Roles of Airports in Regional Disasters: Lessons on Disaster Response, Short-Term Disaster Recovery, and Long-Term Economic Recovery for the San Francisco Bay Area.

摘要

The San Francisco Bay Area is subject to large disasters, including earthquakes, wildfires, and floods. However, catastrophic earthquakes are the largest threat to the region (consisting of Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano and Sonoma counties). The Bay Area airport system includes three international airports, two commercial airports, and dozens of general aviation airports. All of these airports are key resources, as well as key transportation and logistics nodes, in emergency response and recovery. These roles continue during both immediate post-disaster recovery and long-term economic recovery of the region. However, the roles will be impacted and modified based on damage to associated surface transportation systems, utilities (telecommunications, power, fuel, water, wastewater), and support personnel, equipment and supplies. Thus, it is important that airport regulators, airports, and airport users share the same understanding of what could be asked of the aviation system to support disaster response and recovery. This report describes those understandings by identifying: A potential role for commercial and general aviation airports during the three disaster phases as expressed by local government organizations operating within the Bay Area; Actual roles of airports in several recent disasters, based on a review of the literature as well as interviews with airport operators and others involved with those airports at the time of the disasters and during long-term recovery; Recommendations of actions that could be taken by airports to ensure that they can more quickly recover from an incidents, increase their value to regional response actions in future disasters using potential performance improvements, adding mechanisms to speed repair of any damage to airport facilities or to infrastructure serving those facilities, and opportunities for improved coordination.