Powering Through: From Fragile Infrastructures To Community Resilience

by Mary Lasky, William (Bill) Harris, Stephen Volandt

We Take Electric Power for Granted.
Threats to Our Electric Grid are Real.
Here's How to Prepare.

Powering Through is an action guide and contains, for the first time, a comparison of critical infrastructures that can suffer long duration outages caused by five high impact threats:
-high altitude Electromagnetic Pulse (HEMP)
-solar geomagnetic storms
-cyber-attacks
-physical attacks
-and Radio Frequency (RF) weapons.

We are accustomed to short duration power failures. However, disruptions of weeks, months, or over a year are more and more possible, yet this risk is largely unrecognized. The book examines the interdependent, and critical, infrastructures that would be threatened by a sustained electric grid failure, such as our water and wastewater systems, communications, transportation, emergency and healthcare services, government and military defense, to name only a few.

Importantly, the book concentrates on consequence management, starting at the individual, household, and community levels of preparedness. If we are better prepared at home, we can better assist the organizations that will lead recovery, whatever the challenges. In addition, the book sets out a plan for forming resilient community islands which can ultimately aid in recovery.

Ultimately, Powering Through offers hope, via thorough and concrete expert advice, not just to individuals, but to local, state and federal government, emergency organizations, and others, that they can prepare for this very real threat to our electric grid. And what's more, this book heralds a call to action for these same groups to begin preparing NOW.

There are five additional authors:
William Kaewert
David Hunt
John Contestabile
John Rosica
and Mark Walker

279 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2016

About the author

Mary D. Lasky is the chairman of the InfraGard National Disaster Resilience Council. She is the lead editor and author of Powering Through: Building Critical Infrastructure Resilience (2020) and its predecessor, Powering Through: From Fragile Infrastructures to Community Resilience (2016), an action guide for preparation in the face of critical infrastructure failure. Mary is a member of the board of directors of the Foundation for Resilient Societies and has over 20 years of experience leading community resilience organizations in Maryland. She was a program manager for business continuity planning for the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and is a former faculty member at the Johns Hopkins University Whiting School of Engineering. Mary is also a certified business continuity professional.