ABSTRACT
This paper highlights challenges and open questions pertaining to physical and social infrastructure system interdependencies and their implications for disaster response, recovery, and resilience planning efforts. We describe the importance of understanding interdependencies in disaster contexts and highlight limitations to existing approaches. Suggestions for understanding and addressing interdependencies focus on increasing availability of tools for assessing interdependencies and increasing stakeholder and decisionmaker uptake of infrastructure interdependency-related information in planning efforts.
ABSTRACT
Despite continuing efforts to make the electric power system robust, some risk remains of widespread and extended power outages due to extreme weather or acts of terrorism. One way to alleviate the most serious effects of a prolonged blackout is to find local means to secure the continued provision of critical social services upon which the health and safety of society depend. This article outlines and estimates the incremental cost of a strategy that uses small distributed generation, distribution automation, and smart meters to keep a set of critical social services operational during a prolonged power outage that lasts for days or weeks and extends over hundreds of kilometers.
