Power Outages and Social Vulnerability: Quantifying Social and Environmental Contributors to Power Outages Across North Carolina

Abstract

Power outages in the United States have the potential to cause billions of dollars in economic damages and potentially hundreds of deaths annually. Previous studies have shown that sociodemographics and racial identities impact the way people experience outages as well as their preparedness with impoverished, elderly, and people of racial minorities demonstrating reduced outage preparedness. This study combines environmental parameters, census tract data, and high-resolution power outage data in ordinary least squares regressions to evaluate the role that both environmental parameters and sociodemographics have in the average outage duration. This study finds indication of racial identity and income as significant indicators of shorter outage duration, largely contrary to previous findings. Though data resolution is a limitation, this is evidence that further inquiry is needed to further evaluate any such bias in North Carolina.