Operations Research Applications in Disaster Recovery Planning for Flood-Prone Local Government Areas in Anambra State

Anambra State, situated in the floodplain of the Niger and Anambra rivers, experiences severe annual flooding that disrupts infrastructure, displaces communities, and overwhelms local government disaster response capacities. This study applies operations research methods to develop a disaster recovery planning framework for four chronically flood-prone local government areas in Anambra State, South East Nigeria. Decision analysis is used to structure the recovery planning problem, modelling alternative recovery intervention sequences under uncertainty regarding flood duration and inundation extent. Resource allocation models optimize the deployment of recovery personnel, equipment, and materials across affected communities within budget constraints. Network flow analysis identifies critical access routes for recovery logistics during flood events and determines alternative routing plans when primary corridors are impassable. A simulation model of recovery operations, incorporating stochastic flood duration and resource availability, is used to evaluate recovery time performance under four strategic scenarios. Results indicate that pre-positioning recovery resources at strategic flood-resilient depots within local government boundaries reduces average recovery time by 29 percent compared to central-storage approaches. Scenario analysis demonstrates that a coordinated multi-agency resource pooling arrangement outperforms independent local government recovery operations on all cost and time metrics. Recommendations are presented as a professional disaster recovery operations plan for adoption by the Anambra State Emergency Management Agency. Keywords: disaster recovery planning, flood management, Anambra State, operations research, resource allocation