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Community Disaster Recovery Resourcing Strategy Design and Assessment
Abstract
Disasters impact the delivery of infrastructure services and disrupt the normal functioning of communities. A primary goal of recovery is to restore patterns of activity to pre-disaster levels in the shortest time possible with minimum performance loss. Resourcing strategies in the post-disaster period should be efficient to maximize benefits with minimum resources and effectively ensure the desired results. Limited resources force recovery planners to choose among multiple competing priorities across infrastructures and populations (e.g., tourism, transportation, workforce, businesses, public health, residents). Understanding how the structure of community infrastructure systems impact recovery can improve resource planning by identifying dominant causal structures and high leverage points in the community recovery process. This research combines system dynamics and design structure matrix (DSM) modeling to build, test, and apply a feedback theory of community disaster recovery. We compared several recovery resourcing strategies and tested their impacts on recovery duration and lost performance. In terms of intersectoral prioritization, it was found that Housing and Livelihood (such as commerce and tourism) sectors were constantly amongst the top funded sectors in better performing resourcing strategies due to their direct impacts on the community. Model analysis further reveals that sectors with least initial capacity (due to disaster or prior despair, and as impacted by external aid) and slow characteristic sector restoration rate are the most ‘critical.’ A recovery resourcing matrix is developed that categorizes sectors as ‘least,’ ‘moderate,’ and ‘very’ critical based on their sector restoration speed and the available capacity. Our model results show that allocation of resources using the recovery resourcing matrix can speed up recovery by 55%, while reducing the performance loss by 51%.
Subject
Disaster RecoveryInfrastructure Interdependencies
Feedback
System Dynamics
Design Structure Matrix
Resourcing
Policy
Citation
Qureshi, Rameez Riyaz (2022). Community Disaster Recovery Resourcing Strategy Design and Assessment. Doctoral dissertation, Texas A&M University. Available electronically from https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /197975.