US: Professor studies how communities cope with and recover from catastrophe

Chris Zobel, a professor of business information technology in the Pamplin College of Business, studies disaster resilience, or the ability to “bounce back” from a calamity typically associated with making a quick recovery but also depends on the capability to resist the disaster’s initial impact.

This is especially important for critical infrastructure, such as energy, finance, transportation, healthcare, and telecommunications, all of which affect a community’s economy, Zobel says.

“Protecting such systems and helping them to recover from the effects of disasters is essential to the long-term sustainability of the societies they support.”

Winner of a Fulbright Scholar Award, Zobel spent part of the 2015 spring semester at Germany’s Center for Disaster Management and Risk Reduction Technology at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, where he worked on a new, “more operational” approach to measuring and monitoring the resilience and sustainability of critical infrastructure.

“Operational,” he says, means that the approach actually can be applied to improve an organization’s ability to operate effectively.

“If we can use an approach for measuring resilience to tell us not only how quickly but also how effectively we are recovering from a disaster, then that measure of resilience is more than just a theoretical tool — it’s actually useful to support the organization’s operations and its actions during that recovery process.”

That ability is crucial to improving the resilience of a real system, Zobel says. “We need to know what actions or behaviors lead to different levels of resilience. We can then judge which actions would be expected to work best in the future in terms of the amount of resilience they might provide.”

It is important to remember that communities are made up of many interrelated components, Zobel says, including people, buildings, organizations, an economy, and the environment and that each can have its own type and level of resilience.

“Resilience has many different dimensions, and it is therefore common to use a large number of different variables to capture the various characteristics that contribute to a community’s resilience,” he says.

“For example, the number of acres of viable wetlands, the number of citizens over age 80, the employment rate, the number of homeowners in a community all provide different, complementary, views of how resilient that community is likely to be.

“By combining the information provided by each of these variables, we can create a measure of resilience that can be compared across different communities.”

Such information could be used to assess a community’s “static” resilience, or its general capacity for coping with and recovering from any disaster. Resilience can also be “dynamic,” meaning actual actions in response to a particular event.

A good illustration of dynamic resilience, Zobel says, is the performance of New York City’s electric power system during Hurricane Sandy.

“The maximum percentage of households who were without power, the length of time it took to completely restore that power, and how long the majority of households were without power, these are all important characteristics of how resilient the overall system is.”

Both static and dynamic concepts need to be considered, Zobel says, as each describes an important part of overall resilience.

One significant constraint to developing good resilience measures, he says, is the difficulty of collecting data. For example, many of the variables used in calculating static resilience are based on the U.S. Census, which is updated only every 10 years.

Only certain types of data lend themselves to measurement over short time intervals, Zobel adds, and only data that can readily be collected during a disaster can be used to operationalize an integrated measure of resilience.

Following a disaster, economic variables such as unemployment rates and the output of goods and services in the construction, manufacturing, and leisure and hospitality industries can be used to assess the relative rate and extent of community recovery at regular time intervals, Zobel says.

“By quantitatively analyzing the relative amount of resilience exhibited by a community, we may gain better insight into its ability to recover and thus develop a better understanding of the factors that allow it to return to normal, or even better-than-normal, levels of activity.”

For more information on this topic, contact Sookhan Ho at 540-231-5071.