The 2013 Critical Infrastructure Symposium

I had the opportunity and privilege to attend the 2013 Critical Infrastructure Symposium: Advancing Full Spectrum Resilience at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. this week.  Resilience in the context of our national infrastructure will be increasingly important - - probably just as important as sustainability.  The future of our public and private infrastructure will probably be defined in the very near future in terms of both resilience and sustainable. 

Several terms and words were utilized during the symposium that infrastructure engineers need to start to understand and focus more attention on.  In a world marked by more and more events like Hurricane Sandy, response and recovery activities will be critical tasks for engineers.  The goal is to provide greater engineering leadership to improve current practices and policies to advance regional and national infrastructure security and resilience.  Be thinking about the following in the context of infrastructure resilience:

• Public-Private Partnerships
• Change, Adapt, Move
• Technology to aid decision making and a common operating picture (one of the metrics of an effective asset management program)
• Bottom-up relationships
• System interdependencies (the #1 term during the conference that I heard)
• Need for system thinking and system engineering
• Supply chain coordination
• Imagination
• Risk of the wastewater treatment infrastructure (Sandy illustrated this - seems this was a huge problem and significant risk with more future extreme weather events)
• Utilities not recognized as first responders
• GIS
• Communication and trust
• Making the business case for resiliency
• Testing/tracking assumptions
• Performance based engineering
• Serviceability and safety
• Consequences based approach
• Operational culture of resiliency
• Asset management (reciliency as a key function under asset management)
• System performance, recovery time/cost
• Condition Index
• Spatial awareness and critically (where "stuff" is and who knows where the "stuff" is -  still a huge problem)
• Proximity factors
• "Learn as you listen"
• "To protect everything, you protect nothing"
• 16 critical infrastructure sectors (Name them?)
• Private sector runs and operates approximately 85% of the national infrastructure (when you list the 16, it will make sense)
• Single point of failure
• Re-image
• Risk map and risk mapping (great idea as part of an asset managment program)
• "Stuck on stupid"
• Mapping for the purpose of understanding relationships (the definition of GIS)
• Business continuity and importance during recovery
• Pattern recognition
• Dutch (as in Dutch engineers and engineering)
• New defintion of 100-year events
• Climate change assumptions
• Moral hazard
• System gaps and vulerability
• Funding bad solutions
• "People live off of history"