Towards Resilient Critical Infrastructures: Understanding the Impact of Coastal Flooding on the Fuel Transportation Network in the San Francisco Bay

Yiyi He,Sarah Lindbergh,Marta Gonzalez,John Radke,Yang Ju

doi:10.3390/ijgi10090573

Yiyi He, Sarah Lindbergh + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi10090573

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Abstract

Sea level rise (SLR) and storm surge inundation are major concerns along the coast of the San Francisco Bay (the Bay Area), impacting both coastal communities and critical infrastructure networks. The oil industry comprises a complex and critical infrastructure network located in the Bay Area. There is an urgent need to assess consequences and identify risk-based solutions to increase the resilience of this industrial network in the Bay Area to SLR and storm surge. In this study, a comprehensive multi-modal network model representing the fuel supply system was built. A total of 120 coastal flooding scenarios, including four General Circulation Models, two Representative Concentration Pathways, three percentiles of future SLR estimates, and five planning horizons (20 year intervals from 2000 to 2100) were considered. The impact of coastal flooding on fuel transportation networks was studied at two different scales: regional and local. At the regional scale, basic network properties and network efficiency were analyzed across multiple flooding scenarios. At the local scale, cascading effects of individual node disruptions were simulated. Based on this research, smarter and more holistic risk-based adaptation strategies can be established which could lead to a more resilient fuel transportation network system.

Highlights

Critical infrastructure (CI) is part of the central nervous system of the economy in many developed and developing countries
Located on the west coast of the United States, the Bay Area has a high concentration of fuel transportation network assets, and houses the second largest refinery complex in the state
The variation in hazard exposure for both node and link assets to coastal flooding increases over time and is smaller for the first two time horizons and larger for the following three time horizons

Summary

Introduction

Critical infrastructure (CI) is part of the central nervous system of the economy in many developed and developing countries. The oil industry is a good example of a sector with complex CI networks, in which any disruption or failure to the process of hydrocarbon discovery, fuel extraction, processing, and distribution can have a significant impact on the industry’s ability to function as a system [3]. This industry sector is subdivided into three segments: upstream, midstream, and downstream [4,5]. Multiple of transporproduction of crude oil, the to midstream segment refinesmodes the crude oil into fuel-based products, and to theensure downstream transports the products to end tation networks are necessary stable segment and secure fuel flow from supply to users, de- such as airports and gassector stations

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