Measuring Improvements in the Disaster Resilience of Communities

This paper demonstrates the concept of disaster resilience through the development and application of quantitative measures. As the idea of building disaster‐resilient communities gains acceptance, new methods are needed that go beyond estimating monetary losses and that address the complex, multiple dimensions of resilience. These dimensions include technical, organizational, social, and economic facets. This paper first proposes resilience measures that relate expected losses in future disasters to a community's seismic performance objectives. It then demonstrates these measures in a case study of the Memphis, Tennessee, water delivery system. An existing earthquake loss estimation model provides a starting…

• NS
  National Science Foundation
• UO
  University of California, Irvine
• DO
  Division of Electrical, Communications and Cyber Systems