Infrastructure capacity building for recovery and resilience needs of communities to natural hazards.

摘要

The impact of natural disasters in a region is intensified by reduced infrastructure serviceability and inadequate capacities such as resources, manpower, equipment, knowledge base, and institutional capacities for recovery. Often, existing capacities are unable to support post disaster recovery phases of the emergency, short term recovery or restoration and long term recovery. For example, the serviceability of the transportation network in Haiti after the earthquake impeded both the first emergency response teams and the supply of international aid. The hospitals were not able to treat survivors due to lack of utility services such as water, electricity as well as medical supplies, hospital beds, and medical equipment. This shortage of capacities increases the severity of impact and delay the recovery period. The restoration and reconstruction of the community is also slowed, delaying the return of the community to pre disaster status.;Therefore, it is necessary to assess the shortage of capacities of infrastructure and communities during the disaster response period. The need for this assessment is justified by its potential impact on community resilience through strategic building of capacities to adequately meet the requirements of recovery arising in different phases. Furthermore, it will also complement the reduced infrastructure services which in turn will provide additional support for community recovery. This research focuses on developing a decision support system that will allow decision makers to i) identify the capacity needs to expedite post disaster recovery thereby enhancing resilience, ii) develop strategies for post disaster recovery, iii) integrate the experiences of emergency/short term phases into long term planning. For this purpose, infrastructure are classified into seven types: civil, civic, social, financial, educational, environmental, and cyber. These infrastructure play a vital role in not only supporting community's sustenance but also mitigating post disaster needs for recovery. The decision support system establishes relationships among infrastructure using node analysis and identifies capacity needs based on capacities existing during post disaster situation and the recovery and sustaining activities of a community. This is further used to develop effective strategies for each recovery phase. The decision support system identifies capacities specific to different recovery phases. For emergency and short term phase, the optimal capacities are selected from the identified capacities to complement the reduced infrastructure services. This helps in adequately meeting the gap between the needed and available services. For long term recovery, the capacities are identified and selected using the benefit cost comparison analysis. Through this analysis, both monetary and nonmonetary benefits are prioritized for selecting the appropriate long term solution. This decision support system also facilitates the integration of capacity building experiences of emergency/short term into long term planning. The selected solution for long term planning will allow the communities to respond better during subsequent disasters.;The developed decision support system was applied to the case of a medium sized hospital in Midwest region of the United States. The case study focuses on building capacities for adequately meeting the water demands of the hospital in case of a water outage exceeding twelve hours. The development of the case study included discussions with the facility planners for understanding the emergency water planning preparedness. Required data was collected through published reports, documents and articles. The developed decision support system is adaptable to other infrastructure networks, infrastructure and community needs and can be scaled to analyze multiple relationships at the same time. Through this research, decision makers could: (i) identify the capacity needs to expedite post disaster recovery thereby enhancing resilience, (ii) develop strategies for post disaster recovery, and (iii) integrate the experiences of emergency/short term phases into long term planning.