Assessing how household capabilities and well-being are disrupted in the aftermath of wildfires: A human-centered mixed methods approach

Wildfires present a growing threat to critical infrastructure systems (CIS) and the wildland-urban interface (WUI) communities. With the ever-increasing urbanization and availability of cheaper lands, more population moves towards the forest lands, expanding the WUI regions. As a result, more CIS (e.g., power grid, transportation systems, water distribution) are getting exposed and damaged from wildfires. When CIS are damaged and resulting service disruptions occur, they burden WUI communities by disrupting household capabilities (e.g., cooking, lighting, washing) which are important for maintaining well-being (e.g., maintaining good physical and mental health). Traditional community resilience measuring approaches often fail to account for these social implications of CIS disruptions, focusing mainly on financial costs or CIS outages durations. We address this gap in this research by evaluating how household capabilities are affected by various CIS disruptions (e.g., power outages, water outages, transportation disruptions) and the subsequent severity of these impacts in terms of time and financial costs needed to cope. We collected data through a representative survey of households in the Southwest US that were affected by wildfires since 2016. Leveraging the Capabilities Approach Theory and the Bayes Mallows Ranking Method, we identify the household capabilities most affected in the aftermath of a wildfire and present our results for the state of California, which has witnessed some of the most devastating wildfires to date. Our results show that the ability to cook food and access clean air were the most disrupted capabilities during wildfire-induced CIS disruptions. Other capabilities, such as accessing drinking water and lighting homes, were affected under specific conditions. The most severe impacts occurred when households lost their ability to cook food, access clean air and drinking water, and the ability to refrigerate food and medicine. The outcomes of this research informs more efficient, human-centered resilience planning for the CIS managemnt.

Keywords: Wildfire impacts, Critical infrastructure disruptions, Household capability, Bayes Mallows Ranking Method, Human-centered resilience planning.