The first line of response against cascading failure across interconnected infrastructures are those infrastructures, not the state and federal Incident Command System

Inter-infrastructural cascades may be more granular with respect to duration and open to management than assumed in formal modeling and some planning. Certainly, interviewees in our recent research on a Magnitude 9 earthquake in the Pacific Northwest described major emergencies as more punctuated than as single headlong rush of disasters.

Rapid infrastructure cascades can, of course, happen and were observed in New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina and, later, in northern Japan after the earthquake and tsunami of March 2011. Yet cascade models by and large assume an unmanaged, near-immediate escalation in failure probabilities and consequences across interconnected systems. Really-existing infrastructures, like water, electricity and telecommunications, are however managed. Individual infrastructures do not generally fail instantaneously (brownouts may precede blackouts, levees may seep long before failing), and the transition from normal operations to failure across systems can be a punctuated duration.

This means there is a granularity in both space and time between infrastructures in which reliability management can make a difference in the probability of failure of an individual infrastructure and failure across infrastructures. To put the point from the opposite direction, some of the recorded near misses and close calls demonstrate that operators have the time, albeit sometimes just in time, to prevent (significantly more) knock-on effects from initial disruptions or outright failures.

This means that any assumption that infrastructures are not managed in failure is highly misleading. In many cases neither infrastructure control rooms nor their reliability contributions disappear during or after a large system failure. This also means disaster response actually begins in the infrastructures.

It begins before the formal activation of the emergency management infrastructure with its Incident Command System (ICS), such as incident management teams (IMTs) and emergency operations centers (EOCs). “When the M9 hits,” said a city water distribution manager, “my group, we’re going to be the first in. . .We’re the first responders for the water system. I may even have to call someone who lives nearby and tell them to drive up to our major water tank and close the shut-off valve.”

---

Sources: The above is a slightly edited consolidated extract from:

1. E. Roe and P.R. Schulman (2025). The Centrality of Restoration Resilience Across Interconnected Critical Infrastructures for Emergency Management: A Framework and Key Implications. Oregon Research Institute: Springfield, OR (accessed online at https://www.ori.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/FinalReport_10Aug2025.pdf).
2. E. Roe and P.R. Schulman (2016). Reliability and Risk: The Challenge of Managing Interconnected Infrastructures. Stanford Business Books: Stanford CA.