Resilience, Protection, Mitigation, and Engineers

Last May, I gave a lecture at the Heritage Foundation about Unfinished Business at FEMA.

http://www.heritage.org/Research/HomelandSecurity/hl1125.cfm

I made the point that there should be better coordination between Preparedness, Mitigation, and by inference Critical Infrastructure.

Now that there is growing recognition that resilience is a key strategy for a safer homeland, the time has come to better involve engineers in the process.

For example, FEMA Mitigation has a strong engineering orientation and done some excellent work in creating many publications in their Building Sciences Division. Those pubs should be a foundation for the work of Preparedness and Infrastructure Protection.

The organization structure potentially creates barriers to collaboration. What is needed is leadership and processes that facilitate it. Hiring more engineers into Infrastructure Protection and creating working groups composed of Mitigation, Preparedness, and the Office of Infrastructure Protection (OIP) would be a good first step.

In the private sector, The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) has been producing a report card for several years that could be an input to the resilience measurement process. I'll have more to say on this next week.

Thanks for checking in,

Dennis

http://www.drs-international.com/