Analyzing Accessibility to Essential Facilities During Hurricane Ian: Lee County in Florida
Creators: name: Alsayed Ebrahim, Ruqayah
Publisher: name: George Mason University
Year: 2023
Subjects: highway network modeling
road network robustness
road network vulnerabilities
accessibility measure
infrastructure resilience
Hurricane Ian

description: Disasters such as hurricanes cause serious damage to the community lifeline infrastructure systems especially the transportation infrastructure system which is vital to the well-being of the community and requires a good restoration planning to maintain the community lifeline without any interruption. During restoration and recovery phase, residents of affected areas must have access to essential facilities to meet their daily needs, otherwise it will be a chaos and the death toll will increase. To ensure accessibility to essential facilities, alternative routes that serve as substitutes for damaged routes must be identified by local authorities for the residents. As well as identifying vulnerable roads for future restoration prioritization in terms of scheduling to have a disaster resilient road network which is the ability to adapt to changing infrastructure conditions and decrease the impacts on the accessibility. However, it is not always the case, the communication between the local government and the designated agencies such as FDOT is quite challenging as they both have different priorities and different time schedules. In addition, road network disruptions and road closures change rapidly in the post disaster phase, in which it will increase the inspection time of roads and bridges status. Different data of pre/post disasters became available because of the advanced communication technologies such as traffic data, geographical data, physical data and sociodemographic data. These data must be transformed to a suitable form and integrated into an analysis framework to help in identifying alternative routes to access essential facilities, and to identify vulnerabilities in the road network. Maintaining access to essential facilities is crucial as not all communities have the same level of preparedness for disasters. To achieve this, a strong communication between the local government and designated agencies is required for communities’ awareness of alternative routes and critical roads. Therefore, this research aims (1) to integrate modeling techniques to assess and visualize spatial data of facilities, road network, sociodemographic and road closures; (2) to improve the overall network accessibility to essential facilities by alternative routes identification; and (3) to quantify the impacts of transportation damage on the network accessibility for future restoration optimization. This research contributes to build disaster resilient transportation infrastructure systems by (1) evaluating accessibility to essential facilities during disasters using highway network modeling; and (2) identifying vulnerabilities in the road network for future restoration prioritization and resource (facilities) allocation taking into consideration real-world capacity, facilities connectivity and travel distances. The findings of this research can be a strategic guide for emergency management teams and governmental authorities to improve the county’s resilience and preparedness in the case of future disasters, and protecting the community’s lifeline. This can be achieved by (1) mitigating the post disaster impacts on the transportation infrastructure in terms of accessibility to essential facilities; (2) providing invaluable insights to design disaster resilient road network or improve the existing network; (3) improve local authorities’ response to disasters; (4) help policy makers initiate plans for future roadway constructions and facilities construction; and (5) generate ranking criteria for restoration prioritization in terms of scheduling by highlighting critical road.