Functional Recovery of Lifeline Infrastructure System Services

Published

June 30, 2024

Author(s)

Craig Davis, Andrew Herseth, Katherine Johnson, Ayse Hortacsu

Abstract

Services provided by lifeline infrastructure systems are critical to the recovery of social functions after an earthquake. Lifeline infrastructure includes water, wastewater, drainage, electric power, communications, gas and liquid fuels, solid waste, and transportations systems. They are large, complex, geographically distributed systems built with specialized components made of many different materials over long periods of time. It is difficult to prevent damage and potential service outages after earthquakes, but the loss and recovery of services can be managed to meet societal needs. The managing of lifeline infrastructure system service losses and recoveries requires (1) the establishing of practical objectives to ensure societal needs can be met in a post-earthquake environment, and (2) the systems to be efficiently designed and operated to allow basic service recovery times to meet societal needs. A lifeline infrastructure system is considered functionally recovered when all users have their basic services restored. Two Federal agencies in the United States, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) are developing frameworks to design new or retrofit existing lifeline infrastructure systems to achieve recovery-based objectives. The objectives must first be defined in terms of when the basic services are needed by customers having different levels of importance to communities during a disaster; a design procedure can then be implemented to meet the objectives. The establishment of target lifeline infrastructure system basic service recovery times is dependent on the consequences of service interruptions. The consequences of service outages depend on the conditions present, services provided, and users and uses of the services. The earthquake event and its location determine circumstances surrounding an outage.

Proceedings Title

Proceedings for the 18th World Conference on Earthquake Engineering

Conference Dates

June 30-July 5, 2024

Conference Location

Milan, IT

Conference Title

18th World Conference on Earthquake Engineering

Pub Type

Conferences

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Keywords

functional recovery, lifelines infrastructure, resilience, earthquake risk mitigation

Citation

Davis, C. , Herseth, A. , Johnson, K. and Hortacsu, A. (2024), Functional Recovery of Lifeline Infrastructure System Services, Proceedings for the 18th World Conference on Earthquake Engineering, Milan, IT, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=957318 (Accessed December 3, 2024)