This paper investigates whether socioeconomic factors are important for the hurricane performance of the electric power system in Florida. The investigation is performed using the Random Forest classifier with Mean Decrease of Accuracy (MDA) for measuring the importance of a set of factors that include hazard intensity, time to recovery from maximum impact, and socioeconomic characteristics of the affected population. The data set (at county scale) for this study includes socioeconomic variables from the 5-year American Community Survey (ACS), as well as wind velocities, and outage data of five hurricanes including Alberto and Michael in 2018, Dorian in 2019, and Eta and Isaias in 2020. The study shows that socioeconomic variables are considerably important for the system performance model. This indicates that social disparities may exist in the occurrence of power outages, which directly impact the resilience of communities and thus require immediate attention.

Outages are fairly common in power distribution networks [1], [2], and this number is increasing in some countries because of aging infrastructure and changing weather patterns [3], [4]. While good design and maintenance reduce the number of outages, they cannot be eliminated completely. When an outage is required to perform maintenance or upgrade the equipment, the utility can minimize the disruption of service to customers by carefully planning the deployment of the crews and the sequence of operations. On the other hand, a fault in the system usually causes an unplanned outages, which can lead to long service interruptions and significant inconvenience to the customers. Therefore, reducing the number of unplanned outages and better managing their duration is a priority for most utilities [5]. The first step towards mitigating the negative consequences of unplanned outages is to gain a better understanding of their number and duration, as well as the number of customers affected.