Access to Essential Services: A Critical Factor for Predicting Recovery and Quantifying Resilience

Essential services are necessary for individuals to recover from and adapt to disruptive events, yet the relationship between access to such services and recovery trajectory is poorly understood. Data on household recovery times are typically only available through surveys, which are limited in scale and scope. Further, the availability of all open and accessible essential services facilities in a region may not be recorded anywhere. Location-based services (LBS) data from cell phones offers new opportunities for estimating this relationship. Using LBS data, we approximate facility availability and household recovery times following Hurricane Irma in Southwest Florida in 2017 and then statistically model the importance of access for recovery incorporating social vulnerability, local storm parameters, and infrastructure outage variables. We show that power, cell service, and school outages rank highest in importance, followed by measures of access to essential services. These results underscore the importance of including access metrics for predicting community recovery and evaluating resilience as well as the need for planning and policies that improve access to essential services both in times of stability and disruption.