Quantifying the social costs of power outages and restoration disparities across four U.S. hurricanes

The multifaceted nature of disaster impact reveals that areas with concentrated populations may contribute more to overall economic burden, while sparsely populated but highly impacted regions suffer disproportionately at the individual level. This study presents a framework that quantifies the societal costs of power outages by converting customer-weighted outage exposure into monetized social losses. This framework integrates with three recovery measures—average outage-days per customer, restore duration, and relative restoration rate—computed from sequential EAGLE-I observations and linked to Zip Code Tabulation Area-level income. Through a standardized pipeline applied to four U.S. hurricanes—Beryl (2024, Texas), Helene (2024, Florida), Milton (2024, Florida), Ida (2021, Louisiana), we produce the first cross-event, fine-scale accounting of societal outage costs and their underlying drivers. The analysis reveals substantial heterogeneity in impacts: Ida generated $1.50 billion in total deprivation costs ($1,757 per capita) Milton, $1.26 billion ($387 per capita); Beryl, $629 million, ($674 per capita); and Helene, $411 million ($285 per capita). Across all events, the results document consistently regressive burden distributions, with deprivation-cost shares declining systematically with income. Mechanistic analysis demonstrates that deprivation costs increase with restoration duration and decrease with relative restoration rates. Explainable modeling identifies restore duration as the dominant predictor of costs, while unsupervised clustering reveals distinct recovery typologies invisible to conventional reliability metrics. By shifting from simple outage counts and subjective assessments to welfare-based, exposure-weighted measurement, this study delivers three key contributions: (i) a transferable framework for quantifying outage impacts and equity, (ii) comparable cross-event evidence linking restoration dynamics to social losses, and (iii) actionable spatial analyses and community typologies that enable equity-informed restoration prioritization and resilience investment decisions

Cost–benefit analysis · Economic cost · Poison control · Social cost · Social impact · Disaster Management and Resilience · Nursing Education, Practice, and Leadership · Tropical and Extratropical Cyclones Research

• The global k-means clustering algorithm

  Open Access•Aristidis Likas, Nikos Vlassis et al.•Pattern Recognition•2003

  Incluir item

• Social vulnerability to long-duration power outages

  Open Access•Jesse Dugan, Dahlia Byles et al.•International Journal of Disaster…•2023

  Incluir item

• Estimating deprivation cost functions for power outages during disasters

  Open Access•Xiangpeng Li, Mona Ahmadiani et al.•International Journal of Disaster…•2025

  Incluir item

• Research progress on deprivation costs in humanitarian logistics

  Open Access•Jianfang Shao, Xihui Wang et al.•International Journal of Disaster…•2020

  Incluir item

• Anatomy of a historic blackout

  Open Access•Xiangpeng Li, Junwei Ma et al.•International Journal of Disaster…•2025

  Incluir item