Geospatial Vulnerability Framework for Identifying Water Infrastructure Inequalities
Publication: Journal of Environmental Engineering
Volume 147, Issue 9
Abstract
Recent infrastructure failures in the United States have brought attention to the ways and extent to which water security is unevenly distributed in urban areas. For many marginalized communities, infrastructure interdependencies (e.g., water, wastewater, stormwater, transportation) have created significant vulnerabilities in the face of aging or inadequate water treatment and delivery systems. In these communities, cascading failures precipitated by environmental hazards such as flooding often propagate across multiple infrastructure systems, sometimes resulting in poor water quality and/or lack of access to water for significant periods. However, little is known about how specific environmental and social factors combine with water infrastructure vulnerability and interdependencies to create enduring infrastructure inequalities. This paper presents a geospatial vulnerability framework for identifying water infrastructure inequalities, using the City of Tampa, Florida, to demonstrate the framework. For this framework, we integrate geographic information systems (GIS) analysis of environmental hazards, a factor analytic model of sociodemographic data, and a network topology-based performance indicator for the water distribution network. The resulting framework models the environmental and social vulnerabilities, quantifies hydraulic vulnerability and infrastructure interdependence, and maps their distributions across the urban environment. We find that the highest levels of social and environmental vulnerabilities in Tampa are present in low-income areas and communities of color that have high hydraulic vulnerability and infrastructure interdependency, which creates pockets of low resilience capacity.
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Data Availability Statement
All data, models, and code that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Acknowledgments
This research was conducted with support from the US National Science Foundation’s Critical Resilient Interdependent Infrastructure Systems and Processes (NSF CRISP) program, Grant No. 1638301. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. Support for the Florida Brownfields Redevelopment Atlas was provided by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection through US EPA CERCLA Section 128(a) funding. We gratefully acknowledge the cooperation and assistance of the City of Tampa.
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Journal of Environmental Engineering
Volume 147 • Issue 9 • September 2021
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© 2021 American Society of Civil Engineers.
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Received: Feb 25, 2021
Accepted: Apr 22, 2021
Published online: Jul 15, 2021
Published in print: Sep 1, 2021
Discussion open until: Dec 15, 2021
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