Integrated infrastructure-plan analysis for resilience enhancement of post-hazards access to critical facilities
Introduction
Connected roads form the roadway network to provide essential transportation services for safe and efficient delivery of people and goods. People today have increasingly high expectations for transportation performance and low tolerance for disruption, which requires the transportation system to bounce quickly back from disruptions. This is closely tied to the concept of resilience. Resilience refers to the ability of a system's capacity to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from, and more successfully adapt to adverse events (National Research Council, 2012;). Transportation resilience has multiple aspects, including (1) the ability to maintain its normal level of services or return to that level in a timely manner; (2) the ability to compensate for losses to allow functionality, even when that system is damaged or destroyed; (3) the ability to manage unexpected situations without complete failure; and (4) the ability to absorb consequence of disruption and maintain freight mobility (Wan, Yang, Zhang, Yan, & Fan, 2018a; Weilant, Strong, & Miller, 2019).
Disruptions to the transportation network impacts community resilience by severely reducing economic productivity, harming local commercial activities and community well-being, and restricting people's mobility and accessibility (Weilant et al., 2019). Access to critical facilities (e.g., grocery store, pharmacy, hospital, shelter, gas station), in particular, is pivotal in maintaining community resilience, as people require access to critical resources and services to recover from the disruption, such as healthcare services (Dong, Wang, Mostafavi, & Gao, 2019, Dong, Esmalian, Farahmand, & Mostafavi, 2020). Moreover, risks associated with post-disaster access to critical facilities are not evenly distributed but concentrated in areas that are highly exposed to hazards (Song et al., 2019; Tsou, Hung, & Chang, 2005). One way to improve community resilience is to mitigate potential risks to ensure transportation network access to critical facilities during and after a natural hazard event (Forrest, Trell, & Woltjer, 2020).
A deep understanding of the community resilience requires a holistic vulnerability assessment considering disrupted transportation access to critical facilities. Transportation network failure may lead to disruption of access to critical facilities in two different ways: (1) direct impact to the road elements in the neighborhood due to road failure, such as a bridge collapse, road inundation, or road closure/work zone; (2) indirect impact due to isolating effect. For example, failure of roads in other region can cut off the paths between investigating neighborhood and the critical facilities. Although the disruption of access to critical facilities may result from both direct and indirect impacts, the corresponding impacts and risk mitigation approaches are different. The first disruption cause can be addressed by directly improving the physical infrastructure to mitigate the impact from the hazards, while the second disruption scenario requires a systematic understanding of the communities' risk profile. To do so, a network approach is needed to examine the vulnerability of different neighborhoods in terms of their accessibility to critical facilities in facing flood disruption. Dong, Yu, Farahmand, and Mostafavi (2019) proposed the robust component to evaluate network access to critical facilities in facing collective link failures, considering all possible paths. Given the disruption scenarios, vulnerability of different components of a network can be examined through a percolation network analysis approach (Dong, Mostafizi, Wang, Gao, & Li, 2020). Considering a network formed by links and nodes, percolation method refers to the process of removing a fraction of nodes and their connected links and then re-assessing the network functionality. This method enables a closer look at transportation vulnerability in terms of post-disaster access to critical facilities through a resilience lens.
A network of infrastructures also relies on a network of plans to guide infrastructure development and address infrastructure vulnerability to ensure its healthy functioning in both normal conditions and when facing disaster disruptions. Here, a network of plans refers to a collection of local and regional plans that address or affect local vulnerability to hazards. As we cannot prevent weather-related hazards, investing resources into infrastructure development and planning is critical in enhancing resilience (Weilant et al., 2019). Prioritizing planning can improve community resilience by including policies that anticipate adaptation, recovery, and vulnerability reduction before and after a disruption (Berke, Malecha, Yu, Lee, & Masterson, 2019; Godschalk, 2003; Lu & Stead, 2013). To improve the resilience of a transportation system, relevant agencies develop plans to guide investments such as retrofitting or rebuilding vulnerable assets in hazard zones to ensure the region's roadways are resilient to disruption (Hopkins & Knaap, 2018). However, plans are often developed independently, with each addressing a specific issue(s) in the region (Kaza & Hopkins, 2012). Moreover, these plans can be fragmented and poorly integrated, and may even potentially increase community vulnerability to hazards (Berke et al., 2015). For example, a hazard mitigation plan includes a policy that specifies avoidance of infrastructure investments in a floodplain (Li, Dong, & Mostafavi, 2019), but an infrastructure plan (road, or water/sewer) proposes expansion of capacity that stimulates development in the same location. Failure to effectively integrate hazard mitigation and awareness throughout the network of local plans has become an international policy (United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction., 2017) and national policy concern (FEMA, 2015).
To address this issue, Berke et al. (2015) developed a resilience scorecard to evaluate the degree of coordination among local plans and their combined effect on vulnerability to flooding, considering both positive and adverse impacts of the plans. A Plan Integration for Resilience Scorecard (PIRS) analysis can provide insights on conflicts between plan polices and can help local planners and emergency managers identify opportunities to align plans to reduce vulnerability in hazard-prone areas (Malecha, Masterson, Yu, & Berke, 2019). Although many plans have the overall goal of increasing community resilience, the focus of individual plans and their constituent policies may vary, such as retrofitting physical infrastructure or increasing green space (Afriyanie et al., 2020). Additionally, not all local plans will increase the resilience of the transportation system.
There is a notable lack of understanding of the impacts of integrated resilience policy on enhancing network accessibility to critical facilities. To bridge this gap, an integrated infrastructure-plan analysis framework will be conducted to evaluate the extent to which local plans are integrated to improve post-disaster access to critical facilities—including grocery stores, pharmacies, and gas stations—using Hurricane Harvey's impact in Houston, Texas, as a scenario. Hurricane Harvey, a Category 4 hurricane that ravaged coastal Texas and the Houston region in late August 2017, caused $190 billion in damage and revealed the community's vulnerability in terms of the transportation network and policy deficiencies in addressing such vulnerability (Winfree, 2019). This research aims to examine the degree to which local plans are integrated in terms of increasing transportation network resilience by enhancing accessibility to critical facilities.
This study is largely motivated by the fact that plan and policy making often focus on enhancing regional disaster resilience without sufficient consideration of communities' needs for and access to critical services, especially in the aftermath of a disaster (Mitsova, Sapat, Esnard, & Lamadrid, 2020). Understanding remains limited regarding the influence of policy on community vulnerability to post-disaster transportation network access to critical facilities, such as grocery stores, pharmacies, and gas stations (Lang, Chen, Chan, Yung, & Lee, 2019). Houston, Texas, the fourth-most populated city in the U.S., located in Harris county, is the only major city without zoning regulations in North America, and is well known for its modest land use controls. Compared with other cities, government-initiated urban development policies for land use regulations are limited in Houston, which is comprised of 88 “super neighborhoods” (City of Houston, 2020). A super neighborhood is an area that is designated geographically, in which different entities such as residents, civic organizations, government, and different businesses cooperate and collaborate to identify and prioritize community needs, and plan for addressing them. Local planning typically focuses on economic growth, potentially conflicting with efforts to enhance hazard mitigation and resilient infrastructure. Using the case of a set of super neighborhoods in western Houston (Fig. 2) during a flooding scenario, this study will examine whether local infrastructure-related plans and policies address community needs for access to critical facilities after flood inundation. This research will contribute to the evolving discourse on resilience enhancement by introducing an integrated framework on strategic infrastructure plan development for community vulnerability to access disruption analysis, enabling stakeholders to examine the existing resilience plans and practices and identify gaps for resilience improvement in future plans.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews recent research on post-disaster road network connectivity and access to critical facilities, and on resilience of community networks of plans. Section 3 shows the methodology of the adopted robust component and plan integration for resilience scorecard. Section 4 presents the experiment results from a road network analysis through a case study in Houston and Section 5 analyze the resilience scorecard evaluation results of the local plans in the study area. Section 6 integrates the analysis results and discusses the discrepancy between the infrastructure vulnerability and planning endeavor on resilience enhancement. Finally, Section 7 presents a discussion on the results of this paper and Section 8 concludes the paper with major findings and limitations to address in future work.
Section snippets
Literature review
Community resilience can be defined as the ability of different organizations and other community social units to mitigate the risk of hazards, cope with the impact of disasters that occur, and manage restoration and recovery efforts to minimize the adverse consequences of disasters that cause social disruption (Bruneau et al., 2003). Infrastructures, as the backbones of community, support economic growth and prosperity by providing essential services (Ouyang, 2014). During an extreme event,
Methodology
The integrated infrastructure-plan network analysis framework contains two components (as shown in Fig. 1): (1) physical vulnerability analysis that examines the roadway network's access to critical facilities (e.g., grocery, pharmacy, gas) in different flooding scenarios, and (2) plan policy analysis that quantifies policies to build resilience across the study area. The physical vulnerability analysis mainly focuses on examining each roadway intersection's connectivity to critical facilities
Disrupted access to critical facilities
Through calculating intersection's access to critical facilities and aggregating the access score (i.e., 0 for no access and 1 for having access) by the flood-hazard zones, we obtain each district's access to critical facilities in the face of flooding. We defined five ranges for accessibility level index (Low = 0.0–0.2, Low-Medium = 0.2–0.4, Medium = 0.4–0.6, Medium-High = 0.6–0.8, High = 0.8–1.0). Fig. 4 shows the mapped level of accessibility to grocery stores. The shadowed areas in each map
Infrastructure policy resilience score
After thoroughly reviewing the relevant network of plans, we derived scores that reflect the relative infrastructure policy-related resilience in the study area. Following the PIRS method (Section 3.2), 18 local-, city-, and regional-scale plans were evaluated with respect to their effects on infrastructure resilience. Shown in Table 2, these include plans used to guide transportation, hazard mitigation, and development. A resilience score (PIRS) analysis treats different flood zones as
Integrated analysis of access vulnerability and policy score
Knowing the network vulnerability of each hazard zone in terms of losing access to critical facilities during flooding and the corresponding policy resilience scores, we can determine how the infrastructure policies addresses the physical vulnerability. In this integrated analysis, we will mainly focus on the zones that are vulnerable to losing access to critical facilities during floods, since resilient places do not require extensive policy attention in strengthening their network
Discussion
These comparisons between district accessibility to critical facilities and policy scores highlight the discrepancy between physical vulnerability in terms of access loss to critical facilities and policy efforts to enhance resilience. This mismatch reveals a disconcerting absence of consideration of the need to maintain and improve access to critical facilities for all parts of the community. Planning, policy, and engineering decisions related to infrastructure may mean the difference between
Conclusion
Communities' physical and social vulnerability have been researched in various studies (Berke, Malecha, et al., 2019; Dong, Esmalian, et al., 2020; Zeng, Lan, Hamidi, & Zou, 2020). In particular, post-disaster physical network access to critical facilities is essential in maintaining a community's well-being and requires targeted physical infrastructure development for network resilience enhancement. Despite multiple studies and applications (Berke, Malecha, et al., 2019; Malecha et al., 2018;
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Shangjia Dong: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Visualization, Supervision, Project administration. Matthew Malecha: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Visualization. Hamed Farahmand: Methodology, Formal analysis, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Visualization. Ali Mostafavi: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Writing – review & editing,
Declaration of competing interest
None.
Acknowledgement
The authors would like to acknowledge funding support from the National Science Foundation CRISP 2.0 Type 2 #1832662: “Anatomy of Coupled Human-Infrastructure Systems Resilience to Urban Flooding: Integrated Assessment of Social, Institutional, and Physical Networks”. The authors would also like to thank Mr. Connor Lutz for the critical facility data collection. Any opinions, findings, and conclusion or recommendations expressed in this research are those of the authors and do not necessarily
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