PUBLIC INFRASTRUCTURE SUPPORT FOR PROTECTIVE EMERGENCY SERVICES

Project Sponsor : U.S. Department of Homeland Security through the NYU Center for Catastrophe Preparedness and Response . Start Date: October 1, 2004 .

Summary:

Protective emergency services, such as emergency management, health, police and fire protection, routinely depend upon a wide range of traditional infrastructure support services, including transportation, energy, water, environmental protection, and communication infrastructure, to provide and deploy human resources, goods, and information in times of crisis. This project identifies relationships between these two types of service areas and vulnerabilities and choke points created at interconnection points during emergencies, to prepare managers and operators of both traditional infrastructure services and emergency services with an explicit way of incorporating each others’ needs into the design of their services. The project goal is to help develop easily communicated emergency procedures for infrastructure managers that focus on the key interconnections between traditional infrastructure and protective services and the vulnerabilities in these linkages that emergency conditions create. The outputs includes: criteria to identify interconnections between emergency services and other infrastructure; two workshops to obtain input from practitioners and academicians; a demonstration of actual interconnection points in selected geographic areas and service sectors and a review of prototypical interconnections and vulnerabilities; and methods to disseminate results.

 

Key activities:

 

1. Identification of key linkages between emergency services and the critical infrastructures needed to support them, using literature reviews, cases, and a workshop mechanism as inputs

2. Identify networks of protective service providers and users for selected geographic areas

3. Develop a prototypical system of interconnections for a specific geographic area as a demonstration of principles developed

4. Evaluate system of interconnections and the demonstration as well as obtain inputs to scenarios for improving linkages by means of a second workshop mechanism, involving infrastructure and emergency services professionals

5. Design educational curriculum for training

6. Develop a system of web linkages for databases of interconnections among infrastructures

7. Prepare outputs in the form of a monograph, workshop reports, curriculum outline, and web links