Quantification of community resilience to natural hazards by tracking cell-phone GPS location data

Following our ongoing studies on the quantification of urban resilience to natural hazards this paper focuses on quantifying the resilience of local communities which according to reports and satellite radiance data (nighttime light emission) have experienced heavy damage in the wider urban center. Our study focuses on specific heavily damaged communities from the Dallas metroplex and the greater Houston urban area from the February 2021 winter storm. We only distilled cell-phone IDs that their homes are in the identified communities of interest and we trace the path of these IDs on the greater urban center prior, during and after the North American Winter Storm struck. Our study adopts the definition of “engineering” resilience which is encoded in the mean square displacement (MSD) of the citizens of a given community. All computed MSDs of the citizens from these heavily damaged communities show invariably a noticeable suppression during the duration of the storm; yet, immediately after the expiration of the cold storm; all community MSDs from the cities of Dallas and Houston indicate, that in terms of an ensemble average (MSD), each of the communities examined reverted back to the pre-storm response almost immediately; suggesting an inherent “engineering” resilience to the winter storm. Accordingly, this paper confirms our previous findings on the wider urban scale; that even at the community scale the urban fabric of large American cities of medium-to-high population density exhibits a great degree of “engineering” resilience.