A Conceptual Framework for Emergency Food and Water Requirements in a Disaster and Case Study for the HayWired Earthquake Scenario

Abstract:

Estimating the demand-side emergency food and water requirements of impacted households in a disaster has been a perennial gap in emergency management capabilities, with the current supply-side paradigm dominating most relief and mass care efforts. Resource access and food insecurity in a disaster occur at the nexus of power and water utility service outages, transportation disruptions, business interruptions and community vulnerability. Vulnerable communities may require more initial emergency food and water resources than other communities in a disaster and take longer to recover. Yet, emergency managers lack a tool estimate food and water resource requirements across communities in government supported mass care and commodity missions for large and complex disasters. To investigate these issues, a conceptual framework is proposed and implemented to estimate short-term emergency food and water requirements in a disaster based on the percentage of population impacted by utility and transportation disruption and by weighting needs of exposed communities using a social vulnerability index. A case study is then presented to estimate emergency food and water requirements in the HayWired scenario, a M 7.0 Hayward fault earthquake event in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The model estimates 710,357 households (1,908,375 residents) with emergency resource requirements three days after the event. We find that the interaction between physical and social vulnerability increases the estimated regional resource requirements from the Bay Area Earthquake plan by 8%. These demand-side emergency food and water requirements are estimated at a high spatial resolution and mostly focused into communities in Oakland and the East-Bay Lowlands and away from more resilient communities in Eastern Alameda and Contra Costa Counties. Further validation and calibration of the model along with research on the relation between physical and social vulnerability and food insecurity will improve the estimation of demand for emergency resources and address the demand-side gap in emergency management logistical planning for humanitarian relief efforts, catastrophic natural disasters, and economic and public health events.