  Power outages caused by extreme weather events, such as hurricanes, can
significantly disrupt essential services and delay recovery efforts,
underscoring the importance of enhancing our infrastructure's resilience. This
study investigates the spread of power outages during hurricanes by analyzing
the correlation between the network of critical infrastructure and outage
propagation. We leveraged datasets from Hurricanemapping.com, the North
American Energy Resilience Model Interdependency Analysis (NAERM-IA), and
historical power outage data from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)'s
EAGLE-I system. Our analysis reveals a consistent positive correlation between
the extent of critical infrastructure components accessible within a certain
number of steps (k-hop distance) from initial impact areas and the occurrence
of power outages in broader regions. This insight suggests that understanding
the interconnectedness among critical infrastructure elements is key to
identifying areas indirectly affected by extreme weather events.
