Leveraging social media data to study the community resilience of New York City to 2019 power outage

Power outages across the world have severe social impacts. The public's responses to power outages provide valuable insights into their capacities of adapting crisis and an invaluable perspective to demonstrate community resilience. As social media has connected people in the community, the discussion on social media can reflect their responses as a criterion of resilience throughout power outages in a timely and effective manner. In the field of power outages, the potentials of social media data have only been investigated with recent advancements of big data techniques. Nonetheless, studies focusing on community resilience using social media data are quite limited. We filled this gap by introducing a novel and quantitative method to study the community resilience throughout power outages, based on a case study on the Manhattan blackout occurred in July 2019. The study examined community resilience from both mental and behavioral perspectives via sentiment analysis and behavior analysis. The sentiment analysis was used to track people's mental outlook and shape the overall mental status during and after this emergency. On the other side, six major patterns of behaviors were identified, and the behavioral index was defined to learn how the community responded to power outages amid the response and recovery periods. Both the mental and behavioral results reveal that New York City recovered at approximately one and a half hours after the blackout occurred, implying a strong community resilience to such short and emergent power outage events.