RESUMO
The COVID-19 pandemic has the potential to compromise the ability of critical infrastructure utilities to respond to or mitigate natural hazards like wildfires and hurricanes. This article describes the ways that an energy organization, the regional transmission operator PJM, is preparing for hurricanes during the COVID-19 pandemic. PJM is using a combination of technological and organizational processes to prepare for hurricanes during the pandemic. Activities include the development of a third control room to increase redundancy and maintaining social distance at control center, investment in more resilient communications technology to maintain connectivity, and taking a holistic approach to identifying issues related to supply chain and fuel security. With this mix of organizational and technological processes, we argue that critical infrastructure resilience should be understood as a sociotechnical construct and identify several recommendations for improving resilience. The article has implications for policymakers working to maintain infrastructure resilience to natural hazards during the COVID-19 pandemic.
RESUMO
The national power grid is the most critical and the most vulnerable life-support infrastructure in modern society. Electricity serves as the essential element in sustaining every other sector of critical infrastructure including water, fuel and communications. Collective experience with responding to and recovering from widespread, long-duration power outages - known as black sky events - is nearly non-existent. Understanding these risks and weaknesses requires a collaborative planning effort with the public and private sectors to identify and protect critical nodes within the interdependent infrastructure to ensure that recovery from a catastrophic event is possible. This also requires a 'whole community' approach to planning and execution to facilitate a response on an unprecedented level.
