Understanding the Loss in Community Resilience due to Hurricanes using Facebook Data

Significant negative impacts are observed in productivity, economy, and social well-being because of the reduced human activity due to extreme events. Community resilience is an important concept to understand and quantify the impacts of an extreme event to population activity. Resilience is generally defined as the ability of a system to manage shocks and return to a steady state in response to an extreme event. In this paper, we analyze aggregate location data from Facebook in response to Hurricane Ida. Using changes in the number of Facebook users before, during, and after the disaster, we empirically define and quantify community resilience as a function of the magnitude of impact and the time to recover from the extreme situation. We measure resilience and the transient loss of resilience in population activity for the affected communities in Louisiana. The loss in resilience of the affected communities was explained by three types of factors, including disruption in physical infrastructures, disaster conditions due to hurricanes, and socio-economic characteristics of a community. We find that a greater loss in community resilience is associated with factors such as disruptions in power and transportation services and disaster conditions. We also find socioeconomic disparities in loss of resilience with respect to median income of a community. Understanding community resilience using the decreased population activity levels due to a disaster and the factors associated with loss in community resilience will allow us to improve hazard preparedness, enhance disaster management practices, and create better recovery policies towards strengthening infrastructure and community resilience.