Repeat Disaster Impacts to Infrastructure Networks and their Effects on Economic Agent Recovery

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Research shows that infrastructure damage from repetitive hazard events and the ensuing reduced service has a strong, negative impact on business and household economic performance. Databases and methods exist related to infrastructure damage and loss. Little exists with respect to infrastructure restoration over time and the relationship to local economies. There is a critical need to develop and validate models of infrastructure and economic interdependency and recovery from disasters. This project will develop a database of infrastructure damage, service loss, and restoration in Western Washington, a region with high frequency moderate and large-scale flood events. Moreover, it will use this infrastructure damage database to develop a spatially explicit economic recovery model to quantify and validate linkages between infrastructure damage and economic loss and recovery. This work will build upon ResiliUS, a prototype computer model of loss and recovery of critical community services from disasters, developed by the project?s principal investigator. The database framework and computer model will be designed to be easily transferable to other parts of the United States. The goal of this project is to advance knowledge on several fronts: 1) a database framework for measuring, assessing, and monitoring infrastructure impacts on the economy, 2) a populated database of infrastructure service loss and restoration over time - to our knowledge the first multi-service, geographic and longitudinal baseline on infrastructure damage and service downtime linked to economic agent performance, 3) a modular community disaster loss and recovery model with geographic representation of infrastructure system components and economic agent location, 4) a prototype approach for visualizing large amounts of geographic data on service loss and recovery, and 5) model application in two Western Washington communities, aimed at validating and collaboratively assessing the model as a tool for enhancing the monitoring of infrastructure restoration and economic recovery and policy making to support community disaster resilience.The data collected as part of this project will provide valuable insight regarding policies and plans to reduce infrastructure service loss and the impacts of that loss on the economy. A secondary component of this project will be to investigate effective methods for communicating and visualizing both the data collected and outputs of the ResiliUS computer model to stakeholders, such as emergency managers, elected officials and urban planners. As such, the project will include a community collaborative model assessment conducted in two Western Washington counties. Undergraduate and graduate students will be exposed to the research process through research assistanceships, paid internships, volunteer data gathering opportunities, and in-class service learning projects. The results from this study will be disseminated through academic journals, academic conference presentations, and local emergency management and planning association meetings.