Critical facility accessibility and road criticality assessment considering flood-induced partial failure

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ABSTRACT

This paper examines communities’ accessibility to critical facilities such as hospitals, emergency medical services, and emergency shelters when facing flooding. We use travel speed reduction to account for flood-induced partial road failure. A modified betweenness centrality metric is also introduced to calculate the criticality of roads for connecting communities to critical facilities. The proposed model and metric are applied to the Delaware road network under 100-year floods. This model highlights the severe critical facility access loss risk due to flood isolation of facilities. The mapped post-flooding accessibility suggests a significant travel time increase to critical facilities and reveals disparities among communities, especially for vulnerable groups such as long-term care facility residents. We also identified critical roads that are vital for post-flooding access to critical facilities. The results of this research can help inform targeted infrastructure investment decisions and hazard mitigation strategies that contribute to equitable community resilience enhancement.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical facility accessibility
• Flood-disrupted transportation network
• Critical road identification

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge funding support from the University of Delaware Research Foundation (UDRF) project #21A00986 and Delaware Department of Transportation project #T202266002, and the data support from the First Street Foundation and Stephen Pondo-Voigt (Whitman, Requardt & Associates). Any opinions, conclusions, and recommendations expressed in this research are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of the funding agencies. The authors would also like to thank the Editor and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and valuable insights to improve the quality of the article.

CRediT statements

Utkarsh Gangwal: Conceptualization, Methodology, Analysis, Visualization, Writing- Original draft preparation. A.R. Siders: Conceptualization, Analysis, Reviewing & Editing, Funding acquisition. Jennifer Horney: Conceptualization, Analysis, Reviewing & Editing. Holly Michael: Conceptualization, Analysis, Reviewing & Editing. Shangjia Dong: Conceptualization, Methodology, Analysis, Visualization, Writing- Original draft preparation, Reviewing & Editing, Supervision, Funding acquisition.

Disclosure statement

The Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI) reviewed the anonymised abstract of the article, but had no role in the peer review process nor the final editorial decision.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/23789689.2022.2149184

Additional information

Funding

The Article Publishing Charge (APC) for this article is funded by the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI).