Integrating Household Survey with Inoperability Input-Output Model of Critical Infrastructure Systems: A Case Study of Hurricane Sandy

Critical infrastructure systems are essential in the wellbeing and security of the modern society. They are becoming more ubiquitous and large-scale, and their interdependencies have become more and more complex leading to their uncertain behaviors in the aftermath of disruptive events. The prolonged disruptions in public utility services create several negative impacts on the individuals as well as the communities and society as a whole. The paper seeks to develop an integrated economic input-output model that incorporates household-level data from a Hurricane Sandy (2012) survey. In this survey, 427 respondents who were living in the state of New Jersey during Hurricane Sandy were used in the study. The integration of their responses allowed us to show the probability and duration of various types of critical infrastructure failures (e.g., workforce, water, gas, electric power, telecommunications, and transportation) due to a catastrophic hurricane event and estimate the economic losses and resilience across different sectors. The percentage of disruption and recovery period for various critical infrastructure systems were extracted from the survey, which were then utilized in the dynamic inoperability input-output model. The model comprises of 71 economic sectors, which were then ranked according to: (i) inoperability, or the extent to which a sector is affected relative to its ideal level of operation, and (ii) economic loss, which is the monetary worth of business interruption caused by infrastructure inoperability. With the combined infrastructure disruptions in the state of New Jersey, the model estimated an economic loss of $36 billion, which is consistent with published estimates. To our knowledge, this paper is the first to combine household survey with economic input-output analysis in the context of disaster risk management. Results from this paper, such as sector rankings of inoperability and economic losses can provide insights for future disaster preparedness and resilience planning.