Mobility resilience to compounding disruptions: Power outages and social events

This study investigates mobility resilience and socioeconomic disparities in Harris County, Texas, during the 2021 winter storm and power outages, followed by overlapping social disruptions. While prior studies have focused on measuring impact severity or comparing aggregate mobility indicators before and after the storm, they often overlook how resilience unfolds over time, especially in outage-affected areas facing multiple, compounding shocks. We address these gaps by conceptualizing mobility resilience as a dynamic, multi-phase process and examining how communities respond to both physical (infrastructure failure) and social (spring break, COVID-19 policy) disruptions. Using nighttime light imagery to identify outages and mobile phone GPS data to measure nighttime home-stay duration, we model behavioral responses across disruption, stabilization, and recovery. Clustering these trajectories reveals three distinct resilience patterns linked to socioeconomic status. Notably, lower-income communities often show high statistical resilience—smaller mobility shifts—but this stability likely reflects constrained adaptive capacity, not robustness.