Addressing Inequities in Service Disruptions with Human-Centric Infrastructure Resilience: An Empirical Assessment of Household-Infrastructure Interactions During Disasters
Abstract
Natural disasters place tremendous stress on critical infrastructure systems by testing their service reliability under extreme condition. Prolonged service disruptions can pose serious threats to the physical, emotional, and well-being of residents in a community. In fact, critical infrastructure such as transportation, power, water, and communication systems are vital to maintaining the structure of a community. In the standard infrastructure resilience model (Fig.1), the goal is to eliminate the loss of service functions and improve the rapidity of function restoration in systems. However, this model fails to consider the variation in the sociodemographic characteristics of subpopulations and the extent to which vulnerable populations (e.g., low-income families and racial minorities) are disproportionately exposed to risks due to service disruptions. As a result, there is a lack of fundamental information about household interactions with infrastructure services in disasters, and more specifically, how these interactions differ with respect to different subpopulation groups. Understanding the disparities in infrastructure disruption impact is essential to integrating the needs of diverse populations into planning and prioritization of resilient infrastructure while mitigating impacts to the most vulnerable members of society when infrastructure services are disrupted. Therefore, our research study holistically views the disaster impact on individual households through four dimensions: the experienced hardship, the extent of exposure, the zone of tolerance, and well-being impact.
To address these shortcomings, a new framework for a human-centric infrastructure service model that conceptualizes the association between humans (in terms of well-being and hardship) and infrastructure (in terms of service provisions) is developed and demonstrated using empirical data collected from a household survey and analyzed using correlation analysis. In the first study, correlation analysis is used to confirm an empirical relationship between well-being in households and infrastructure service disruption. It further establishes the existence of inequitable impacts in service disruptions on vulnerable population groups. A second study seeks to understand how social media is used for information communication behaviors surrounding different infrastructure service disruptions using logistic regression models. Existing disparities among vulnerable groups can be exacerbated by differences in social media access and use as tools for disaster and service disruption communications. The third study employs Structural Equation Models (SEM) to develop a systems-level understanding of household-level processes related to demand and access to FEW services during disasters with respect to differential household experiences. The final study of the dissertation uses Classification and Regression Trees (CART) to analyze underlying pathways of well-being impact disparities in vulnerable groups and different infrastructure services. Collectively, the studies of this dissertation advance the understanding of social inequalities in exposure and hardship experienced due to infrastructure service disruptions in disasters. In particular, the findings provide the much-needed empirical information necessary to uncover the extent to which subpopulations in a community experience varying levels of the disaster impact due to infrastructure system disruptions. Hence, the study contributes to establishing the fundamental knowledge needed for a paradigm shift towards a more equitable resilience approach in infrastructure systems.
Subject
Infrastructure ResilienceEquitable Resilience
Disasters
Natural Hazards
Household Resilience
Citation
Dargin, Jennifer Sara (2022). Addressing Inequities in Service Disruptions with Human-Centric Infrastructure Resilience: An Empirical Assessment of Household-Infrastructure Interactions During Disasters. Doctoral dissertation, Texas A&M University. Available electronically from https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /197284.