Building Water and Wastewater System Resilience to Disaster Migration: Utility Perspectives

Abstract

This paper leverages expert knowledge from leaders in water and wastewater utilities to anticipate water and wastewater infrastructure impacts in communities that host populations displaced by disasters. These experts represent knowledge from 25 utilities across the United States. While the identified infrastructure impacts of disaster migration were both positive and negative, the responding experts indicate that impacts depend greatly on the spatiotemporal characteristics of the increased demands caused by hypothetical migrant populations. With this in mind, findings demonstrate a need to include utilities in the placement of disaster migrants to minimize the impact of service on both the hosting community and disaster migrants. For the construction industry, both the speed and scale of response needed in the host communities are particular organizational and workforce challenges. More broadly, given the technical impacts of suddenly increased populations, the results of this research suggest a need for policy that can provide infrastructure funding for communities hosting displaced populations, and to enable expedited code enforcement that protects public safety while meeting the requirements of an emergency situation.