NSF Award
2143902
In February 2021, Winter-Storm Uri, impacted 25 states and more than 150 million Americans leading to extended power and water outages. Among the states impacted by the storm, Texas was the hardest hit. The impact of Uri on the state of Texas was far beyond expectations leading to several deaths, a significant halt in the distribution and administering of COVID-19 vaccines, and an estimated $90 billion economic loss. Most significantly, the independent electric grid managed by the Eclectic Reliability Council of Texas, came very close to a complete failure. Consequently, local electric utilities had to significantly reduce power consumption resulting in millions of households and businesses, experiencing significant and extended periods without power. There were also cascading failures of local water systems, as pumping stations failed. It was widely reported that the power outages disproportionately impacted some populations more than others, and yet there was little in the way of any systematic evidence establishing these observations. There is a need to scientifically document the nature of these failures, any potential disparate impacts, and establish contributing factors using appropriate data. Such data collection can provide opportunities to learn what went wrong at various levels, including technical and infrastructure maintenance issues, precautionary measures, planning, and execution. Findings from this research can be employed to address environmental justice issues and broader infrastructure resilience planning. As such, this project aims to perform ground truth validation by collecting detailed data from multiple fronts including perishable data from households and power/infrastructure sysetms. The findings of this research will advance knowledge for building more disaster resilient infrastructure systems which are critical for promoting the health, prosperity, and welfare of our nation.<br/><br/>This research lies at the nexus of engineering and social sciences aiming to ultimately explore potential relationships between engineering infrastructure, operational decisions and household experiences. More specifically, this RAPID project will collect data on two fronts. The first is household data including demographic, socioeconomic statuses together with their experiences throughout the storm and outages. These data will be collected a hybrid data collection method including an online survey of households, interviews with community-based organizations (CMOs), and secondary data collections from various social media outlets. While online data collection helps with uncovering general trends, interviews with CMOs and impacted stakeholders within a diverse set of neighborhoods will help address digital divide issues within lower-income neighborhoods. Finally, content analysis of social media posts provides another layer of information will be used to fill the remaining data gaps and cross-examine data trends. The second data collection activity focuses on the collection of grid and utility data related to the locations, timing, and duration of outages during and after the storm. These data will complement household/neighborhood data to provide both top-down and bottom-up insights on the unraveling of the event and its associated decision making.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
