Surprise Impacts on Infrastructure Resilience: A Case Study of Hurricane Florence and Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune

Abstract

A common way to improve infrastructure resilience is to surge resources for temporary organizing (e.g., staff, equipment, and funding) at disaster-impacted locations to protect and recover failed systems. Yet, the increasing frequency and impacts of natural disasters appear to be causing unexpected damage to infrastructure, even in locations that may have significant emergency response capabilities like military installations. We argue that a key contributor to these failures is whether natural disasters cause surprise or not. We define surprise as an event that contradicts established beliefs, which can lead to ineffective use of resources for temporary organizing and impact infrastructure resilience. To substantiate this claim, we develop a method that relates surprise to measures of infrastructure resilience and conduct a case study on the destructive 2018 storm Hurricane Florence to assess temporary organizing efforts at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune (MCBCL). Our analysis focuses on recovery efforts to manage failures in MCBCL sewer, training ground, school, and mission-essential infrastructure. We find each system experienced varying degrees of surprise that influenced temporary organizing. Specifically, results show when expectations diverged from reality, how long surprise remained unresolved, and whether events should be categorized as situational or fundamental surprise. Results also show the type surprise (i.e., situational or fundamental) and length it remains unresolved has a negative impact on the effectiveness of resources for temporary organizing. Overall, this study advances the temporary organizing literature by showing the differences in capabilities between civilian and military entities, the infrastructure resilience literature by developing new analysis methods for studying surprise, and military installation operations by providing practical recommendations on how to improve resource allocation for future disasters.