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Probability of at least each unhappiness level k versus outage duration for a electric power and b water supply
Source publication
Critical infrastructure systems derive their importance from the societal needs they help meet. Yet the relationship between infrastructure system functioning and societal functioning is not well-understood, nor are the impacts of infrastructure system disruptions on consumers. We develop two empirical measures of societal impacts—willingness to pa...
Citations
... In summary, previous academic communities put more emphasis on the research of infrastructure systems themselves and contributed substantially to protecting infrastructure. Indeed, infrastructure systems are critical because of their role in societal functioning, especially in situations where modern societies become increasingly dependent on infrastructure systems [7,29]. However, precisely how infrastructure service disruptions impair society is poorly understood owing to the difficulties in quantitatively measuring the societal impact and integrating it with disruptions [8,9,29]. ...
... Indeed, infrastructure systems are critical because of their role in societal functioning, especially in situations where modern societies become increasingly dependent on infrastructure systems [7,29]. However, precisely how infrastructure service disruptions impair society is poorly understood owing to the difficulties in quantitatively measuring the societal impact and integrating it with disruptions [8,9,29]. ...
... In the dimension of subjective well-being impact, researchers mainly from social science measured individuals' negative perceptions and feelings about infrastructure disruptions by different theoretical frameworks or dimensions, including the hardship experience, deprivation cost, and negative emotions. Correspondingly, the quantifiable instruments or indicators are proposed and measured using social surveys in specific cases to evaluate the impact [29]. The specifics are as follows. ...
... 6 Heat outages may expose individuals to extreme temperatures, precipitating adverse health outcomes. 7 Hot water outages can contribute to mental and physical stress, 8 exacerbating preexisting health conditions. Thus, it is crucial to understand who experiences utility outages. ...
Background
Utility services for electricity, gas, heat, and hot water are necessities for everyday activities (e.g., lighting, cooking, and thermal safety). Utility outages can threaten health; however, information is limited on the prevalence of electricity, gas, heat, and hot water outages in representative studies. We characterized infrastructure-related electricity, gas, heat, and hot water outages in New York City (NYC) and within subgroups.
Methods
Using a representative 2022 survey of NYC adults (18+), we assessed the prevalence for 6+ hour utility outages and compared across building, demographic, and health subgroups. Building characteristics included age, number of floors, rental type, and owner/rental status. Demographics included household poverty, neighborhood poverty, and race/ethnicity. For health, we focused on cognitive impairment, electricity-dependent medical equipment use, and mental health conditions.
Results
Outages impacted 20% of NYC residents. Heat outages were nearly 3× and 2× more common in mid-rise and high-rise buildings respectively, vs. low-rise buildings. Similarly, hot water outages were 5× and over 6× more prevalent in mid-rise and high-rise residences. Renters faced 2× more heat and hot water outages compared with owners. Compared with low-poverty households, high-poverty households faced 2× more hot water outages. Residents with mental health conditions experienced more electricity (11% vs. 5%), heat (15% vs. 7%), and hot water (16% vs. 8%) outages compared with those without.
Conclusions
NYC utility outage prevalence varied by type with heat and hot water being most common. Disparities across building, sociodemographic, and health characteristics were also larger and more frequent for heat and hot water outages.
... Os setores produtivos dependem da estabilidade e disponibilidade de energia para operar máquinas, equipamentos e processos industriais de maneira eficaz (MEEKS et al., 2023). A interrupção no fornecimento de energia pode resultar em prejuízos significativos, afetando não apenas as empresas, mas também a economia de um país (STOCK et al., 2023 Nesse contexto, a Identificação por Radiofrequência (RFID) emerge como uma tecnologia promissora e com claro potencial para melhorar a rastreabilidade dos ativos, embora ainda não esteja plenamente consolidada no gerenciamento de ativos de alta tensão em subestações e linhas de transmissão do setor elétrico (CAMARGO et al., 2018;DUBEY et al., 2022). Esta lacuna destaca a necessidade premente de uma revisão da literatura para suportar a discussão da contribuição do RFID na gestão de ativos nas subestações das empresas distribuidoras no Estado do Rio de Janeiro. ...
... Islam et al. 124 found households with limited access to safe drinking water were more inclined to pay for resilient water infrastructure. Stock et al. 125 observed that higher-income households showed greater WTP for power and transportation resilience, likely due to more disposable income and expectations for service quality. These findings highlight the need to consider economic constraints in WTP studies to avoid misinterpreting lower income as lower willingness to invest. ...
... 93) and willingness-topay models (such as ref. 125). Such economic functions are preliminary steps in quantifying equity as a cost measure; however, these models must avoid misinterpreting lower income as a lower willingness to invest. ...
Infrastructure resilience plays an important role in mitigating the negative impacts of natural hazards by ensuring the continued accessibility and availability of resources. Increasingly, equity is recognized as essential for infrastructure resilience. Yet, after about a decade of research on equity in infrastructure resilience, what is missing is a systematic overview of the state of the art and a research agenda across different infrastructures and hazards. To address this gap, this paper presents a systematic review of equity literature on infrastructure resilience in relation to natural hazard events. In our systematic review of 99 studies, we followed an 8-dimensional assessment framework that recognizes 4 equity definitions including distributional-demographic, distributional-spatial, procedural, and capacity equity. Significant findings show that (1) the majority of studies found were located in the US, (2) interest in equity in infrastructure resilience has been exponentially rising, (3) most data collection methods used descriptive and open-data, particularly with none of the non-US studies using human mobility data, (4) limited quantitative studies used non-linear analysis such as agent-based modeling and gravity networks, (5) distributional equity is mostly studied through disruptions in power, water, and transportation caused by flooding and tropical cyclones, and (6) other equity aspects, such as procedural equity, remain understudied. We propose that future research directions could quantify the social costs of infrastructure resilience and advocate a better integration of equity into resilience decision-making. This study fills a critical gap in how equity considerations can be integrated into infrastructure resilience against natural hazards, providing a comprehensive overview of the field and developing future research directions to enhance societal outcomes during and after disasters. As such, this paper is meant to inform and inspire researchers, engineers, and community leaders to understand the equity implications of their work and to embed equity at the heart of infrastructure resilience plans.
... This leaves people with little to no water supply for the day. Studies elsewhere confirm the disruptions caused by load-shedding on water delivery services as power outages halt water treatment processes [5,23]. Similarly, any load-shedding affecting the two pumping stations scuttles water delivery in MCV. ...
Reliable potable water is essential for sustaining livelihoods and promoting human well-being, yet many rural communities in South Africa have disrupted and inadequate access. This has been exacerbated by the energy crisis that led to frequent load-shedding. As a water-scarce country, the South African government considers sustainable management of resources as critical to sustaining lives and livelihoods. The lengthy load-shedding schedules prompted the need to investigate how they disrupt scheduled water delivery services using the case of Mohlaba-Cross Village in Limpopo Province. This study investigated the challenges load-shedding poses for water access in already water-deprived communities. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected through structured questionnaires, key informant interviews, focus group discussions, observations, and review of documents. Results indicate that load-shedding significantly disrupts scheduled water delivery services, hence daily household chores, livelihoods, local businesses, and economic activities. Some community members resorted to buying water from private vendors, which is unsustainable, especially for low-income households and small businesses. Despite understanding the limitations caused by load-shedding, proactive measures were hindered by a lack of communication and collaboration among key stakeholders. Low pumping capacity and a lack of adaptability in water management posed additional limitations. The study underscores the importance of supply-side interventions by water authorities, such as investing in alternative energy sources and improving pumping capacity to address the interconnected energy and water security challenges. Managing the demand side through promoting water conservation and embracing adaptive management strategies requires effective collaboration by all stakeholders. However, this requires the water authorities to initiate the process. Our study contributes to understanding the energy-water nexus in rural communities and the need for stakeholder engagement to address emerging challenges. It provides insights for policymakers, water managers, businesses, and communities to foster sustainable water management practices and improve the well-being of all.
... Also, the limit value was considered in the deprivation cost function, e.g., the point at which an individual dies after five days of water deprivation, and by regression analysis, an exponential function was fitted the best for the deprivation cost function. Similarly, Stock et al. [55] measured the societal impact by households' WTP to avoid electricity and water disruptions. Although they did not introduce the deprivation cost function, they also found the nonlinear relationship between infrastructure (outage duration) and societal functioning (WTP) using survey-based data from Los Angeles County, USA. Macea et al. [77] used discrete choice modeling to establish a deprivation cost function of water disruption based on a social survey with questions about various hypothetical disruption scenarios, and they found that the Box-Cox model fitted the function best. ...
... Wang et al. [79] introduced a numerical rating scale (11 points) from the field of medical science to measure the suffering level due to the shortage of food, medicine, and tent during disasters, and similarly, asked people through social surveys about their degree of suffering when faced with different scenarios (0 implies no suffering, 10 implies extreme suffering). Stock et al. [55] developed two empirical measures of societal impacts: a WTP to avoid lifeline service interruptions and a constructed scale of unhappiness, which has 5 levels of unhappiness (from Not unhappy to Extremely unhappy) allowing individuals to choose in a questionnaire. They found that unhappiness is better able to distinguish the effects of shorter-duration outages than WTP is. ...
... Households' poor preparation is attributed to past experiences and social vulnerability, which refers to the households with children, racial minority status, and low income and educational attainment, and they are prone to underestimate the impacts of a disaster, or have greater barriers to preparing for disasters, such as relatively high costs, lower accessibility to stores, lower availability of store supplies, etc. Stock et al. [55] used survey-based data from Los Angeles County, and also found significant role of preparation and durations of disruptions (power and water supply system) on households' well-being impact. Differently, in Stock's study, the effects of some sociodemographic characteristics were not significant, like gender, race, education level, and the household with children, partially conflicting with Dargin's findings. ...
Infrastructure systems play a critical role in providing essential products and services for the functioning of modern society; however, they are vulnerable to disasters and their service disruptions can cause severe societal impacts. To protect infrastructure from disasters and reduce potential impacts, great achievements have been made in modeling interdependent infrastructure systems in past decades. In recent years, scholars have gradually shifted their research focus to understanding and modeling societal impacts of disruptions considering the fact that infrastructure systems are critical because of their role in societal functioning, especially under situations of modern societies. Exploring how infrastructure disruptions impair society to enhance resilient city has become a key field of study. By comprehensively reviewing relevant studies, this paper demonstrated the definition and types of societal impact of infrastructure disruptions, and summarized the modeling approaches into four types: extended infrastructure modeling approaches, empirical approaches, agent-based approaches, and big data-driven approaches. For each approach, this paper organized relevant literature in terms of modeling ideas, advantages, and disadvantages. Furthermore, the four approaches were compared according to several criteria, including the input data, types of societal impact, and application scope. Finally, this paper illustrated the challenges and future research directions in the field.
... Other important factors that may impact households' outcomes from an infrastructure disruption are outage duration and prior experience. Outage duration has been linked to increased severity of consequences, as previous studies have found that longer-duration outages were associated with more severe impacts on households and communities (Stock et al. 2023). Conversely, prior experience has been associated with less severe outage consequences, as studies have found that the knowledge gained through previous outages can help households act effectively and engender resilience during disruptions (Heidenstrom and Kvarnlof 2018; Abi Ghanem et al. 2016). ...
In February 2021, severe winter weather conditions associated with Winter Storm Uri triggered an energy infrastructure failure in Texas. Most Texans lost electricity, some lost potable water, natural gas, and suffered other infrastructure-related service disruptions that had profound household consequences. Although several studies have documented the disparities in terms of the types and extent of disruptions Texans experienced during Uri, there is little information about the impact of these disruptions in terms of their burdens on households. Guided by the Capabilities Approach framework, a survey of Texan households was conducted to identify the outage characteristics and capability losses for different household types, as well as the burdens that those disruptions posed to households using both objective and subjective measures. Our results indicate that households that endured longer and constant electricity outages suffered more severe impacts across all measures, including more disrupted household capabilities, increased time, and financial costs to cope during the outages, as well as greater declines in reported life satisfaction. We found that low-income households, households with children, and households with disability challenges suffered more severe objective burdens during the storm, although subjective results for these households were mixed. Households with members over the age of 65 fared better in terms of objective measures, yet suffered more in terms of subjective well-being. Moreover, households that had prior experience with a prolonged outage reported significantly smaller reductions in well-being during the storm than other households, despite not showing any difference in objective measures. Ultimately, our results offer context-specific, post-event information about the impacts and needs of different types of households during Uri that are important for informing emergency management and community resilience planning.
... Other options include the use of surveys [ 36 ] or aggregated customer and census data [37] . Additionally, service demand pattern data may be required for both asset functionality determination and impact estimation [23] , especially when examining the societal impacts of disruptions [38] . Although sufficiently accurate estimations exist for certain CI services, such as water distribution networks [ 39 , 40 ], they may be more difficult to obtain for other CI services, such as emergency services or the financial sector. ...
Natural hazards impact interdependent infrastructure networks that keep modern society functional. While a variety of modelling approaches are available to represent critical infrastructure networks (CINs) on different scales and analyse the impacts of natural hazards, a recurring challenge for all modelling approaches is the availability and accessibility of sufficiently high-quality input and validation data. The resulting data gaps often require modellers to assume specific technical parameters, functional relationships, and system behaviours. In other cases, expert knowledge from one sector is extrapolated to other sectoral structures or even crosssectorally applied to fill data gaps. The uncertainties introduced by these assumptions and extrapolations and their influence on the quality of modelling outcomes are often poorly understood and difficult to capture, thereby eroding the reliability of these models to guide resilience enhancements. Additionally, ways of overcoming the data availability challenges in CIN modelling, with respect to each modelling purpose, remain an open question. To address these challenges, a generic modelling workflow is derived from existing modelling approaches to examine model definition and validations, as well as the six CIN modelling stages, including mapping of infrastructure assets, quantification of dependencies, assessment of natural hazard impacts, response & recovery, quantification of CI services, and adaptation measures. The data requirements of each stage were systematically defined, and the literature on potential sources was reviewed to enhance data collection and raise awareness of potential pitfalls. The application of the derived workflow funnels into a framework to assess data availability challenges. This is shown through three case studies, taking into account their different modelling purposes: hazard hotspot assessments , hazard risk management, and sectoral adaptation. Based on the three model purpose types provided, a framework is suggested to explore the implications of data scarcity for certain data types, as well as their reasons and consequences for CIN model reliability. Finally, a discussion on overcoming the challenges of data scarcity is presented.
... Severe weather events, characterized by increasing frequency and intensity, negatively impact critical infrastructure including water and electric utility services (Long et al., 2023;Ritchie et al., 2022;Stock et al., 2023). For example, the February 2021 Cold Air Outbreak in the USA brought historic lows, winter precipitation and widespread power outages across the states of Texas and Oklahoma (NOAA, 2023). ...
Purpose
Across the USA, local municipalities and providers struggle to reliably supply water and electricity when faced with severe weather events induced by climate change. Previous research suggests those at higher risk for experiencing the detrimental effects of climate change have higher climate-related concerns. Additionally, research demonstrates variation in trust in institutions and perceptions of environmental justice along racial lines, which can influence concern for access to resources. Informed by this research, the authors ask two questions: how do Oklahomans’ trust in institutions, environmental justice perceptions and global climate change risk perceptions differ based on race, and how do these factors influence concern for water and electrical infrastructure? The purpose of this study is to better understand Oklahomans’ trust in information from institutions, environmental justice perceptions, global climate change risk perceptions and concern for water and electrical infrastructure.
Design/methodology/approach
This study uses a series of nested regression models to analyze the survey responses of 2,687 Oklahoman adults. The data were pulled from Wave 3 of the Oklahoma Meso-scale Integrated Socio-geographic Network survey, which is part of the National Science Foundation EPSCoR S3OK project.
Findings
The findings demonstrate the complex interplay of riskscapes – or risk landscapes – that encompass institutional trust, perceptions of environmental justice, climate change and infrastructure in Oklahoma. The authors find evidence that education and income are better predictors of institutional trust and environmental justice than race among our respondents. Political ideology emerges as a significant predictor across all hypotheses.
Originality/value
This study contributes to the understanding of complex dynamics involving race, perceptions of environmental justice, trust in information from institutions, risk perceptions of climate change and concerns for water and electrical infrastructure in Oklahoma.
... Kong et al. (2021) calculated the infrastructure efficiency by removing different percentage of nodes in the system for both power and water systems. Previous studies also investigated the societal, mental, and economic impacts of power disruption (Dargin and Mostafavi 2020;Stock et al. 2021) along with interdependency analysis among the infrastructure systems. Studies have explored recovery strategies and efficiency (Ge et al. 2019;Loggins et al. 2019) as well. ...
Major disasters such as wildfire, tornado, hurricane, tropical storm, and flooding cause disruptions in infrastructure systems such as power and water supply, wastewater management, telecommunication, and transportation facilities. Disruptions in electricity infrastructure have negative impacts on sectors throughout a region, including education, medical services, financial services, and recreation. In this study, we introduced a novel approach to investigate the factors that can be associated with longer restoration time of power service after a hurricane. Considering restoration time as the dependent variable and using a comprehensive set of county-level data, we estimated a generalized accelerated failure time (GAFT) model that accounts for spatial dependence among observations for time to event data. The model fit improved by 12% after considering the effects of spatial correlation in time to event data. Using the GAFT model and Hurricane Irma’s impact on Florida as a case study, we examined: (1) differences in electric power outages and restoration rates among different types of power companies—investor-owned power companies, rural and municipal cooperatives; (2) the relationship between the duration of power outage and power system variables; and (3) the relationship between the duration of power outage and socioeconomic attributes. The findings of this study indicate that counties with a higher percentage of customers served by investor-owned electric companies and lower median household income faced power outage for a longer time. This study identified the key factors to predict restoration time of hurricane-induced power outages, allowing disaster management agencies to adopt strategies required for restoration process.
