Understanding Household Power Outage Experiences: A Case Study Comparison across U.S. Cities

Household power outage experiences vary based on outage characteristics and the household’s ability to cope with a disruption. While disaster management scholarship has produced methods to anticipate where the most significant impacts of a hazard may occur, these methods do not anticipate secondary impacts, such as power outages. This research is necessary as the expected risks associated with power outages will increase in the United States caused by climate change, increasing electricity demand, and poorly maintained infrastructure. To understand households power outage experiences, a survey collected 896 responses from three cities in the United States: Detroit, MI; Miami, FL; and Phoenix, AZ. Participants were recruited through Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) service to complete a Qualtrics survey. We hypothesized that those racial/ethnic minority groups, specifically non-whites, and lower income experienced more frequent and prolonged power outages. We also hypothesized the same groups were more likely to have experienced greater economic impacts, such as throwing away perishable food and not receiving assistance. We found that non-whites in Phoenix and Detroit were more likely to experience longer outages than whites; however, this association was not present in Miami and not statistically significant in any city. Income was not a substantial factor in predicting food waste or assistance received during the longest self-reported outage. Through this research, we demonstrated that two social vulnerability indicators – race and income – are possible factors for predicting adverse power outage effects. Further assessments in varying geographical and political contexts are necessary to increase understanding of how households experience power outages.