requires research teams to quickly organize their efforts before entering the field. The purpose of this project archive is to share the primary data collected, document methods, and to help future research teams reduce the amount of time needed for project development and reporting. This archive does not contain Personally or Business Identifiable Information.more » « less
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Abstract Limited access to food stores is often linked to higher health risks and lower community resilience. Socially vulnerable populations experience persistent disparities in equitable food store access. However, little research has been done to examine how people's access to food stores is affected by natural disasters. Previous studies mainly focus on examining potential access using the travel distance to the nearest food store, which often falls short of capturing the actual access of people. Therefore, to fill this gap, this paper incorporates human mobility patterns into the measure of actual access, leveraging large‐scale mobile phone data. Specifically, we propose a novel enhanced two‐step floating catchment area method with travel preferences (E2SFCA‐TP) to measure accessibility, which extends the traditional E2SFCA model by integrating actual human mobility behaviors. We then analyze people's actual access to grocery and convenience stores across both space and time under the devastating winter storm Uri in Harris County, Texas. Our results highlight the value of using human mobility patterns to better reflect people's actual access behaviors. The proposed E2SFCA‐TP measure is more capable of capturing mobility variations in people's access, compared with the traditional E2SFCA measure. This paper provides insights into food store access across space and time, which could aid decision making in resource allocation to enhance accessibility and mitigate the risk of food insecurity in underserved areas.
