Title: "Assessing and improving equity in access to essential service facilities during hurricanes"

The presentation will present results of ongoing research on Assessing and improving equity in access to essential service facilities during hurricanes. Ensuring equity while allocating resources towards improving the accessibility of communities during and after disaster is imperative, especially considering socio-eco- nomic inequities. There is a wealth of research that has been conducted on post disaster recovery and resilience. However, there is limited research that focuses on assessing equity in access to emergency facilities and developing methods that can identify important paths which can be strengthed to improve equity and overall connectivity . To this end, this presentation will first identify the inequities in accessibility to essential service facilities in a case study region in Southeast Louisiana. Next, a novel method to rank paths in a road network based on their importance for connectivity to essential service facilities con- sidering a hazard scenario and demographic characteristics will be presented. These results and methods can be valuable for policy makers for identifying important paths to prioritize when allocating resources for roadway infrastructure manage- ment while considering equity in benefits for all segments of the population.

Dr. Sabarethinam Kameshwar
Assistant Professor
Lousianna State University

Dr. Sabarethinam Kameshwar is an Assistant Professor at Louisiana State University. He obtained his PhD from Rice University and he has a B.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati in India. His research group focuses on performance of infrastructure systems subjected to natural hazards such as hurricanes and earthquakes. Specifically, his research group focuses on multi-hazard performance of road networks and oil storage tanks, infrastructure resilience to extreme events, and hazard mitigation decision support tools for infrastructure systems considering deep uncertainties.