Estimated Time to Restoration of Hurricane Sandy in a Future Climate

Abstract

Power outage restoration following extreme storms is a complicated process that couples engineering processes and human decisions. Emergency managers typically rely on past experiences and have limited access to computer simulations to aid in decision-making. Climate scientists predict that although hurricane frequency may decrease, the intensity of storms may increase. Increased damage from hurricanes will result in new restoration challenges that emergency managers may not have experience solving. Our study uses agent-based modeling (ABM) to determine how restoration might have been impacted for 30 different scenarios of Hurricane Sandy for a climate in 2112 (Sandy2112). These Sandy2112 scenarios were obtained from a previous study that modeled how outages from Hurricane Sandy in 2012 might have been affected in the future as climate change intensified both wind and precipitation hazards. As the number of outages increases, so does the expected estimated time to restoration for each storm. The impact of increasing crews is also studied to determine the relationship between the number of crews and outage durations (or restoration curves). Both the number of outages and the number of crews impact the variability in time to restoration. Our results can help emergency managers and policy makers plan for future hurricanes that are likely to become stronger and more impactful to critical infrastructure.

Predicting Outage Restoration in Advance of Storms Impact

“…This paper builds upon previously published work [21], and [22], and adds to a field where limited decision-making modeling exists. This study shows the validation of the University of Connecticut (UConn) ABM for predicting time to restoration with four different high impact storms.…”

“…The generalizations made in this paper were used to aid the model development and provide the basis to be able to use the model in a forecasting mode in the future. Previous model versions [21], [22] missed the ramp up phase altogether and started with all outages present in the model. This previous assumption made the modeled peak equal to the total number of customers affected.…”

Understanding the Decision-Making Process for Hurricane Evacuation Orders: A Case Study of Florida County Emergency Managers

“…Oftentimes, EMs face extreme events that they have not experienced before [7], which would require EMs to use discretion with some level of uncertainty in their decision-making process. In a more specific sense, uncertainty exists when existing emergency plans are not sufficient for decision-making, and the disaster situation is different from what an EM has experienced before [8].…”