Assessing the effectiveness of disaster risk reduction strategies on the regional recovery of critical infrastructure systems

Communities depend on critical infrastructure systems to support their regular operations and future development. Destructive events, such as natural disasters, threaten to disrupt service to these systems and the communities they support. Strategies designed to reduce the impacts from disasters and other events are therefore an important consideration for community planning. At a regional level, coordination between communities supports the efficient use of resources for implementing disaster risk reduction (DRR) measures and completing post-disaster repairs to meet the needs of all residents. Coordination is challenging, however, due to the complexity of regional systems and competing stakeholder interests. This work presents a case study model of regional water, wastewater, and power systems, and demonstrates the effect of seismic hardening and increased resource availability on post-earthquake repair requirements and critical infrastructure recovery. Model results indicate that implementing DRR strategies can reduce required repair costs by over 40 percent and outage severity by approximately 50 percent for the studied sectors. Not all strategies are effective for all sectors and locations, however, so this work discusses the importance of comprehensive, coordinated, and accessible emergency planning activities to ensure that the needs of all residents are considered.