FLOOD01788

• County: Statewide
• Title: Surviving Disasters Building on Experience
• Date: 10/12/2001
• Prepared For: CWCB
• Prepared By: CSU
• Floodplain - Doc Type: Floodplain Report/Masterplan

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Experience is the
best teacher about
disasters.

Overcome barriers
to mobilize
organizations.

Communication and
teamwork. are
critical in
emergencies.

Surviving Disasters in Water Utilities

Background Information-Executive Summary
October 11-12, 2001 Workshop

The A WW A Research Foundation is sponsoring Project 2696,
"Surviving Disasters: Building On Experience." The goal is to learn
from experience to prepare for inevitable future disasters. This is a
summary of a background study about how utilities survived disasters
and emergency events.

Threats to water utilities include natural-caused disasters (earthquake,
flooding, wind, disease, drought, severe weather, lightening, fire,
landslide, and volcano; and human-caused disasters (hazardous
materials, breaks, system failures, power or computer failure
accidents structure fires, terrorism, vandalism, hoaxes, cyber attacks,
war and civil unrest).

Disasters impact physical, management, and support systems, and
utilities should deploy assets to achieve their missions during
emergencies. They prepare for this through disaster preparedness,
where they assess threats and hazards, identify vulnerable points in
systems, strengthen systems and mitigate against threats, and plan for
response and recovery.

A systems approach to preparing for disasters should overcome
barriers to mobilize the entire organization. It requires intra-
organizational work (across levels and divisions) and inter-
organizational work with other utilities, suppliers, and regulators.

Interdependencies show where coordination provides electric power,
water to fight fire, water to keep business going, roads to bring
supplies, communication systems, and water for critical uses.

The utility emergency plan is a systems approach to disaster
preparedness. It should provide a cross-cutting mechanism to operate
during emergencies; but getting units to work together may be a
challenge and complacency must be overcome. If personnel are not
trained with the plan, it may not work.

Experience shows that making emergency plans too detailed is not
needed because of inevitable surprises. Disasters show a need for pre-
established relationships with partners so that mutual aid can be
successful. The "Incident Command System" can be applied for
operational control for command, control, communications, and
intelligence.

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