Post-disaster infrastructure restoration: A comparison of events for future planning

The restoration of lifeline infrastructures following a major disruptive disaster is a complex task. Along with the implementation of mitigation measures, pre-event recovery planning can be of great assistance to this process. This paper seeks to inform such planning discussions by suggesting likely paths of recovery over time, and in turn computing indicative estimates of expected restoration times. While current methods can require significant amounts of data and are calibrated to few events, the presented approach analyses and combines 63 electricity, water, gas, and telecommunications post-disaster infrastructure recoveries from across the world. Recoveries are compared across disaster types with global median recovery curves produced to inform likely restoration rates for future disasters. Models based on initial outages or seismic shaking intensity directly provide estimates of expected recovery times back to 90% operability of the initial disruption. An application of the presented methodology is presented as a case study for the Wellington Region of New Zealand with recovery estimates comparing favorably with those presented in the literature.