Measuring disaster resilience: The impact of hurricane sandy on critical infrastructure systems

Modern critical infrastructure (CI) systems are tightly coupled, resulting in unprecedented complexity and difficulty to predict, limit and control the consequences of disruptions caused by hazards. Therefore, a paradigm shift in disaster risk management is needed: instead of focusing on predicting events, resilience needs to be improved as a basis for adequate response to any event. This paper starts from a definition of CI resilience that provides a basis for quantitative and qualitative decision support. For the quantitative modelling approach, which aims at measuring the resilience of individual CIs, we focus on two CIs of fundamental importance for disaster response: transportation and power supply. The qualitative framework details relations between CIs. The results of this research are illustrated by a case study that analyses the impact of Hurricane Sandy. The findings highlight the need for a framework that combines qualitative and quantitative information from heterogeneous sources to improve disaster resilience.