Infrastructure Resilience
Critical infrastructure comprises the physical and virtual assets and systems so vital to the Nation that their incapacity or destruction would have a debilitating impact on national security, national economic security, or national public health or safety.
Infrastructure built in the 1900s to early 2000s using baseline data from the mid-1900s lacks the ability to withstand the changes now occurring in both intensity and frequency of extreme weather events and could experience excessive damage or destruction. These effects are particularly pronouned in the Arctic region.
Of the 79 largest U.S. military installations, the Department of Defense says two-thirds are vulnerable to worsening flooding and half are vulnerable to increasing drought and wildfires.
Severe weather events are impacting critical infrastructure in both foreseen and unpredictable ways, increasing the likelihood of events that defy historic expectations. Recovering from these events happens in stages. Where a storm or nuisance flooding might last a few days, re-stabilizing and reestablishing basic necessities may last a few weeks to a few months, but rebuilding the installation might take a decade or more.
Additionally, the potential for cyber attacks on critical infrastructure is increasing and we must protect our installations from these threats.
Some of the adaptation measures that will be needed to protect our critical infrastructure include:
- Hardening or fortifying physical assets, as well as building defenses—for example, erecting seawalls or hardening power plants and placing transmission lines underground
- Hardening our defenses against cyber threats and increasing our ability to recover from cyber attacks
- Providing advanced warning or monitoring of potential hazards
- Managing crisis responses and recovery by having on hand and rapidly deploying emergency generators and other equipment
CESIR will facilitate Midshipmen educational and research activities as well faculty research in the area of Infrastructure Resilience.
In the area of Infrastructure Resilience, educational activities will focus on ocean and coastal engineering, resilience and adaptation, marine, atmospheric and environmental chemistry, coastal processes; extreme weather, cybersecurity, and expansion of continuous environmental monitoring by unmanned and autonomous systems. It will also include creation of a living laboratory in the Severn River in Annapolis in support of courses and senior engineering design (Capstone) projects in infrastructure resilience and adaptation.
Research activities will include coastal resilience and adaptation modeling and analysis, development of mitigation measures for USNA, development of infrastructure resilience centric models using real world data, polar science and the impact of ice melt events, impact of permafrost thaw on water quality in the Arctic, improving marine weather forecasts, prediction of non-tidal residual water levels, harmful algal blooms, marine plastics, contaminant transport and fate, continuous environmental monitoring, passive acoustic monitoring, acoustic surveys, and cybersecurity.
Representative Midshipmen research projects include:
- Prince George's Street Seawall Design and City Dock Resilience, Annapolis, MD
- Carr's Beach Restoration & Erosion Control, Annapolis, MD
- Shoreline Erosion Control at George Washington Birthplace National Monument, Colonial Beach, VA
- Coastal Resilience Design for the Nansemond Indian Nation, Suffolk, VA
- Experimental and Analytical Wave Forces and Pressures on Elevated and Inclined Walls
- Wave-Focusing Induced by a Submerged Plate in Combination with Headland Breakwaters
- Coastal Flooding Mitigation with the Use of Mangroves in Ghana
- Flood Mitigation at Pituffik Space Base
- Survey of the Forrest-Sherman Seawall on Hospital Point
- Response of Simulated Supercells to the Evolving Near-Storm Environment around the September 2021 Annapolis Tornado
- Ground-truthing Local Marine Weather Forecasts for Annapolis, MD
The following links describe programs related to Infrastructure Resilience at the Naval Postgraduate School and the Department of Defense:
NPS Center For Infrastructure Defense
