Choose a city with which you are familiar. The city must have an electrical grid that can be accessed through the U.S. Energy Information Administration: U.S. States (Links to an external site.) web page in addition to several other critical infrastructures represented, such as water, sewage, highway, or rail.
You will analyze at least three critical infrastructure sectors (electrical substations, rail lines, and highway transportation) in your chosen city that will allow you to see how these sectors fit together after consulting a critical infrastructure sector map. Then, based on your analysis, you will write a report evaluating the impact of a natural, technological, or terrorist initiated hazardous event in your chosen city.
Include the following elements in your paper:
For your maps,
Create a map of critical infrastructure from a state view.
Access the S. Energy Information Administration: U.S. States (Links to an external site.) web page. On the map, select the state of your chosen city. Then use the zoom feature to identify the electrical sectors, rail lines, and freeways in your state. Ensure you have the energy infrastructure view activated (Note the “Layers/Legend” button in the upper left of your map). You may identify additional critical infrastructure or facilities on your map, such as hospitals, airports or port facilities, rail yards, etc. Once you get the view you seek, take a screen capture. (For assistance with screen capturing, you may wish to access the Take-A-Screenshot (Links to an external site.) web page. Save your screen capture image and insert it into the “Appendix” section of your report.
Create a map of critical infrastructure from a city view.
Now go through the same process to develop a city view. Once you see all of the icons, take a screen capture of the layers/legend window. Insert this image onto a new page. Highlight critical facilities such as hospitals, schools, rail yards, port facilities, water treatment plants, etc. You may wish to access the provided Appendix sample for guidance.
Save the images of the two maps and develop a legend for your map.
For your report, you will show the relationships between the infrastructure sectors in your chosen city. Your goal is to analyze one critical juncture where multiple infrastructures come together in your city, not all possibilities. Be sure to include all of the following elements:
Identify the locations of intersections between critical infrastructures, single point failures, and the implications of these failures for critical infrastructure in your chosen city using your maps as a guide.
Place a circle on the map around these critical points.
Determine the impact when we remove one of these critical junctures.
For instance, explain how you would reroute traffic. Assess the impact on travel time in such scenario. Or, if you were to have an accident in a rail yard that damaged an electrical substation, discuss the cascading effects of losing the infrastructure on other infrastructures.
Assess the impact to human life should these single-point failures be unavailable due to a natural disaster or terrorist attack in such a densely populated city.
What consideration will you have to consider managing special needs populations?
Analyze the first-, second-, and potentially third-order effect of a hazardous event that incorporates multiple critical infrastructures.
Insert a picture of your map and of the legend into an “Appendix” section at the end of your report. Label the map with the name of your chosen city, and label the Layers/Legend image with “Legend.”
