April Coffee Talk | Facility-Level Infrastructure Service Interruption Estimation

Hurricanes, winter storms, wildfires, and other hazards can cause prolonged loss of utility services. However, estimating the likelihood of loss of service and the length of the outage at an individual facility level poses challenges. Sufficient historic data at the facility level is generally not available, and engineering modeling approaches typically require substantial amounts of detailed data about utility systems that is not typically available. This talk gives a high-level overview of recent work that allows power outages and outage durations to be estimated at individual building scales based only on public information to support downtime estimation and regional loss assessment. It also briefly summarizes extensions of this work to model loss of potable water services and cellular communication services, again at the individual facility level.

About the Speaker

Seth Guikema is a Professor of Risk Analysis in the Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Michigan as well as a Professor II in the Department of Safety, Economics, and Planning at the University of Stavanger (Norway). He was the President of the Society for Risk Analysis (SRA) in 2020 and is a Fellow of SRA. He is the editor for the Natural Hazards area of the journal Risk Analysis as well as an editor for Artificial Intelligence in Scientific Reports.

His research focuses on natural hazards risk analysis, community resilience, loss estimation, resilience inequity within communities, and human trafficking.