  Community resilience in the face of natural hazards relies on a community's
potential to bounce back. A failure to integrate equity into resilience
considerations results in unequal recovery and disproportionate impacts on
vulnerable populations, which has long been a concern in the United States.
This research investigated aspects of equity related to community resilience in
the aftermath of Winter Storm Uri in Texas which led to extended power outages
for more than 4 million households. County level outage and recovery data was
analyzed to explore potential significant links between various county
attributes and their share of the outages during the recovery and restoration
phases. Next, satellite imagery was used to examine data at a much higher
geographical resolution focusing on census tracts in the city of Houston. The
goal was to use computer vision to extract the extent of outages within census
tracts and investigate their linkages to census tracts attributes. Results from
various statistical procedures revealed statistically significant negative
associations between counties' percentage of non-Hispanic whites and median
household income with the ratio of outages. Additionally, at census tract
level, variables including percentages of linguistically isolated population
and public transport users exhibited positive associations with the group of
census tracts that were affected by the outage as detected by computer vision
analysis. Informed by these results, engineering solutions such as the
applicability of grid modernization technologies, together with distributed and
renewable energy resources, when controlled for the region's topographical
characteristics, are proposed to enhance equitable power grid resiliency in the
face of natural hazards.
