The complete failure of the power systems infrastructure in Puerto Rico, following Hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017, severely hampered the recovery efforts of multiple critical infrastructure systems (CIS). Understanding the relationships of infrastructure recovery efforts between power infrastructure systems and the other CIS has the potential to be a key in developing an effective recovery plan leading to resilient infrastructure systems, and thereby a more resilient community. This paper explores the critical interfaces and interdependencies in CIS recovery by examining the disruptions and recovery progress of the CIS, including the power infrastructure systems, in Puerto immediately following the events of Hurricane Maria. This research uncovers that strong CIS recovery interdependency relationships exist between the power infrastructure systems and other CIS in Puerto Rico, and these relationships contribute to the resilience of these CIS. The resultant CIS recovery associations may potentially predict the recovery progress of post-disaster CIS recovery centered on the power infrastructure systems and lay the groundwork for further interdependency analysis of CIS in post-disaster scenarios. The results may also be helpful while designing CIS for resiliency in natural disaster areas.

When Hurricane Maria struck the island of Puerto Rico in September, 2017, it devastated the island’s critical infrastructures, including the well-documented total loss of electric power systems. The strong interdependencies or associations among critical infrastructures in modern society meant that the failure of power systems propagated to and exacerbated the failure of other infrastructure systems. Moreover, these associations impact systems recovery just as they impact system failure. This study is a follow-up of previous research by the first author on Hurricane Maria. In this research authors extracted and quantified the recovery associations of Hurricane Fiona (September 2022) made landfall in Puerto Rico and inflicted considerable damage to its critical infrastructures. The recovery efforts following the disaster provided an opportunity to follow up on the previous research and examine the recovery associations. Significant money and efforts have gone into upgrading the infrastructures of Puerto Rico to make them more resilient to natural disasters such as hurricanes or tropical storms following Hurricane Maria. This paper explores the new recovery resiliency characteristics of Puerto Rico’s critical infrastructure systems (CISs) that the recovery efforts following Hurricane Fiona illustrate. This research shows that the power systems and other CISs of Puerto Rico are much more resilient when compared to their state of resiliency in 2017. Moreover, examining the recovery interdependencies reveals that some of the CISs are strongly dependent on power systems recovery. Outcomes of this study suggest that CIS relationships based on recovery data from Puerto Rico, are transferable to similar disaster-prone areas such as the Caribbean islands or other island nations, as they have similar characteristics and challenges.