Fire Station Accessibility, Assessment, and Improvement Considering Probabilistic Road Failure in Facing Flooding

Sea-level rise exacerbates the risk of road disruption on accessibility to facilities such as fire stations, which impacts vulnerable neighborhoods disproportionately. To address this issue, we propose an integrated framework that considers the physical and social vulnerabilities of communities to better understand critical facility accessibility in the face of flooding. Using fire stations in Delaware as a case study, we estimated the travel time of different neighborhoods that represented nodes in the network under different flood disruption scenarios, including the closest fire station and the station assigned based on coverage area. The probabilistic flooding scenarios are generated based on FEMA flood risk maps, and a Monte Carlo approach is adopted to simulate and measure reachability and travel time. The proposed metric will inform the facility siting and service boundary design to improve accessibility to fire stations for equitable flood risk management.