Matrix-Based Resilience Assessment of Community Water Supplies

Abstract

With the rising threat of climate change and cascading impacts from infrastructure failure, there is a growing need to strengthen community resilience. While there are many theoretical and practical frameworks for assessing community resilience, there is a high degree of variation and no one standard resilience assessment framework. In this paper, we extend past work applying a resilience matrix framework that is adaptable for communities, utility providers, and government agencies. While previous papers have introduced and applied the framework at a high level, this research further establishes a set of widely applicable metrics that users can adapt to their organization. To test this approach, we focus on assessing the resilience of a single community critical function: the ability to supply water. This paper culminates with a case study assessing the resilience of the water supply within and around a county in the southeastern US. The case study provides important insight into the weaknesses and strengths of water suppliers related to their capacity to respond to the cascading impacts from infrastructure failure and diverse disruptions that threaten their communities.