Northland Civil Defence Emergency Management Plan, 2010

INFRASTRUCTURE FAILUREOverviewHazardLikelihoodFuel/Electricty(B/C).Telecomms (C)HazardConsequence(3)How do wemanage thisrisk?What moreshould we bedoing?What is thefuture risk?The Northland Lifelines Group has carried a significant amount of work to improve theunderstanding of the likelihood of various types of infrastructure failure. Many of thepotential causes of failure are natural hazards and in these cases the consequences ofinfrastructure failure are incorporated into those respective hazard assessments. Howeverthere is also the risk of some type of internal system failure, such as technology failure, fireat a critical facility, human operational error, etc. It is this type of internally-generatedfailure that is being assessed in this section.As illustrated in Table 13, the electricity and fuel sectors are most vulnerable to singlepoints of failure that could potentially affect the whole region. By contrast, the watersupply networks are more dispersed and internal system failures are likely to have onlylocalised impacts on individual town water supply systems.Failures are likely to occur to significant parts of the infrastructure quite frequently,perhaps as often as once a year. However most can be restored quite quickly or there isredundancy in supply networks that enables services to continue. The type of catastrophicfailure that are being assessed in this section – ie a prolonged, regional outage, is unlikely,but there is little hard data available to make an accurate assessment.The most significant consequence arises from electricity, fuel and telecommunicationsfailure as these will have a knock-on effect on most other lifeline utility services.Electricity: Built: A prolonged outage would see severe disruption to water supply, fuel andtelecommunications services. Social: Worst-case scenario is a winter outage which may see a public health impactboth in terms of lack of heating and lack of water supplies. Economic: Severe disruption to all types of businesses that do not have standbygeneration.IT/Telecommunications Failure: Built: Disruption to electricity, gas, air/sea transport, fuel, water supplies which rely oncontrol systems. Social: Inconvenience. Potential public health impact, particularly those in moreremote areas who rely on telecommunications to seek help in emergencies. Economic: Severe disruption to business, particularly commercial/retail.Fuel failure: Built: Will impact on all other utility’s ability to respond to network outages. Social: Inconvenience. Disruption to emergency services response capability. Economic: Severe disruption to business, particularly transportation sectors and thosewith perishable goods that require transport.Generally there are procedures in place to ensure that lifeline utility and emergency serviceagencies have priority if one utility network fails (for example, the draft national fuel planrequires the fuel sector to give priority to ‘CDEM-critical’ customers and electricitycompanies have load shedding arrangements that minimise impacts on key agencies).Ongoing Northland Lifelines Group work to improve the understanding of risks posed byhazards to the region’s infrastructure, and what can be done to mitigate that risk. Society is likely to becoming increasing dependant on technology and utilities. Some sectors are increasing resilience in the networks – for example a majorelectricity transmission upgrade through Auckland will reduce the risk of region-wideoutages in Northland (though it will not eliminate the risk).Northland Civil Defence Emergency Management Plan, 2010-2015 Page 81