Abstract
One challenge in emergency preparedness and response during extreme weather events such as hurricanes and ice storms is estimating how many people may be without power and how long they could be without power. In this presentation, we will discuss a method for estimating the spatial distribution of people without power during extreme weather events. The method is based on a directional nearest-neighbor approach in which grid cells representing substation locations acquire other grid cells representing customers/population demand with respect to the capacity of each substation. We also present a method for estimating restoration time in case of an outage. The application of these methods during the 2008 hurricane season will also be discussed.
