Equitable community resilience: The case of Winter Storm Uri in Texas

Community resilience in the face of natural hazards involves both a community's sensitivity to disaster and its potential to bounce back. A failure to integrate equity into resilience considerations results in unequal recovery and disproportionate impacts on vulnerable populations, which has long been a concern in the United States. This research investigated aspects of equity related to community resilience in the aftermath of Winter Storm Uri in Texas which led to extended power outages for more than 4 million households. County-level outage/recovery data was analyzed to explore potential significant links between various county attributes and their share of the outages during the recovery/restoration phase. Next, satellite imagery was used to examine data at a much higher geographical resolution focusing on census tracts in the city of Houston. The goal was to use computer vision to extract the extent of outages within census tracts and investigate their linkages to census tracts attributes. Results from various statistical procedures revealed statistically significant negative associations between counties' percentage of nonHispanic whites and median household income with the ratio of outages. Additionally, at census tract level, variables including percentages of linguistically isolated population and public transport users exhibited positive associations with the group of census tracts that were affected by the outage as detected by computer vision analysis. Informed by these results, engineering solutions such as the applicability of grid modernization technologies, together with distributed and renewable energy resources, when controlled for the region's topographical characteristics, are proposed to enhance equitable power grid resiliency in the face of natural hazards.

Automated summary

Community resilience in the face of natural hazards depends on both the community's sensitivity to disaster and its ability to recover. This research investigated the role of equity in community resilience after Winter Storm Uri in Texas, which caused extended power outages. The study found significant associations between county attributes and outage ratios, as well as between census tract attributes and outage-affected areas. Based on these findings, engineering solutions are proposed to enhance equitable power grid resiliency in the face of natural hazards.