Powering Through: Building Critical Infrastructure Resilience

by Mary Lasky, William Harris, Steve Volandt

We can outsmart disaster through intelligent planning.

There is more to critical infrastructure than roads and dams—our everyday life relies on invisible infrastructure, from wastewater management to communications technology. Whether we’re charging our phones or seeking emergency healthcare, we trust that our electrical grid will be reliable. So what happens to that infrastructure when disaster hits?

Will the kitchen tap bring us water after a freak weather event? At the supermarket, will we find what we need during a pandemic? Or might water systems and supply chains turn out to be underprepared for surviving disruption?

We don’t need to wait for a cyberattack, hurricane, or severe winter storm to find us. Resilience is a plan, not an afterthought, when the grid is down. When emergency alerts blare and the lights go out, our nation’s critical infrastructure can be prepared.

After reading this book, you will know:

-How our power grid arrived at a state of vulnerability
-What obstacles we face to preventing mass, long term power failure
-How industry professionals can push for a more resilient critical infrastructure

With a focus on our nation’s electric grid, Powering Through offers a comprehensive look at multiple threats, reaching across infrastructure sectors to address interdependencies. It serves as an actionable consequence management handbook for any professional seeking a route to greater resilience. Each chapter concludes with a chart that helps the reader assess current approaches and orient an action plan towards greater resilience.

Chapters concentrate on key infrastructure areas:

-Electric Power
-Communications
-Water & Wastewater
-Food & Agriculture
-Transportation
-Healthcare & Public Health
-Emergency Management
-Chemical
-Information & Operations Technology

A key addition to any library of natural disaster and survival books, Powering Through focuses on disaster preparation and prevention. This updated edition builds on its 2016 predecessor through three key questions:

-What happens to each critical infrastructure sector in the event of electric power failure?
-How can each sector help restore electric power in a grid down scenario?
-What can each sector change now to become more resilient?

“Powering Through: Building Critical Infrastructure Resilience provides the most comprehensive review of threats, impacts, consequences, and preventative measures any organization can take to be more resilient to extended power outages that we have seen in our 16 years in the disaster management and business continuity field.” - Tom Moran, Executive Director of the All Hazards Consortium

457 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 12, 2020

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.

Reviews

[Humphrey Hawksley · Rating 5 out of 5]

A worrying and detailed examination on the vulnerabilty of our electrical grids, written by experts who know what they are talking about. Their mission statement sums up the what and why. 'The InfraGard National Disaster Resilience Council Mission is to inform communities how to mitigate the high-impact threat of long-term power and communications failure (greater than 30 days), which could lead to catastrophic, cascading losses of life-sustaining infrastructures and resources for recovery.' The recent crisis in Texas is evidence that much more work needs to be done to make us safe. Lack of investment by power companies coupled, weak regulation and the change in modern warfare to weapons such as cyber and electromagnetic pulse make this a compelling read. The primary target now in any major war would be the destruction of your enemies electrical grid.