This collaborative Rapid Response Research (RAPID) Grant provides funding to collect field data about damage by Hurricane Isaac to transmission lines, distribution lines and electrical substations. The power loss resulting from this hurricane affected more than one million households and businesses, and the restoration for over 250,000 customers took more than 72 hours. The specific reasons for these power outages are not known, though it is reported that more than 40 substations were damaged either by wind or flood. It is important to collect the data about damages to transmission and distribution lines quickly, and to determine whether the cause of the damage was by wind or by flood.
The data that will be collected under this award will be archived on the web site of the American Association for Wind Engineering enabling access to other researchers. These data will also be archived by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
The major goals of this RAPID collaborative research project were to collect, catalog, and disseminate highly perishable data including weather-related hazard data associated with Hurricane Isaac and related damage to components and subsystems of the power delivery infrastructure in Louisiana. Louisiana State University and University of Washington collaborated to collect hurricane hazard and power infrastructure damage data. The team conducted two days of field damage reconnaissance, collecting data to describe hazard and damage conditions for the power transmission and distribution systems. Data were cataloged and organized for dissemination. The field reconnaissance resulted in geo-referenced, high-definition video (nearly 11 hours), geo-referenced still photographs (nearly 1000 photographs), and written field notes and assessments. Databases have been organized to make these data, and data collected from third party websites, available through an online portal. This project has resulted in the development of a Hurricane Isaac data repository specific to the performance of the electrical power delivery system. These results contribute to the understanding of the impacts of hurricane hazards on electric power delivery systems, and the hazard datasets developed and disseminated through this project will be of use to other disciplines for hurricane hazard analysis. The data collected and cataloged during this project are freely available to other research groups as well as the general public. A conference paper entitled Collection and Organization of Hurricane Damage Data for Civil Infrastructure was presented at the 12th Americas Conference on Wind Engineering (12ACWE), an international wind engineering conference, held in Seattle, Washington, June 16-20, 2013.
