Natural hazard impacts on infrastructure in Russian regions

Infrastructure is considered as the fundamental facilities and systems serving a country or other area to ensuring the functioning of its economy. The term infrastructure refers to public and private facilities and systems such as transport (including roads, railways, bridges, tunnels, ports, airports, etc.), water supply, sewers, electrical grids, and telecommunication lines. Throughout the area of Russia, almost all of the listed infrastructure facilities are exposed to the undesirable impacts of adverse natural processes and phenomena, as well as natural hazards of various origins such as geophysical, hydro-meteorological, and others. Adverse impacts of natural hazards may trigger accidents and failures; disrupt the normal operation of infrastructure facilities. In their turn, these negative consequences of natural hazard impacts on the infrastructure cause multiple social problems. Using the information collected by the author in the database of technological and natural-technological accidents, contributions of natural factors to accidents and failures in the infrastructure facilities are assessed. Database includes more than 21 thousand events from 1992 to 2019. Among all the identified types of natural hazards, the largest contributions to accidents and infrastructure disruptions have hydro-meteorological hazards such as heavy snowfalls and rains, floods, and ice phenomena. Electrical grids are the most vulnerable to adverse impacts of natural hazards. Regional differences in the risk of accidents and infrastructure disruptions between Russian federal regions were found. All the federal regions were grouped by their risk levels of accidents and infrastructure disruptions. The resulting maps were created and analyzed.