Critical Infrastructure Protection

Table of Contents

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Banner with a faded photo of flooding and and a collapsed road, with a transparent green overlay and the title of this section

A Critical Infrastructure Protection Plan is a strategy to make critical infrastructure more resilient. What qualifies as “critical infrastructure” is defined locally, but generally refers to infrastructure that is necessary to providing vital community and individual functions. It can include both buildings (e.g., schools, town halls, hospitals), and also physical facilities such as roads, storm drains, potable water pipes, or a sewer collection system. Critical infrastructure must be designed, located, and sufficiently protected to remain operational during hazard events and emergencies, including floods, wildfires, high winds, and severe weather. Key infrastructure assets can be owned, operated, and maintained by either public agencies (e.g., roads, bridges, water and sewer systems, school facilities, etc.) or the private sector (e.g., hospitals, utilities, etc.). A diminished or vulnerable critical infrastructure system will greatly impede a whole community’s ability to withstand or recover sooner from hazard events. 

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Each local community must identify and analyze its own critical infrastructure in relation to known hazards and develop a comprehensive strategy. The results should include a list of prioritized capital improvements and associated costs and potential funding sources. The strategy should be incorporated into the local hazard mitigation plan’s list of mitigation projects, the local comprehensive plan, and the capital improvement program/plan. It is especially important to develop plans for the long-term maintenance of critical infrastructure, since FEMA (and potentially other agencies) may not provide funding for repair unless the damage is related to a specific disaster event.    

Similar to many growing communities in the semi-arid climate of Colorado, the City of Aurora faces an increasingly complex future with regard to its water supply and infrastructure planning. Uncertainties related to a host of future conditions including population growth, aging infrastructure, climate change, and extreme events present clear risks to the provision of safe drinking water to its citizens far into the future. As part of developing its 2015 Integrated Water Master Plan (IWMP), Aurora Water, the City’s water utility, applied a scenario-based planning process in which the potential impacts of these and other factors to its assets were quantified using performance metrics of reliability and resilience. In so doing the City developed a risk management framework to identify key risks inherent to the entire Aurora Water infrastructure system – from watershed supply to storage, treatment, distribution, and delivery. This systematic approach considered the future frequency and severity of drought, wildfire, and floods among other threats and was used to evaluate and rank all the system vulnerabilities to serve as the basis for decisions regarding future capital projects, programs, and policies. Typical of most utilities, Aurora Water’s refined Capital Improvement Program outlines projects over the next 20 years. However, despite uncertain future conditions, the planning horizon for their IWMP extends to 2070 with updates planned on a three to fiveyear basis.

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The speed at which a community is able to recover is linked closely to the resilience of its critical infrastructure and ability to avoid damage from disaster. The following steps need to be taken: 

  • Have a critical facilities protection plan (CFPP) in place prior to any disaster event.
  • Establish an on-going program to implement recommended actions in the CFPP.
  • Build support for funding of the CFPP by educating the general public and key stakeholder groups.  
  • Implement the CFPP to achieve long-term savings to the local government, as well as state and federal governments.
  • Gaining funding support to implement the CFPP can be a struggle when a community has not experienced a disaster for some time. 
  • Another challenge is avoiding funding competition among agencies responsible for certain infrastructure elements.
  • Some critical facilities may also be classified as historic structures, which may introduce additional challenges in terms of upgrading the structures to be more resilient.
Key Facts

Administrative Capacity

Planner, public works official, engineer, finance office, emergency manager

Mapping

As needed

Regulatory Requirements

N/A

Maintenance

Minimal

Adoption Required

Yes

Statutory Reference 

N/A

Associated Costs

Staff time to file for grant(s) – cost can be recovered out of grant(s); to prepare Critical Facilities Protection Plan requires staff time

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