NWIRP Study of 

Hurricane Maria Impacts and 

Recovery in Puerto Rico:

Preliminary Project Plan for Evaluating 

Infrastructure Support of Critical Buildings and 

Emergency Communications

Aug 30, 2018

NCST Advisory 

Committee Meeting

Ken Harrison

Operations Research Analyst, Community Resilience Group

National Institute of Standards and Technology

Marc Levitan

NCST Investigation of Hurricane Maria

NWIRP Study of Hurricane Maria

National Institute of Standards and Technology
NWIRP Project: Infrastructure Support of Critical Buildings

Project Objective (A): 

• As they relate to critical buildings, investigate 

power, water, and transportation infrastructure 

dependencies in

• Impacts

• Recovery

• Make recommendations for increasing resilience 

through changes to codes, standards and practice

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Permanent

Permanent with backup capacity

Temporary

Components: Functionality:

ALL inputs needed

ONE input sufficient

Figure: A highly simplified network showing critical building functional dependencies on 

infrastructure (and other components/services), based on NIST field deployments/studies, 

including 2016 Hurricane Matthew and 2017 Hurricane Harvey. Such networks are needed input 

to the systems models developed within the NIST Community Resilience Group

Areas of Study

Impacts

• Damage to components

• Cascade of ‘Loss of function’

• Mitigating factors (e.g., backup capacity, 

redundancy)

Recovery

• Time to recover functionality

• Time/resource dependencies

• Temporary measures (e.g., generators)

• Critical path – set of activities, any of which if 

shortened, would have shortened recovery

Planning:

• Where in the system to 

• Increase hazard resistance?

• Add backup capacity?

• Employ new technologies?

• Which changes to codes, standards and 

practice would be supportive?

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NWIRP Project’s Preliminary Study Plan

1. Establish partnerships and official collaborations

2. Gather information at the community level on cascade, recovery, 

and considered resilience-improving actions

• 200 semi-structured interviews with Power, Water, and Transportation 

officials at local and regional levels and Municipal officials

3. Extend and test NIST community resilience planning systems 

models

4. Apply model in a Puerto Rico based resilience planning case study
NWIRP Project updates

1. Establish partnerships and official 

collaborations

• Argonne National Laboratory (ANL)

(Resilience Assessment, Decision and 

Infrastructure Sciences)

• Contributor to DOE Energy Resilience 

report

• Potential contribution: Puerto Rico - wide 

network dependency modeling 

complementary to NIST modeling

• Webinar planned for September

• NIST Smart Grid Program

• Microgrid potential interactions with 

building design

Electric Power Interdependency Examples

(Source: DOE)

https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2018/06/f53/DOE%20Report_Energy%20Resilience

%20Solutions%20for%20the%20PR%20Grid%20Final%20June%202018.pdf
NWIRP Project updates

2. Gather information at the community level on cascade, recovery, and 

considered resilience-improving actions

• 200 semi-structured interviews with Power, Water, and Transportation officials at local 

and regional levels and Municipal officials

• Data collection related to infrastructure to support sampling of buildings

• Infrastructure: GIS shapefiles

• Maps: Precipitation, Peak Wind gusts

• Recovery data: Power (regional-level)

• Contract for interview research services has been written and submitted to NIST’s 

Acquisition Management Division
Next Steps

1. Establish partnerships and official collaborations

2. Gather information at the community level on cascade, recovery, 

and considered resilience-improving actions

• 200 semi-structured interviews with Power, Water, and Transportation 

officials at local and regional levels and Municipal officials

• Continue infrastructure-related data collection

• Application of the infrastructure –related data to support sampling critical buildings 

and other NCST and NWIRP projects

• Develop interview instrument questions, drawing from prior field studies

3. Extend and test NIST community resilience planning systems 

models

• Equations representing reserve capacity (e.g., diesel generators) within NIST systems 

modeling framework (mixed-integer linear programming) 

4. Apply model in a Puerto Rico based resilience planning case study
Project Objective (B): 

• To investigate causes of the 

loss of functionality and 

extended-duration outage of 

the wireless communication 

system in Puerto Rico 

following Hurricane Maria. 

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Source: Federal Communications Commission

NWIRP Project: Infrastructure Support of Emergency 

Communications Systems
NWIRP Project’s Preliminary Study Plan

• Collect data on damage caused by Hurricane Maria to cell towers, 

equipment, cabling, and related components of wireless communications 

systems, from regulatory agencies, telecommunications companies, and 

telecommunications support industries

• Collect information on codes, standards and regulations governing the 

design and construction of cell towers and wireless communication 

equipment

• Determine the hazard levels experienced at cell site locations identified 

by the Hazard Characterization project 

• Evaluate tower and equipment performance with respect to the hazard 

levels experienced at each site and code design requirements
Progress Updates 

• Types of information gathered so far include:

• Daily cell cite outage information by county1

• Information on recovery of daily call and text 

volume over time2

• Locations of the 1,039 registered communications 

towers in Puerto Rico, as of 20063

• Post-Maria aerial imagery of towers and 

surroundings

- Only a few towers appear to have collapsed 

(image resolution was generally insufficient to 

observe finer scale damage such as to towermounted equipment and cables)

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1 https://www.fcc.gov/maria

2 http://about.att.com/inside_connections_blog/hurricane_maria

3 http://www.jrtpr.pr.gov/registro-de-torres/

Source: Federal Emergency Management Agency

Collapsed Trussed Tower in Humacao
Next Steps

• Contact government agencies and private sector entities 

for data collection, including

• Federal Communications Commission

• Federal Emergency Management Agency

• Junta Reglamentadora de Telecomunicaciones de Puerto Rico 

(Regulatory Board of Telecommunications of Puerto Rico)

• Wireless communications service providers

• Identify codes, standards, regulations and practices 

governing the wind load design and construction of 

communications towers and the equipment such towers 

support, as well as any design requirements for other 

hazards (e.g. wind-driven rain)

Collapsed Roof-Mounted 

Tower in Caguas