Contents I. Introduction
Natrual disasters, e.g., floods, windstorms, tsunamis, and earthquakes, have been observed to impose potentially devastating and widespread striking effects on the nations critical energy infrastructures [1]. Among such high-impact low-probability (HILP) incidents, the occurrence of which has been trending higher in recent years, one can highlight the 2010 earthquakes and tsunamis in Nepal and Chile knocking power to many customers for several days [2], the 2012 Hurricane Sandy in the U.S. resulting in an extensive outage affecting 8 million customers with estimated 75 billion economic loss [3], the 2016 Hurricane Hermine with approximately 8.5 million customer power outages and direct damage amounted to 71.4 billion in the U.S. [4], the 2017 Hurricane Harvey in Texas causing 10,000 MW electricity outages to 291,000 people in the state [5], and the 2017 Hurricane Irma leading to a power outage of 6.7 million electricity customers in Florida accounting for 67% of all state customers [6]. According to [7], 58% of all the U.S grid outages in the 10-year time interval from 2003 to 2012 are driven by the weather-caused HILP events resulting in an estimated $18–33 billion annual loss. With an elevated incidence and severity, the resilience of the electricity delivery infrastructure and its capacity to withstand such outage-inducing HILP patterns has become more and more critical to peoples well-being and every aspect of our economy [8], [9].
