Resilience

ASCE sponsored an industry summit on December 8-10, 2008 at Lansdowne Resort, to identify content for a guidance document outlining key attributes required for successful, safe, resilient, and sustainable critical infrastructure systems. The document will assist in proactively preventing infrastructure catastrophes such as the levee failures in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina or the collapse of the I-35W Bridge in Minneapolis.

The summit fostered meaningful discussions and insights from experts with wide-ranging roles in critical infrastructure: financiers, elected officials, civil servants, infrastructure advocacy group members, news media, engineers, and others. Summit participants were actively engaged in discussions focused on developing and sustaining resilient infrastructure systems.

In support of the overarching guiding principle to protect public health, safety, and welfare, four fundamental guiding principles were developed:

1. Quantifying, communicating, and managing risk.
2. Exercising sound leadership, management, and stewardship in decision-making processes. 
3. Employing an integrated systems approach. 
4. Adapting critical infrastructure in response to dynamic conditions and practice.

These guiding principles are fully interrelated. No one principle is more important than the others and all are required to protect public safety, health, and welfare.

The National Committee on Levee Safety said the U.S. should take a complete inventory of all levees in the country. Although the US Army Corps of Engineers maintains an inventory of levees it is responsible for, there is a lack of inventoried data on privately owned levees. Officials don't know how many there are or what shape they are in.

Best practices are activities that support the mitigation mission, which includes creating safer communities by reducing loss of life and property, enabling individuals to recover more rapidly from floods and other disasters and lessening the financial impact of disasters on the nation. Mitigation measures are being collected and told as best practices stories by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Texas Governor's Division of Emergency Management (GDEM).

The US Department of Homeland Security announced regulations that will strengthen the security of the nation's freight and passenger rail systems and reduce the risk associated with transporting security-sensitive materials. The Rail Security final rule will require rail carriers to designate rail security coordinators and report significant security concerns to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). This fact sheet explains the TSA's security standards for freight and passenger rail systems.

The public and private sectors must join forces during the next presidential administration to focus their resources on the resiliency of US critical infrastructure as a means of ensuring both homeland and financial security, according to a report from the Reform Institute.

The water sector is set to become the first of the country’s 18 critical infrastructure and key resource sectors to develop a metric and launch a tool to gauge security progress under the National Infrastructure Protection Plan framework.