Mulowayi, E; Coffey, V; Bunker, J and Trigunarsiah, B (2015) The influence of critical infrastructure interdependencies on post-disaster reconstruction: Elements of infrastructure interdependency that impede the post-disaster recovery effort. In: Raiden, A and Aboagye-Nimo, E (eds.) Proceedings of 31st Annual ARCOM Conference, 7-9 September 2015, Lincoln, UK.
Abstract
The importance of developing effective disaster management strategies has significantly grown as the world continues to be confronted with unprecedented disastrous events. Factors such as climate instability, recent urbanization along with rapid population growth in many cities around the world have unwittingly exacerbated the risks of potential disasters, leaving a large number of people and infrastructure exposed to new forms of threats from natural disasters such as flooding, cyclones, and earthquakes. With disasters on the rise, effective recovery planning of the built environment is becoming imperative as it is not only closely related to the well-being and essential functioning of society, but it also requires significant financial commitment. In the built environment context, post-disaster reconstruction focuses essentially on the repair and reconstruction of physical infrastructures. The reconstruction and rehabilitation efforts are generally performed in the form of collaborative partnerships that involve multiple organisations, enabling the restoration of interdependencies that exist between infrastructure systems such as energy, water (including wastewater), transport, and telecommunication systems. These interdependencies are major determinants of vulnerabilities and risks encountered by critical infrastructures and therefore have significant implications for post-disaster recovery. When disrupted by natural disasters, such interdependencies have the potential to promote the propagation of failures between critical infrastructures at various levels, and thus can have dire consequences on reconstruction activities. This paper outlines the results of a pilot study on how elements of infrastructure interdependencies have the potential to impede the post-disaster recovery effort. Using a set of unstructured interview questionnaires, plausible arguments provided by seven respondents revealed that during post-disaster recovery, critical infrastructures are mutually dependent on each other's uninterrupted availability, both physically and through a host of information and communication technologies. Major disruption to their physical and cyber interdependencies could lead to cascading failures, which could delay the recovery effort. Thus, the existing interrelationship between critical infrastructures requires that the entire interconnected network be considered when managing reconstruction activities during the post-disaster recovery period.
| Item Type: | Conference Paper (Paper) |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | post-disaster recovery; critical infrastructure; infrastructure interdependency |
| Index terms: | disaster management, repair, post-disaster recovery, critical infrastructure, determinant, restoration, infrastructure interdependency, telecommunication, built environment, vulnerability, post-disaster reconstruction, questionnaire, well-being, propagation, earthquake, population, commitment, strategy, flooding, partnership, society, information and communication technology, physical infrastructure, cyclone, becoming, recovery, reconstruction, natural disaster, urbanization, interview |
| Subjects: | operations management, psychology, communication, urban planning, mental health and wellbeing, engineering process, data collection methods, risk assessment, climate science, computing systems, building construction, demography, partnership management, environmental hazards, systems engineering, communities and social development, philosophical process, infrastructure and transport systems, maintenance engineering, post-disaster and reconstruction, management, renovation and retrofit, financial risk |
| Topics: | Digital Applications, Urban Studies, Organizational Design, Cost Management, Business Strategy, Health and Safety, Project Management, Research Practice, Engineering Principles, Stakeholder Management, Risk Management, Governance, Sustainability |
| Descriptive scope: | 4 PCEA |
N.B. Descriptive scope is a count of how many of the five facets of empirical research are indicated by the words used in title, abstract and keywords. It is not intended as a judgement on the research; merely a count of the kind of word we would expect to indicate Phenomenon, Concepts, Theoretical framing, Empirical techniques, Analytical techniques. If all five are present, then a code of “5 PCTEA” will indicate this. If you feel the coding for this record is questionable, we welcome discussion around the terms we matched or the way we categorized them. The facet you would expect may not be coded, or a facet may be coded inappropriately. This can also bear on a larger question, of which facets should be treated as defining in construction management research. Please get in touch, and we will look at it. More details here