Critical facility accessibility rapid failure early-warning detection and redundancy mapping in urban flooding

• Published in: Reliability engineering & system safety Vol. 224; p. 108555
• Main Authors: Gangwal, Utkarsh, Dong, Shangjia
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Barking Elsevier Ltd 01.08.2022; Elsevier BV
• Subjects: Access redundancy mapping; Accessibility; Community planning; Critical facility accessibility; Critical point; Critical road identification; Decision making; Early-warning detection; Flooding; Groceries; Hurricanes; Mapping; Redundancy; Reliability engineering; Roads; Social organization; Travel; Urban flooding; Warning systems; Urban flooding; Critical facility accessibility; Critical road identification; Early-warning detection; Access redundancy mapping
• ISSN: 0951-8320; 1879-0836
• DOI: 10.1016/j.ress.2022.108555

System-wide functionality failure emerges when a collection of components collapse simultaneously. Aiming to detect the early warning of the rapid critical facilities accessibility loss after flooding, this paper presents a network-theory-based detection model to identify the critical point after which the rate of road access loss to critical facilities starts to accelerate. The road network of Harris County, Texas during Hurricane Harvey 2017 flooding and simulated 500-year flooding (1,000 flooding sequences) is used for the case study. We also considered the travel radius for reaching critical facilities (e.g., 5 miles travel radius for hospitals, and 4 miles for groceries and pharmacies) in the accessibility assessment to show the flood impact on daily life. Additionally, we link the critical threshold to the spatial network to identify the corresponding critical roads whose disruption will likely trigger the rapid critical facility accessibility loss. This result will facilitate the decision-making on targeted infrastructure protection. Moreover, we map the number of critical facilities that each network component has access to within reach and reveal the resource redundancy inequity and risk disparity across the network. Integrating with the social vulnerability mapping, our result can help inform the resilience planning toward an equitable community. •Critical facilities accessibility rapidly decreases after the early-warning point.•Accessibility failure early-warning point can help identify critical roads.•Communities’ access to critical facilities are affected disproportionately in urban flooding.•Access redundancy mapping can inform equitable resilience planning in infrastructure development.