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rate than population in the suburbs in and around metropolitan areas (U.S. Census
Bureau, March 2011). These suburban areas are also potentially vulnerable to the out-
comes of climate change, since they may have very few alternatives should conventional
infrastructures become impaired.
Vulnerable populations need to be identified, and strategies to address their in-
frastructure needs must be developed not only for conventional infrastructure but also
innovative infrastructure that will help to adapt to and reduce the impacts of climate
change (see section IV below).
D. Infrastructure Interdependencies And Cascading Impacts:
A Case Study
This section illustrates, through a case study in South Florida commissioned for this
NCA technical report, how impacts and vulnerability to extreme weather events would
change as built infrastructures evolve in response to climate and non-climate drivers.
The selected weather event is a hypothetical category 5 hurricane landfall near Miami.
We examine the impacts derived from infrastructure models in 2010 and compare those
impacts to those forecasted in 2030 from a hurricane of similar intensity and landfall
point. The difference in the observed impacts are derived from population movements
from forecasted sea level rise in the Miami area and population migration paterns that
might be disrupted in the process. Built infrastructures will evolve within a different
patern based on people and economic activity being found in diferent locations than
they were found previously. Changes in the impacted areas will increase the vulner-
ability of some infrastructure sectors and decrease the vulnerability in others that may
evolve to more resilient configurations.
1) THE STUDY AREA - CURRENT IMPACTS AND FUTURE EVENTS
Extreme weather events associated with climate change affect communities disproportion-
ally that have high population density, aging infrastructures, outdated building codes,
insufficient reactive power, lack of coordination among system protection agents, inef-
fective communication, and untimely warning systems (US Canada Task Force, 2004).
Extreme events such as a hypothetical category 5 hurricane landfalling near Miami
and causing widespread and persistent outages in energy, waste water and water dis-
tribution, telecommunications, public health, and transportation have been projected
as plausible (NISAC, 2011) possibly with increasing frequency. Correlations have been
established between rising sea levels, and more frequent and intense storms in the US
(Meehl et al., 2007; Travis, 2010). Hurricane Andrew, for example, which reached land-
fall in southern Florida in August 1992 as a Category 5 hurricane (Miami Hurricane
Scenario Analysis Report October, 2011), was projected to produce a storm surge exceed-
ing 12 feet of flooding in some areas, which would cause about 1.1 million people to
experience more than 1 foot of storm surge. This effect approximates an extreme sea
level rise event such as described within the case study that, if realized, could inundate
large areas of the southeastern Florida coastline resulting in infrastructure damage with
increasing frequency, initiating population movements. Economic damage, unstable
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