The nightmare scenario of a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and its potential to cause a tsunami is one threat among many that motivate emergency managers who live and work in the Pacific Northwest to continue planning and coordinating. The region’s proximity to the danger-filled Cascadia Subduction Zone — a fault that stretches from Northern California to mid-Vancouver Island — requires never-ending vigilance.
Because of the risk of earthquakes and other threats to critical infrastructure and key resources (CIKR) — terrorist attacks, industrial accidents and other natural disasters — five Portland, Ore.-area counties collaborated beginning in 2006 to assess and identify the region’s critical infrastructure. Man-made or natural threats to CIKR could significantly disrupt government and business functions, and produce cascading effects far beyond the targeted sector and incident’s physical location, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
“What we had determined early on — because we are a regionally networked area — there’s critical infrastructure that’s shared by all,” said Patty Rueter, Planning Division manager for the Portland Office of Emergency Management. “So we did some studies, collected information and determined that we really wanted to move forward as a group on analyzing the critical infrastructure within the region and understand how we work together.”
Creating a master plan for where money should be spent on CIKR was another driver for developing the plan. “Certainly an underlying desire was to create a blueprint that would give us some guidance about where would be most appropriate to spend money on infrastructure protection,” said Scott Porter, director of the Office of Consolidated Emergency Management for Washington County, Ore., and co-manager of the plan. “That motivated me locally within my own county and regionally to try to do something about that.”
The goals of the Portland/Vancouver Urban Area Critical Infrastructure Protection Plan (CIPP) were to:
- develop a definition for critical infrastructure specific to the five-county region;
- identify private and public critical infrastructure that met the regionally specific definition;
- develop a method to prioritize the region’s critical infrastructure; and
- identify existing standards for protection of each critical infrastructure sector that can be used for public- and private-sector planning.
The Portland/Vancouver area was defined as Oregon’s Multnomah, Washington , Clackamas and Columbia counties; and Clark County, Wash. The participating counties received funding through numerous programs to develop the CIPP, including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Urban Areas Security Initiative grant program. The collaboration began in March 2006 and took about a year and a half to complete, Rueter said.
What’s Regionally Appropriate?
Understanding how the region’s CIKR interact and are interdependent was a critical step for the CIPP. To help bring the region’s CIKR sectors together, CH2M Hill was hired as the coordinating body to help set up the necessary processes for arriving at the desired outcomes. “The collaboration had to do with really identifying what the critical infrastructure was regionally … rather than the city or the five counties saying, ‘This is what we consider critical.’ They actually wanted to reach out and involve as many stakeholders as they possibly could,” said Sandra Davis, lead facilitator and project designer.
Marvin Nauman
Photo: A Peninsula Light power crew repairs down power lines and broken power poles in Gig Harbor, Wash. Photo courtesy of Marvin Nauman/FEMA.]
A series of “interdependencies workshops” were held, which gathered groups of complementary CIKR agencies. For example, one workshop included dams, utilities and energy providers, and another joined transportation, shipping and military, Davis said. “We designed a process that allowed them to not only look at what was the most critical infrastructure within the region, but also how they related to each other,” she said.
Rueter said discussing how the assets interact brought to light how interconnected they are. “Natural gas [providers are] part of the transportation sector because they transport their fuel, and then they’re also part of the public utilities infrastructure because they have a pipeline,” she said. “It was very interesting to see how different infrastructure pieces fit themselves into different sectors.”
The first step in developing the region’s CIPP was to develop a regionally appropriate definition of CIKR. “The federal infrastructure and national definition were very vague and did not address everything we wanted to address within our region,” said Rueter, who also was co-manager of the CIPP. “Theirs was systems and assets, whether physical or virtual, vital to the United States; it was United States-centric. We wanted to make it so that it was regionally-centric.”
The federal definition of CIKR may in some cases be too broad or include sectors that don’t apply to a particular community, like national monuments or nuclear facilities. Porter said adding a regional definition also helped to scale the thinking down to the county level.
The resulting definition was: “Publicly and privately controlled systems and assets, including the built and natural environments and human resources, essential to the sustained functions of the Portland/Vancouver metropolitan areas. … Such systems and assets specifically include those necessary to ensure continuity of security, safety, health and sanitation services, support the area’s economy, and/or maintain public confidence.”
The definition met the stakeholders’ approval and provided a county-level view of CIKR, which aided in identifying the region’s assets.
The owners and representatives of the CIKR assets also were asked to identify their assets by type and name. This presented a problem because approximately 85 percent of the nation’s critical infrastructure assets are privately owned. Representatives feared revealing proprietary information. Scott and Rueter said getting information from private industry ultimately came down to trust. “We needed to know that there were facilities, what role they played, and what their importance was in terms of the region’s operations,” Scott said.
To encourage owners of private assets to participate, the CIPP didn’t require the facilities’ addresses or names. Scott said they could be labeled A, B or C as long as the owner knew which label represented which CIKR asset, and they could be described using generic terms. More than 90 private and public organizations provided lists of CIKR in which more than 700 assets were identified.
Comparing Apples to Oranges
Prioritizing infrastructure is a necessary but oftentimes difficult part of a CIPP — governments need to know which assets are the most important because those might need additional funding for protection or disaster preparedness.Porter said devising a scoring system for prioritization presented a challenge because the plan members had to compare, for example, a power generation facility with a food production facility or a bridge. “You’re really comparing apples against oranges,” he said, “but you want to come up with a quantitative method of comparing your infrastructure so you can make smart decisions about what to protect.”
The representative who identified the asset was responsible for scoring it in a prioritization questionnaire. Assets were ranked based on the number of immediate and long-term deaths that could theoretically result from worst-case damage, its replacement cost, impact to emergency response and environmental impacts.
“Each asset had a sheet filled out. The information from that sheet went into a program, the program did the math, then we were able to get the ranking of the infrastructure, and then we ‘ground-truthed’ it based upon that,” Davis said. “After we had the results from the ranking, we had another workshop where we brought the infrastructure owners or asset owners together. [We] had them look at it and said, ‘OK, within your sector, does this make sense? Is there something that seems like it hasn’t been appropriately ranked?’”
Biased scoring was one problem that arose from representatives scoring their own asset. Porter said in some cases they would follow up with the scorers to see if the ranking could be modified. To combat this issue, he recommends having a cross-sector team score the infrastructure to produce unbiased, consistent scores.
Rueter said the infrastructure prioritization is incomplete because not all the region’s assets are accounted for. “I don’t believe that you can ever fully prioritize critical infrastructure unless you have everyone involved and you understand who that infrastructure actually impacts,” she said. “It’s a web. We looked at the interdependencies and that helped us understand, ‘OK, in order for you to run your critical infrastructure you need this, this and this.’”
Championing the Plan
Getting participation from all of the organizations — particularly from the private sector — proved to be one of the barriers to a complete CIPP. Porter said there were at least four sectors, including agriculture and financial, that didn’t provide the depth of participation he hoped for. Although they reached out to the Washington and Oregon state governments and other organizations to obtain information, he said it was difficult to find the representatives of the CIKR assets. Porter said the biggest challenge now that the CIPP is complete, is the question of who owns it. “That’s unfortunately the problem with a lot of plans, particularly the broader they are in reach, the harder it is to have a champion, an owner,” he said. “Who owns infrastructure protection from an agency perspective, from a countywide perspective, from a regional perspective? And the higher up you go, the harder it gets.”
Because so many people, agencies and organizations contributed to the CIPP, having a group of people or a single person take ownership of it is a complicated matter. However, if it had a champion, the CIPP would potentially be more beneficial. “If this is going to do anything for us, then we really have to have a team, an individual, that will own it and keep the pressure on implementing it,” Porter said.
In the future, Porter hopes to target the sectors that lacked adequate participation and normalize the prioritization scores by making them more consistent across the sectors. He also would like to develop county-level plans for the CIPP’s five participants — this could be done either as stand-alone plans or by adding addendums to the regional plan.
Definitions of Critical Infrastructure
U.S. Department of Homeland Security: Critical infrastructure are the assets, systems and networks, whether physical or virtual, so vital to the United States that their incapacitation or destruction would have a debilitating effect on security, national economic security, public health or safety, or any combination thereof.
Portland/Vancouver Urban Area Critical Infrastructure Protection Plan:
Publicly and privately controlled systems and assets, including the human-built and natural environments and human resources, essential to the sustained functions of the Portland/Vancouver metropolitan areas. … Such systems and assets specifically include those necessary to ensure continuity of security, safety, health and sanitation services, support the area’s economy, and/or maintain public confidence. Incapacitation or destruction of any of these systems or assets would have a debilitating impact on the area either directly, through interdependencies and/or through cascading effects.
Critical Infrastructure and Key Resources Sectors
- Agriculture and Food
- Banking and Finance
- Chemical
- Commercial Facilities
- Communications
- Critical Manufacturing
- Dams
- Defense Industrial Base
- Emergency Services
- Energy
- Government Facilities
- Health Care and Public Health
- Information Technology
- National Monuments and Icons
- Nuclear Reactors
- Materials and Waste
- Postal and Shipping
- Transportation Systems
- Water
Source: U.S. Department of Homeland Security
