[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.