Improving Post-Disaster Access to Critical Facilities for Coastal Communities

The increased frequency of acute coastal hazards (tsunamis and hurricanes) in conjunction with induced chronic hazards (coastal erosion) could result in the occurrence of unprecedented combinations of these hazards that can cause tremendous damage to the coastal transportation network. These disruptions combined with the prevailing lack of adequate redundancies in the transportation network can severely impact connectivity from coastal communities to critical facilities such as hospitals, fire stations, and other areas for post disaster aid. 

Thus, this proposal will first quantify the impact of unprecedented combinations of coastal hazards on the connectivity of rural communities to critical hazards. Additionally, this project seeks identify appropriate post-disaster response and recovery strategies to minimize differential impacts on coastal populations by improving their access to critical facilities after unprecedented disasters. These strategies include the identification of appropriate operations based on the region and the hazard for recovery and creation of discrete event simulation models to enable quantification of their performance. These will also enable a large-scale optimization in the allocation of resources considering a region’s hazard exposure and the type of operations enabled.