EMForum Presentation — January 22, 2014

The Infrastructure Security Partnership (TISP)
Improving Resilience of the Nation’s Infrastructure

William B. Anderson
Director and Chief Operating Officer
The Infrastructure Security Partnership (TISP)

Amy Sebring
EMForum Moderator

This transcript contains references to slides which can be downloaded from http://www.emforum.org/vforum/TISP/TISPOverview.pdf
A video recording of the live session is available at http://www.emforum.org/pub/eiip/lm140122.wmv
MP3 format at http://www.emforum.org/pub/eiip/lm140122.mp3 or in MP4format at http://www.emforum.org/pub/eiip/lm140122.mp4
 


[Welcome / Introduction]

Amy Sebring: Good morning/afternoon everyone and welcome to EMForum.org and our first program for 2014. I am Amy Sebring and will serve as your Host and Moderator today and we are very glad you could join us.

For the last few programs, we have been learning about different organizations that share aspects of the emergency management mission.  Today we will hear from The Infrastructure Security Partnership, whose focus is on resilience for All Hazards, not just terrorism.

[Slide 1]

Now it is my pleasure to introduce the Director and Chief Operating Officer for the partnership, William B. Anderson.  Under his leadership, they have developed a number of resources you may find helpful.  Please note the links on our Background Page to a few of them.

Welcome Bill and thank you very much for taking the time to be with us today. I now turn the floor over to you to start us off please.

[Presentation]

Bill Anderson: Good afternoon, everyone.  My name is Bill Anderson.  I am the director of the Infrastructure Security Partnership.  I want to thank the Emergency Information Infrastructure Project for inviting me to introduce you to the Infrastructure Security Partnership (TISP) and able to provide this brief on our efforts to improve the resilience of the nation’s built environment.

On a volunteer basis we have been working on resilience as a concept and strategy for communities to work together to withstand the impacts of all types of hazards or when they have been disrupted to band together and recover, otherwise known as “bounce back” as quickly as possible.   We have been doing this for over a decade now.

Many of you may be familiar with FEMA’s Whole Community and National Preparedness Systems.  These are examples of the federal strategic policies and programs for the national resilience effort.  Today we have been seeing agencies spend more towards these resilience programs in their specific sectors such as the EPA has a community water resilience program.

The Office of Health Affairs in the Department of Homeland Security has its Community Health Resilience Initiative.  Most recently you may have seen the announcement in the federal register for the Federal Transit Administration looking to spend 3.7 billion on making public transportation systems more resilient.

These are a few examples where the federal agencies have begun to spend more money on these particular areas.  What we are going to be going through today is how we are working with those agencies and what you can do to work with us on the topic of resilience.

[Slide 2]

TISP is a national public-private partnership with a mission to lead collaboration that is advancing the practice and policy of regional infrastructure security and resilience.  Our partners and members are governmental agencies at all levels—that means it is state, local and federal.  It is professional societies and other non-for-profits.  It is also large and small companies. We got our start with the engineering construction professions around the subject of building stronger infrastructure through the critical infrastructure protection programs.

 We have since grown our membership to include emergency managers and operators, first responders and attorneys, transportation and public works managers and operators, community and county planners and commissioners, risk and resilience assessors and managers, regional public-private partnerships, academic and research communities, national defense and international communities.

We have expanded quite immensely over the fourteen years we have been around.  TISP is governed by twenty-one officials on a board of directors which is currently chaired by Ernie Edgar of Atkins.

[Slide 3]

TISP is more like a coalition.  When we say we’re a public-private partnership we are not an established 501c3 as an independent entity.  We rely on a benefactor organization for the purpose of staffing and financial support.  Currently TISP is a division of Society of American Military Engineers.  

The value of this relationship is that we have access to SAME’s 105 state and local committees for emergency preparedness and infrastructure resilience.  This is a true grassroots machine.  If you are not familiar with the SAME posts in all 105 locations you can reach out to us and we can get you connected to the folks in your region.  Before SAME the American Society of Civil Engineers was our benefactor.

[Slide 4]

The reason why the Society of American Military Engineers is our benefactor is that our missions are closely aligned with an interest in national defense, emergency preparedness, mission assurance and regional resilience.  There is a synergy between our two organizations.

[Slide 5]

The primary functions we provide to our partners and members—we provide a national leadership for cutting edge subjects around resilience.  We also build and strengthen partnerships and networks where they already exist and sometimes where they don’t exist we help establish them. We also serve as an educator and help share information among our members regarding specifically these areas of resilience and what our partners have been working on.

[Slide 6]

If you are interested in learning more about our activities TISP publishes an annual report which SAME produces in its magazine, The Military Engineer.  The report can be downloaded from SAME’s homepage at www.same.org or on our homepage at www.tisp.org .  The report includes details on some of the events and initiatives which nearly 450 individuals are actively working via our board of directors and committees.

If you are interested in learning more about our activities we recommend you sign up to receive “The Resilience Today” which is our newsletter that goes out to over 8,200 people or that we recommend you sign up for group which currently has over 950 people in it.

[Slide 7]

So much is happening around this topic of resilience so we rely on our partners to share information with each other. To do that we typically develop strategic partnerships to ensure that resilience is developed in a competitive yet compatible system.  What we do is develop these relationships so that when we get around the table and talk about these items we do so with the purpose of coordinating and collaborating for the potential business and partnership opportunities.

Some of these examples include the Applied Physics Laboratories which has been developing a resilience implementation process, The National Association of Counties which is developing a presidential program around the topic of resilience and the National Academies which is getting ready to release its demonstration program they are calling Resilient America.  There will be some good information coming out shortly from them.

[Slide 8]

We also have established other relationships with organizations like the Homeland Security Policy Institute, the Office of Infrastructure Protection and The American Bar Association.  We’ll go into detail about these relationships further in.

[Slide 9]

These partnerships never stop.  We continue to grow them on a regular basis.  We are always interested in learning more about these other organizations that have a common interest or common mission.  If one of your organizations is currently working on this particular area and you would like to develop a strategic partnership with us, reach out to us.  We’d like to learn more.

[Slide 10]

That is a bit about our organization.  By now each of you have used this term “resilience” in your daily tasks or have heard someone else use it.  We have yet to see a true demonstration of a resilience program that is done on a regional scale.  You could talk about port security for example. That is a good example where you have multi stakeholders working together on making decisions and addressing interdependencies, reducing risks through mitigation strategies—a whole host of activities in that. But it is only through one specific jurisdiction.  Very few of those port security programs extend out of the port.  Some of them do but and those are some wonderful examples, but a true, mature resilience program has yet to be demonstrated nonetheless.

[Slide 11]

Why do we care about this?  Why are we spending all this time talking about resilience?  There are a lot of answers our partners can give to this particular question.  From our perspective, we care because we focus on the built environment.  Over time and through many disasters we have seen repeatedly that we haven’t learned from our lessons.

We haven’t built the infrastructure which can withstand hurricanes or tornados or earthquakes..  We have been doing a lot of improve those things but we haven’t built the infrastructure that has been able to withstand all hazards from that aging perspective and from all natural and manmade disasters.  That is one of the reasons why we care about this particular issue.

[Slide 12]

The real reason is the cost scenario.  ASCE’s report card says we are doing poorly with our infrastructure maintenance and operations.  Their message is not getting through to decision makers for them to take action and make improvement.  The decision makers can basically get into their cars, run errands, go to work, take kids to schools, watch TV at home with the power provided to their homes, take showers without risks of the water shutting off and all of this is done without frequent interruptions which impact their daily lives too greatly.

In other words they don’t see the impact of having a D+ grade affecting them on a daily basis.  When a disaster strikes, they see it.  In the last four years we spent an average of eighty billion dollars of our federal tax dollars on rehabilitating our infrastructure.  That is rebuilding our infrastructure to the same state—the same minimal construction standards that the building contained before the disaster.

We are rebuilding it so it can be knocked down by the same kind of disaster that hit it in the first place.  Keep in mind this is not an issue only the United States is facing.  The United Nations quotes that between 2000 and 2010 our developed and developing countries spent over 1.4 trillion on response and recovery and we lost over 1.1 million people in that time period to disasters.

One point we need to make here—when we are talking about federal dollars spent, we are not looking at the money spent the development authorities nor the money spent by insurance companies nor the money spent by state governments.  We do spend more than eighty billion dollars on average to recover.  These are particular concerns and we know we can do better.

[Slide 13]

We can’t just throw money at it and we know that.  Infrastructure project procurement and appropriation is part of the problem as well.  Think about it.  Can the federal government afford a major construction project such as the New Jersey Turnpike, Hoover Dam or a transcontinental tunnel today?  

Using the traditional funding streams put in place years ago to build those things, we really can’t.  Our infrastructure funding has changed.  We rely on corporate investors, we rely on cost sharing and fee for use and revenue sharing.  These types of public-private partnerships and contracts have unintended impacts and newer risks that we weren’t noticing before.

Since our national funding streams are failing the taxpayer has less of a say in public safety and security.  The project proposal phase typically require the developer and designer to get approval from all the stakeholders—make everybody happy.  That has an impact on the amount of time spent during the project proposal phase.

You also have the environmental impact assessment through NEPA that has a lengthy process to that—no time limits basically for making decisions on the proposal period.  That adds to the time and cost of projects.  Laws and regulations don’t keep up with public-private partnership models.  Most of the things are addressed through concessions within the contracts.  As you know all contracts are debatable.  There is particular risk there.

Liabilities for risks and failures have been transferred basically from the public to the private sector.  There is more responsibility on the companies and what they are confronting today.  You have contracts based on fees for revenue typically dis-incentivizing developers to utilizing resources that optimize the asset use and design to meet the minimal industry standards.

These same agreements dis-incentivize developers from using newer engineering innovations, technologies or construction materials that could extend the life of a system.  These are all particular concerns.

[Slide 14]

What is resilience?  We asked that question a bit earlier but there are a lot of definitions you can look at out there today.  You can find a federal definition in Presidential Policy Directive 21 for Critical Infrastructure Security and Resilience.  The two best definitions that we see out there today are the National Academy’s in their August 2012 report entitled “Disaster Resilience—A National Imperative” and also The Infrastructure Security Partnership’s definition as we have on this slide.

Both the National Academy and TISP offer a definition which gives the operator the opportunity to make a decision—absorb the impact or mitigate against it.  There are other options than just mitigating risks and consequences.  You can actually absorb them if it’s not actually going to shut you down or if you are able to bounce back quickly from that disruption then that might be a better option than spending money on the mitigation time.

It is important to remember when working on your own resilience program for all the stakeholders to have a common understanding for the term used.  Since there are so many definitions for resilience it may be helpful to use the Webster Dictionary which is basically the basis for all resilience definitions—an understanding that resilience means the ability to either withstand and/or bounce back from any disruption or disaster.

[Slide 15]

If you’d like more information on resilience and what it is all about we do offer the “Understanding Resilience” booklet.  It is a compendium to the 2011 edition of the TISP Regional Disaster Resilience Guide.  The booklet educates the reader as to the importance of targeting resilience initiatives at the regional and infrastructure levels.  The booklet has been referenced in recent national dialogs questioning whether resilience is a public good as well.

At the end of the booklet you will find a list of reading material you can use for understanding more about the initiatives around the country today.

[Slide 16]

As stated earlier, TISP has focused on resilience in 2003.  In 2006 we published the Regional Disaster Resilience Guide.  It is a how-to guide for multi-jurisdictional partners to develop an action plan for improving the resilience of their self-defined region.  The 2006 RDR Guide was used by a few states such as Maryland.

It was used by the Water Works Association framing their Water/Wastewater Agency Response Network program (WARN).  It was used by the Corps of Engineers in forming their dam sector exercise program and it was used by the Community and Regional Resilience Initiative to develop their resilience systems toolkit.

In 2011 we published an updated edition of the Regional Disaster Resilience Guide.  The updates to the guide were made from the recommendations by the initial users of the 2006 edition and also through the lessons that had been shared from disasters around that timeframe.  It is important to note that sharing your lessons learned is very important.

Organizations such as ourselves and many of our partners actually learn from that and use that information.  You can see the changes between the 2006 edition to the 2011 edition as evidence of that.

[Slide 17]

In 2010 the TISP board of directors established the Regional Infrastructure Disaster Resilience Task Force. I called it the “rider” task force. This opened a cooperative task force which was chaired by Doctor Paula Scalingi of the Bay Area Center for Regional Disaster Resilience made up of 115 stakeholders that were tasked to revive the RDR Guide to be relevant for the next five years and they were also tasked to develop an educational tool for understanding infrastructure resilience—thus the Understanding Resilience booklet.  

The task force worked well together and the product was then reproduced with our permission as a chapter in McGraw-Hill’s textbook entitled Homeland Security Handbook edited by David Kamien and is available on Amazon.com.  

[Slide 18]

The task force was tasked by the board of directors with two basic objectives.  One was to keep the guide brief.  We have all seen what happens when a document is too long.  They get ignored; they collect dust on a shelf or used as doorstops.  We didn’t want any of that.  We want to make sure the service we provided to you would be of value to you so we made it our effort to make it as brief as possible.  

Two—they were also tasked to make the guide as user-friendly as possible.  As you can see with this slide we attempted to make the “how-to” process as simple as playing Chutes and Ladders is what I like to say.

[Slide 19]

As you maneuver your way through the game board you are provided with a list of fourteen focus areas that are priorities for most regions.  Not all will apply to each region.  It is up to you and your stakeholders to make decisions about what your priorities are.  These are starting points which include your needs for addressing all hazards.

Each focus area also includes a set of recommended short-term, mid-range and long-term activities so it gives you something to work together on.  The guide is intended to strengthen and enhance your resilience without causing confusion.  We use plain English.  We try to use very few acronyms.  You will see a few acronyms like the RDR Guide and TISP.

The guide also includes a set of key definitions and fundamental principles so that it can help focus all the stakeholders around one basic concept and you know you are all walking in one direction with a set of principles behind you.

[Slide 20]

The scope of the Resilience Action Plan—it covers the typical life cycle for disaster management which means most of you on this webinar would be familiar with the process.  It covers the development of situational awareness and also highlights dependencies and interdependencies between the sectors.

[Slide 21]

The guide is not designed to solely address terrorism.  It covers natural and manmade hazards.  It also includes recommended incentives for cross sector, multijurisdictional collaboration which would be the foundation for lasting stakeholder partnership for the implementation of the final action plan.

[Slide 22]

That’s the RDR Guide in a very brief description.  We are working on our website right now to include a regional and infrastructure resilience toolkit which will include some templates for some action plans.  It will include some samples of workshops that will be held to bring together stakeholders and work on specific functions.

It will include some lessons learned from some of the other users and I recommend at the end of March you visit our website to take a look at these tools.  If you are interested in downloading the RDR Guide you can go to our page at www.tisp.org or you can send us an email to request a copy.  We charge $25 per copy just to cover the shipping and handling.  We are always willing to lower the cost for multiple purchases of the copies.

The next edition of the RDR Guide will be published in 2016.  In 2014 TISP transitions its focus from strategic perspectives of resilience to operationalizing resilience.  That is basically what we are going to talk about now.

[Slide 23]

Last year the Office of Infrastructure Protection was mandated by the Homeland Security Act of 2002 and the Presidential Policy Directive 21 for Critical Infrastructure Security and Resilience to update the National Infrastructure Protection Plan.  The Office of Infrastructure Protection facilitated an open public collaborative process that was led by Bob Kolaski to write and edit. TISP participated in that process.

It was very collaborative and we appreciated being invited in and having the opportunity to work closely with our partners and we were pleased with the end product.  One of the things we worked on first off was with the Homeland Security Policy Institute within George Washington University.

We held a forum on July 25 that looked at the NIPP as it currently stood and how it was utilized and viewed.  It also looked at what would the updated and revised version of the NIPP look like.  If it was your dream and you got everything you wanted out of the next version of the NIPP, what would that be?

We took all that information and we wrote that into a nice white paper and submitted it to the Office of Infrastructure Protection offering a set of recommendations on how to revise the National Infrastructure Protection Plan.

[Slide 24]

Our recommendations included that the original NIPP, the 2006 and 2009 versions of the NIPP were still valid.  They were good frameworks and we should continue to work in that risk management approach with our GCC and SCC partners.  We also recommended that the same network needed to be brought down to the state and local levels.

One way they could do that is through greater expansion of the public-private partnership model.  We also recommended that the NIPP include a transfer of some knowledge and tool sets that had been developed in the federal agencies for the purpose of implementing the NIPP.  Not all of that had been brought down to the state and local levels and by expanding out the partnerships you are going to be able to do that more easily.

[Slide 25]

Further recommendations included that the process be a united effort.  Everybody is in this together and we need to do it together.  The new NIPP should include specific actions that can be taken by the partnerships, by companies and by agencies so they know they are heading in the right direction.

[Slide 26]

Lastly we offered up additional recommendations to include educational and training programs so they have the skill sets to implement the action items established within the NIPP.  We also recommended a network and relationship building process be added in as well.

[Slide 27]

Altogether when the NIPP came out in December 2013 we were pretty pleased as it really didn’t recreate the wheel.  It was basically the same document that existed before but it opened up some new doors and windows at the state and local levels.  It enabled that more joint work could actually be accomplished through public-private partnerships.  

It had a greater focus on risk management and risk assessment.  You’ll see that documented through there.  It also included a set of action items which I understand there are not any specific documents today that show off what is happening in those particular action items but that document is being considered for development.

It also set up this closer collaboration and integration between the cyber security effort along with the NIPP and the National Preparedness System and Goal.  It offered the opportunity to tighten the connections between many of the initiatives and programs which we weren’t actually seeing how they were going to be connected.  We really appreciate how the new document is helping to move this along for us.

[Slide 28]

One of the other items we have been working on is a regional resilience workshop series.  We do this in partnership with the Society of American Military Engineers Posts.  We held six particular workshops last year in places like Dallas, Saint Louis and the Philadelphia region.  The purpose behind the workshop series was to take one particular national dialog and bring it down to the regional level and get the regional perspective.  How do these things actually impact them?

This was the first year we actually did this.  We looked at how the mitigation strategies were being applied in helping to set the priorities for infrastructure investment made at the community or regional level.  We had great attendance at these events and gathered a lot of information.

[Slide 29]

We were able to focus our discussions within five particular areas.  We were able to focus on strategies and frameworks, policy and legislation, finance and partnerships, risk assessment and information sharing and civic and cultural factors.

[Slide 30]

As a result we wrote a white paper which is currently being edited right now.  The five basic recommendations came out and we were a little shocked by the information we got from the regions.  We were thinking we would directly talk about finance issues and how you can address some of those things directly.  What we heard more frequently was there were other things we could work on that would have greater impact and open more possibilities in the areas for helping to establish priorities.

First of all most regions don’t have a clear understanding of their infrastructure inventory so they recommended that states and communities develop that inventory as an as-is condition and also an understanding of how when stressed what some of the impacts could be—so gaining a better understanding of perhaps some loss estimation from particular hazards.

Another item was to consider how to address dependencies of lifeline infrastructure and supply chain logistics infrastructure.  A third recommendation is to use a development plan to guide the principles for mitigating risks and making communities more resilient to all hazards.  While there are many regions that work on the development of development plans for the transportation sectors primarily or within some other smart growth areas, rarely do they apply that to mitigate risks.

The communities are looking at how they can make that happen—in other words, bring in the emergency managers as part of the planning process.  They are also looking at cost-cutting measures to do more with less.  We had talked a little about the issues of not having time limits for the proposal process and by cutting down the time limit of the process from a decade to one or two years you’ll be able to save the developers millions of dollars.

They also wanted to highlight the mean to educate the different types of partnership models that exist today.  This is both from a financing partnership model to the risk management or resilience partnership model so they get a better understanding of how work can be accomplished in a concerted effort.

[Slide 31]

Another item that TISP works on is the Critical Infrastructure Symposium that it holds every year.  We began doing this with West Point four or five years ago.  Basically Lieutenant Colonel Steve Hart came to me one year and said he had an idea of putting on a meeting where we bring together the academic community, both the educator and the student—we bring in the practitioners and we also bring in some senior leaders to sit around the table and talk about infrastructure resilience.

The whole concept was he is teaching this at West Point.  He had only been doing it for less than ten years.  The students had been learning about it for six months.  The amount of information out there about this topic and the amount of information you can gain through research was very comparable.  We were all basically at the same level so why can’t we learn from one another and help develop the programs that we will develop and need in the future?

That was the whole idea behind this.  This is our fifth one we are holding in Colorado Springs—West Point, the Air Force Academy, Colorado Technical University, Penn State University and USNORTHCOM and the Office of Infrastructure Protection are all working together to put together the program for this year’s symposium.  

We have a call for papers that is out right now that closes on January 29.  I recommend you find that on our website at www.tisp.org to find out more details about the process for submitting a paper or abstract.  This year we are expanding the symposium to include a workshop on public-private partnerships so if you are interested in learning how you can get engaged or establish your own partnership we will help with that dialog and discussion in the workshop.

We will also be offering two training courses—one offered by Argonne Labs as they are looking at their RMI tool (Resilience Measures Initiative tool) and also the Office of Infrastructure Protection will provide a training course on the National Infrastructure Protection Plan 2013.

[Slide 32]

Some other primary events where you can get engaged—we are bringing back many of our founders together and we do so on a quarterly basis so we can talk about particular topics of resilience when focused on the architecture, engineering and construction arenas.  We are also convening stakeholders on a monthly basis through our National Resilience Coalition which brought together several of the associations who have an interest in national resilience.

We are communicating with one another on those particular initiatives.  We do this through a conference call and webinar tool so this gives you an opportunity to learn from that.  We will hold a webinar as well with the Society of American Military Engineers looking at operationalizing the operational plan for the critical infrastructure security and resilience that will be provided by Bob Kolaski at the Office of Infrastructure Protection.

The date for that has not been formally set but it is the last week of February.  In May or June we will be doing a congressional event trying to educate our legislators to what resilience is all about and how it is going to impact their constituents.  We will continue to work with the Society of American Military Engineers posts on several events and of course we will rerun the workshop series.

[Slide 33]

Additionally to help transition from a strategic resilience down to an operational resilience discussion we are conducting four roundtables.  One is the legal issues and building resilience roundtable which is chaired in partnership with the American Bar Association with Ernie Edgar of Atkins and Denise Krepp of Penn State University facilitating these dialogs.

Not many organizations have been looking at some of the legal issues of working within a partnership for resilience so those are some of concerns we are looking at in this particular roundtable.  We have also brought together Michelle Deane from ANSI and Kevin Morley from the American Water Works Association to help facilitate a dialog around resilient standards and measures and basically what we are looking is not sector specific standards but regional standards.

How are you going to be able to measure that your community is heading within a resilient framework?  We are looking at how military installations and the communities around them can work together on resilient strategies now that less money is going to be spent on mission assurance and more focused on cyber security they are going to have to rely on the communities around them to help build a regional plan.

The facilitator for that dialog is currently Paul Stockton.  The last roundtable is bringing together the climate adaptation sustainability and resilience.  The chairs for that are Jerry Brashear and Paula Scalingi, both of our board.

[Slide 34]

As I said we are working on our website to include a host of tools.  I highly recommend you visit our website in late March where all these types of resources will be found.

[Slide 35]

If you are interested in learning about our committees and getting involved, we have four committees.

[Slide 36]

One of them is co-chaired by Ed Hecker of the Army Corps of Engineers and Mohan Singh of AECOM. It looks at regional infrastructure resilience and one thing they are focusing on is developing a set of principles for resilience.  If you are interested in learning how these will impact your region and community I highly encourage you to get engaged.

We are developing a steering group because we are going to work on many items and the steering group’s focus is to elaborate and coordinate those functions.  If you are interested, contact us.

[Slide 37]

Chaired by Jay Manik and Paula Scalingi is our public-private collaboration committee and one of the first things they are focused on is developing network shop—the training tools and how you can put together public-private partnerships.

[Slide 38]

We also have the knowledge skills and education committee that is chaired by Lieutenant Colonel Steve Hart of West Point.  He will be stepping down in April and Wayne Boone from Carleton University will be taking the chair role here.  Their primary function is to develop the program for the critical infrastructure symposium but some of the other things they are working on is the scholar and resilience initiative.

If you are interested in getting involved in that and helping establish some research and case study projects for universities, get in touch with us.

[Slide 39]

We also have the infrastructure standards and measures resilience committee which is chaired by Eve Hinman of Hinman Engineering Consultants.  Their primary focus is supporting the roundtable right now—looking at resilience standards and measures.

[Slide 40]

Thank you for listening to our presentation.  Here is our contact information: Bill Anderson, Director wanderson@tisp.org and Jacqueline Barrett, Program Coordinator jbarrett@tisp.org . We are available to answer any of your questions at any time so please get in touch with us.  Thank you very much.

Amy Sebring: Thank you very much Bill.  It is very impressive all that you have on your plate.  We will move to the Q&A portion.

 [Audience Questions & Answers]

Comment:
Amy Sebring:  On your website currently you have an amazing resource library already.

Bill Anderson:  We try to maintain that resource library and grow it.  We are always interested in receiving new materials.  We look at these as gateway libraries.  If you have a tool set or a description of an initiative that would be helpful just to give us that and a link to learn more directly from your organization.

Question:
Amy Sebring:  You have a whole committee for metrics and a roundtable.  In terms of measuring resilience, did you have any recommendations on that for the National Infrastructure Protection Plan?  Is there any starting point for that in existence already?

Bill Anderson: There are a few initiatives that are underway or established.   SPUR in San Francisco, for example, has been able to establish their as-is condition today for their infrastructure and made a determination on where they would like to take that infrastructure so it can become more resilient within a set time period.  That is a set of measurement.  That is an interesting way of addressing it from a community standpoint or regional standpoint.

Then you have other organizations like the American Water Works Association which had already developed a resilient metric for their installations.  That has been around between three and five years but we really haven’t seen any organizations run a complete analysis since those have been adopted.

What is nice about their standards is they had actually gone through the Safety Act Compliance Act.  Not only do they have industry standards but they are Safety Act complaint.  That is a brilliant move.  There are a few other organizations that have been working on it from a sector perspective but nobody seems to have an agreed upon process or a wide range of acceptance other than AWWA.

Question:
Isabel McCurdy: Hi Bill, Happy New Year! What Canadian partners are included in your organization and could you elaborate on the Canadian project?

Bill Anderson:  I invite to you reach out to us and let us talk to you a bit more in detail about it.  We have been working with many Canadian agencies in the past, more frequently when it comes to some of our partners like the Great Lakes Hazards Coalition and the Great Lakes Region.  We communicate on a regular basis with those organizations.  We also work with many of the universities like Carleton University with Wayne Boone chairing one of our committees.

The executive director for a partnership (I cannot remember the name) is Grant Leckie and I apologize for not remembering the name of his partnership.  We have been working together on how to establish an international network of partnerships to share information on these initiatives.  That is a starting point on a building of networks.  It is a wonderful idea and we are trying to get behind it and help push it forward with them.

The purpose is to get together and talk about what you’re doing at this point and see how that grows into something with a more mature structure.

Question:
Shawn Smith: In your presentation you quoted $1.4 trillion in Global Disaster Costs for 2000-2010.  What is your source for this figure?  A Munich Re report quotes $100 Billion in global costs for just natural hazards, but your number is significantly larger.¬

Bill Anderson: I had done some Google searches looking at articles and what FEMA had been reporting and some insurance organizations talking about where money had been spent.  A lot of this was compiled based off of the tax dollars that were authorized for rehabilitation.  We added all that up.

The average 80 billion dollars came up from adding those four year period from 2009 to 2012 which was a little more than 320 billion.  That is where I got those figures. Like I said when I gave the report nobody is really tracking that on an official basis so I’m going off of what we see in our media reports today for the United States.

The other figure of 1.4 trillion is tracked.  The UN tracks that.  You can go to the UN and they have a resilience program where you can find the figures on that. They have presentations on it.

Question:
Dennis Schrader: Bill, Could you discuss the notion of empowering regional partnerships and how they relate to the RCCC and TISP. What is the benefit to state and local EMA's?

Bill Anderson:  There are quite a few benefits to regional partnerships.  There are many types of partnerships out there.  We are just now learning more about what are some of the capabilities but we have already seen some of the benefits.  By directly working within partnerships you are engaging the companies within your regions and talking about the particular issues you all would confront in a disaster situation and how you would all work together to mitigate that.

That means the private sector has an opportunity to establish the policies within that region.  You are already getting buy-in from the emergency management community on what are the best approaches to mitigate the risks within that region.  You also get a buy-in from that same private sector community on what the risks are.

You get to share information with one another if that is one of the goals in that partnership.  You get to share the type of information you need.  There are many other reasons why you could work in these partnerships that go beyond the financial benefit.  There is also the buy-in from the community.

Question:
Amy Sebring:  One of the things that caught my eye for what is coming up is the Congressional outreach. Can you sketch out your plans for this Hill event?

Bill Anderson:  I’ve asked Denise Krepp who once worked on the House Homeland Security Committee to help us bring together a program that will bring together many of our stakeholders currently working on resilience initiatives.  The idea is to educate the legislators on what the programs will have as an impact on their constituents.

It also will include a set of recommendations on some programs that can be implemented at the state or federal level to help with demonstrating some of the programs within the National Infrastructure Protection Plan or within any other type of national resilience program.  

If you are interested in getting involved, reach out to us because we are always looking for ways to improve any program.

Question:
Shawn Smith: What is TISP doing with respect to helping make Plans truly operational?  Does your toolkit address linking plans to Resource Management so that current response capabilities can be measured and Whole Community Capacity Building can be accommodated?
 
Bill Anderson: We’d like to get there but it takes time.  Since we are building the toolkit from the ground up what we are trying to do is get the low hanging fruit first and we have it in our plans to head in that direction.  Over the next year or two you may see that come out as a toolkit item.  Today it is not going to happen or by the end of this year.

Perhaps in 2015 or 2016 as part of the rollout of the next edition of the Regional Disaster Resilience Guide—you may see it there.

Question:
Amy Sebring:  I am impressed that all this is a long term effort.  You mentioned you were putting together a white paper on the results of the regional workshops?

Bill Anderson:  This is a generational effort. We are putting together a white paper.  We have a pretty good final draft of it but it is being edited.  We are hoping we’ll have it out by the beginning of February in the hands of the public.

Amy Sebring:  Some of the recommendations that came out of those were quite original, right?

Bill Anderson:  They weren’t so much original—we have heard them before—but we never really thought they would rise to a higher level of importance than figuring out how to fund infrastructure projects considering the place we are in today with our funding federal government actions and how that rolls downhill into state and local levels.  We were a little surprised by that.

Amy Sebring:  Are you going to repeat those regional workshops this coming year?

Bill Anderson: We are going to have another set of workshops.  The topic is currently being considered right now.  One of the leading ideas is looking at the top ten initiatives for resilience.  So if you are a state or community, what are the top ten things you should be working on to develop a resilience program?

[Closing]

Amy Sebring: On behalf of Avagene, myself, and all our participants, thank you very much Bill for being with us today and sharing this information with us.  And we hope that this spring’s symposium is very successful.

Bill Anderson: Thank for this opportunity. I look forward to working with many of you.

Amy Sebring:  Our next program will be February 12th when our topic will be “The Critical Role of Purchasing and Procurement in Disaster Cost Recovery,” and our guest will be Michael Martinet, principal of the Martinet Group, LLC specializing in disaster finance training and cost recovery planning.

Please note, we will be moving to a new Webinar platform next month that will enhance our capability to support participation via mobile devices, so please watch for new instructions in the near future.

Thanks to everyone for participating today and have a great afternoon. We are adjourned.