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.
Given the right organisational attributes and sets of incentives, power grids, water systems and other large technological systems can function reliably, even as highreliability networks. However, high reliability remains 'unlikely, demanding and at risk' as organisational sociologist Todd La Porte stated 25 years ago. What is much more common is risk creation-the creation or exacerbation of hazard, increase in exposure and propagation of vulnerability-that can interact and cascade across these systems when realized as a disaster. Here we describe the 2021 Texas blackouts during the COVID-19 pandemic through this lens of disaster risk creation and cascading disaster, showing how risk emerges and propagates across large technological systems. Given their ubiquity and criticality, we argue that more research is desperately needed to understand how to support high-reliability networks and that more efforts should be made to invest in their resilience.
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