serendipityoucity

I just read the Geospatial Information & Technology Association (GITA) The Geospatial Dimensions of Critical Infrastructure and Emergency Response White Paper Series No. 1 - Infrastructure Interdependencies.

GITA defines infrastructure as:

all fundamental services, activities, and operations that sustain our communities and way of life. 

The paper is very specific in its objectives at mobilizing the GITA constituency to understand how they can work together to map, share data and to respond to a crisis whether human made or a natural disaster that affects infrastructure.  They will produce a series of white papers targeting specific GITA constituencies. Infrastructure interdependencies, according to the white paper fall into one of four types:

1. Physical Interdependencies: involve disruptions that physically impact one or more other infrastructures. The risk of failure from normal operating conditions in one infrastructure will be a function of risk in another infrastructure.
2. Cyber Interdependencies: occur occur when the operation of one infrastructure is dependent upon another infrastructure via information or communication links. This is the type of complex system whereby control of a networked system is dependent upon the transmission of information.
3. Geographic Interdependencies: involve the physical proximity of one infrastructure to another. An event such as an explosion of a gas main in an urban area could create correlated disruptions with other infrastructures, such as water and electric services to a community.
4. Logical Interdependencies: mean that the state of one infrastructure is dependent upon another, due to some economic or political decision. An example of this is the logical interdependency between the cost of fuel and the number of vehicles using the transportation infrastructure.
   

Geospatial aspects of critical infrastructure depencies are also:

1. Scale: Hurricane Ike impacted a relatively small area in September 2008. Failure of local infrastructure (roads, bridges, water systems) had the largest effect on response, yet occurred at the smallest geographic scale and its restoration will take the longest period of time. Further, failure of regional infrastructure (electric) proved to be the basis for a potentially overarching threat of national significance—failure of 25% of the petroleum industry.
2. Time: how long can we go without power to those refineries (not long, and so the restoration period will likely be much faster than that of local infrastructure). In other words, we’re not just talking about interdependencies of infrastructure, but their corresponding interdependencies of scale and time.
3. Scope: Ike was a small area but the scope of the impact was large.

But my favorite is about Geospatially Enabling Community Collaboration:

breaking through this barrier of data sharing and collaboration between emergency responders and private utility and telecommunication companies is the primary purpose of another of GITA’s infrastructure-oriented initiatives.

Mapping the Internet initiatives stopped when utility companies made it more and more difficult for cartographers to access data.  Public broadband mapping has pretty much been at a standstill since.  GITA however, may be able to overcome this sharing issue since they are neither government nor private sector, they are an association of powerful members of a constituent communities of geomaticians from many sectors.  I look forward to their next Critical Infratructure white paper!