The Resilience Series 2022: Infrastructure Resilience in the Spotlight
Hurricanes are a major destructive force. The potential damage to infrastructure, businesses and household assets represents only the beginning of the costs to society. Immediate damage is typically followed by the interruption of functionality for an extended period until various operations have recovered. For example, business interruption (BI) losses have actually exceeded the dollar value of property damage in cases such as Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Harvey.
The Costs of Business Disruption of Infrastructure Services (July 29, 2022) with Adam Rose, Research Professor in the University of Southern California Sol Price School of Public Policy, and Senior Research Fellow at USC’s Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Threats and Emergencies (CREATE).
This presentation explains how the total economic consequences of business and infrastructure can be accurately measured. First, supply-chain effects, which can exceed direct BI by several fold, need to be taken into account. Second, resilience, which refers to the implementation of tactics to utilize remaining resources more efficiently and accelerate repair and reconstruction needs to be incorporated into the analysis. Resilience has the potential to reduce BI by 50 to 75%.
The presentation focuses on the results of two studies of total BI losses stemming from two hurricanes in Texas. The first involves a simulation study of disruptions to the Beaumont/Port Arthur shipping complex. The second emanates from a study of the economic impacts from Hurricane Harvey.