A New Transportation Disruption Metric for Household Food And Water Resource Accessibility after Earthquakes

Keywords: Transportation disruption, food access, earthquake, HayWired,
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 12

Abstract

Transportation disruption is one of the most important sources of social and economic loss in a disaster. Damage to transportation infrastructure in an earthquake may degrade supply chains that serve millions of residents, isolating large areas of the population. New metrics for early warning and decision support must be developed to rapidly assess, prioritize and allocate resources for infrastructure repair, and to mitigate impacts and disproportionate hardships experienced in vulnerable communities. This study develops a new household-level metric for accessibility that can be used by emergency managers for estimating food and water resource access loss in an earthquake, and for allocating resources to the most severely impacted areas. Current accessibility metrics of loss in terms of percent (%) increase in travel time across a network can not be directly connected to household-level impacts to emergency food and water resource access.
The innovation of our approach is in recognizing that transportation disruption affects individual households in much the same way as power or water service outage—at the household level, and not across a network as previous methods have investigated. We estimate the average percentage (%) increase in travel time for emergency food access from origin-destination analysis, by ~1 km grid cell in the study region and estimate uncertainty from multiple simulations of damages to the transportation network. Our research applies the new transportation disruption metric in a case study of the HayWired earthquake scenario, within Alameda and Contra Costa Counties, California (USA).