Buxton, R.; Wright, K.C.; Daly, M.C.; Timar, L.; Mieler, D.H. 2014 Single infrastructure failures : capturing outage information for MERIT Modelling the Economics of Resilient Infrastructure Tool. Lower Hutt, N.Z.: GNS Science. ERI research report 2014/01 56 p.; doi: 10.21420/G20K5V
Abstract: The Economics of Resilient Infrastructure (ERI) research programme is a four year project funded by the New Zealand Government. The aims of the project are to study and quantify the impacts of natural hazards on infrastructure and to model the economic consequences of these impacts. To this end a new software tool called MERIT (Modelling the Economics of Resilient Infrastructure) is being developed as part of the program. This report outlines the progress undertaken to date (March 2014) as part of Research Aim 1 in the ERI programme. Research Aim 1 is focussed on the development of ‘Outage Scenarios’ that can be used to better inform the MERIT approach. A large part of the work in Research Aim 1 has been focussed on ‘single outage’ scenarios where a single critical infrastructure provider is asked to outline a credible outage scenario which may have significant impacts for the community in a study area. The study area chosen was Auckland and the infrastructure sectors concentrated on were electricity, represented by Vector and Transpower, and water supply represented by Watercare. Spatial service outage data relating to the scenarios was collected through the use of workshops, meetings and other information provided by Vector, Transpower and Watercare. This report outlines the outage scenarios and describes the process used to generate the data in a form suitable as an input to the MERIT tool. An assessment of the suitability of the approaches used is given as well as an overview of what the next steps in the research programme will be. (auth)