Tag Archives: Seville Erica

Transportation Lifelines and Critical Infrastructure

This is the first paper that sparked my research interest in transportation vulnerability, and what would later become the focus area of my research: the cost of transportation vulnerability and the benefit of transportation reliability. It was published almost ten years ago, in 2001: Risk and Impact of Natural Hazards on a Road Network by Erica Dalziell and Alan Nicholson from the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. As far as I am aware of, the Dalziell-Nicholson paper is one of the first attempts to calculate a cost benefit ratio for road closure versus mitigation investments, where the road is seen as a transportation lifeline, and thus a critical infrastructure for the communities that it links.

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Resilience revisited

How many ways are there for defining vulnerability and criticality, really? Traditionally, risk matrixes have a likelihood/impact approach, but not always. Yesterday, I was examining a criticality/vulnerability matrix. Today, I will take a closer look at a criticality/preparedness matrix with a third susceptibility dimension added to it, as presented in the New Zealand research project Resilent Organisations, a project that has given me plenty of food for thought for my own research in assessing and analyzing resilience.

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