Search

Communities are complex systems defined by the interaction of social, economic, environmental, and physical systems. The dynamic response and recovery of a community to a disaster is often tied to the response and recovery of its organizations. This paper employs the Community Capitals framework to understand how organizations contribute to community resilience. The organization-level functionality is defined as the capability of an organization to be used for its intended purposes. Organizations are not solely physical objects, staff and supply chain are identified as critical non-physical components contributing to organizational functionality alongside conventional physical components. Fault trees and a probabilistic framework are developed to measure organizational functionality failure. A fault tree is presented in detail for three organizations, namely, banks, gas stations, and schools, to illustrate the different components necessary for functionality of different organizations. Lastly, a framework for evaluation of community resilience based on organizational functionality is proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this paper is to define a quantitative measurement system capable of capturing multiple dimensions of a community impacted by disaster. The multiple dimensions of a community are defined here as the seven community capitals inherent to any community, namely, financial, political, social, human, cultural, natural, and built capitals. A two-pronged approach is proposed, where one prong relates organizations to community capitals using a novel scoring system aligned with the definition of each community capital, and the other prong relates building-damage consequences to the community capitals, including number of damaged buildings for built capital, household dislocation for social capital, morbidity rates for human capital, accessibility changes for political capital, and repair costs for financial capital. The framework is exemplified on a virtual community, Centerville, under an earthquake scenario. The example demonstrates that the proposed approach for quantifying capitals provides useful measures of disaster impacts and can readily inform risk-based decision making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]