RAPID: Exploring Impacts of Cascading Failure and Recovery Efforts of Interdependent Critical Infrastructure in Socially Vulnerable Puerto Rican Communities After Hurricane Fiona

Hurricane Fiona severely impacted Southwestern Puerto Rico, provoking landslides, unleashing flooding across the Island, and obliterating the power grid. Such impacts are quite unusual for a Category 1 hurricane, raising concerns about disaster-preparedness of the US Territory that faces a multilayered socioeconomic crisis rooted in long-standing policy, migration, and poor budget practices. While it is well-known that disasters and subsequent recovery efforts exacerbate the socioeconomic disparities among marginalized groups, there is a lack of understanding of how these groups are being impacted by the cascading critical infrastructure (CI) failures and delays in the restoration process. While the role of CI interdependencies has gained importance for analyzing cascading failures, their linkage to restoration activities after a hurricane and the compounding effect on community recovery have not yet been extensively studied or systematically documented. This Grant for Rapid Response Research (RAPID) award supports the collection of time-sensitive data to study the impacts of cascading hurricane-induced failures of electric and transportation networks on socially vulnerable Puerto Rican communities and to understand the relationships between CI restoration activities and faster community recovery. The research findings will fill an important data gap for the development of community-based multi-infrastructure optimal recovery and reconstruction strategies. This research will quantify the impacts of cascading failures of power grid and transportation systems on socially vulnerable communities and capture the dynamic relationships of CI restoration interdependencies with the community recovery process. In addition to data collected from publicly available sources, the research team will conduct interviews and focused-group surveys of the emergency managers and infrastructure operators to understand the multidimensional impacts on the hardest-hit Puerto Rican communities and investigate how the restoration decisions are associated with the challenges and resource constraints. The team will also conduct a focused-group survey of the households from communities of high social vulnerability to document their actual and perceived harms owing to hurricane-induced infrastructure failure and the delayed community recovery. This project will generate valuable information to better inform decision-makers to anticipate future disruptions in CI systems and plan for efficient and equitable restoration strategies. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.