Defining organizational functionality for evaluation of post-disaster community resilience

Abstract

Communities are complex systems defined by the interaction of social, economic, environmental, and physical systems. The dynamic response and recovery of a community to a disaster is often tied to the response and recovery of its organizations. This paper employs the Community Capitals framework to understand how organizations contribute to community resilience. The organization-level functionality is defined as the capability of an organization to be used for its intended purposes. Organizations are not solely physical objects, staff and supply chain are identified as critical non-physical components contributing to organizational functionality alongside conventional physical components. Fault trees and a probabilistic framework are developed to measure organizational functionality failure. A fault tree is presented in detail for three organizations, namely, banks, gas stations, and schools, to illustrate the different components necessary for functionality of different organizations. Lastly, a framework for evaluation of community resilience based on organizational functionality is proposed.