Abstract
The highway sector is frequently and severely impacted by natural disasters. To mitigate these effects and reduce the need for large relief budgets or emergency funds, it is crucial to study the resilience of the transportation network. As such, defining resilience in absolute terms is not enough; instead, it is equally important to analyze specific case studies and build a lessons-learned rapport. This is critical because it helps identify unique vulnerabilities and strengths that might be overlooked in broader analyses. However, current research on highway resilience often lacks empirical evidence to support the selection of these unique and significant case studies. This paper fills this knowledge gap by leveraging highway emergency relief funds (ERF) data as it provides insight into the resilience of a highway system. Consequently, a multistep methodology was adopted that included (1) standardizing and normalizing the ERF data; (2) a series of analysis of variance models to evaluate the influence of continuous variables on categorical ones; and (3) extracting unique data points causing variances followed by hierarchical clustering and descriptive statistics to pinpoint and analyze these critical points. Results revealed that while some states and disasters have had attention within the literature, others, such as Georgia and Idaho, share common highway funding urgencies due to flood disasters in 2019 that require more nuanced studies. To this effect, the detailed analysis of factors influencing post disaster funding and resilience can offer case studies that lead to actionable insights to guide resource allocation, improve disaster response strategies, and enhance overall highway system resilience. This study contributes to the body of knowledge by identifying commonalities of states, years, and disasters that interact to affect time-related and monetary-related factors in the ERF for highways.
Recommended Citation
M. Elazhary and I. H. El-Adaway, "Guiding State-Specific Studies on Highway Disasters: Examining Differences in Postdisaster Funding," Journal of Infrastructure Systems, vol. 31, no. 3, article no. 04025021, American Society of Civil Engineers, Sep 2025.
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.1061/JITSE4.ISENG-2640
Department(s)
Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)
1943-555X; 1076-0342
Document Type
Article - Journal
Document Version
Citation
File Type
text
Language(s)
English
Rights
© 2025 American Society of Civil Engineers, All rights reserved.
Publication Date
01 Sep 2025
