The public good of “stabilization” in immediate emergency response and initial service restoration

A federal emergency manager whose national and international experience included working in one of the Pacific Northwest states whose emergency management we recently researched described his experience in a disaster:

But as, you know, as they start bringing systems up and we run into this, everybody gets pretty excited, right? They’re like, “Oh, water plant’s up and running. It’s great. You know, we’re out of the bottled-water business.” Or, you know, people have water to their taps now. And then,. . it’s off again. And so we plan those things, we really never plan a kind of a hard cut off of any of it. We continue until we’re sure everything is stable. And that kind of the world I live in is the world of stabilization. . .It might not be a long term solution, but they work. And that’ll then allow all of those other systems that are tied to it—so water, wastewater or interconnected power with all of that. It allows you time when you once get it stable, time [for] people that really know what they’re doing to go and figure out if there are any other problems with the systems, figure out where the gaps are going to be. . .

[For] example, anytime they’re putting the grid back together, power will come up in an area. And at some point, they’re gonna have to take that back offline in order to do something somewhere else. And so, it’s not necessarily stable at that point. So if we are providing food and water, we may still have to provide food and water because there’s going to be a time where it might be a couple of days that the power’s gonna go back down.
So, you know, there’s that interconnectivity. It seems like that is the world we live in. It all, everything we do, every piece of it impacts something else. . .

Here stabilization is explicitly tied to shifts in the interconnectivities between and among critical infrastructures as the disaster unfolds. But how can this challenge of stabilization during immediate response and initial service restoration be better addressed in advance before the emergency?

Part of the answer centers on a much more nuanced understanding of vulnerabilities in infrastructures.

Discussions of infrastructure vulnerabilities that we are familiar with frequently focus on physical components, like corrosion in gas pipelines. Sometimes, physical properties considered vulnerabilities are focused on precisely because they follow from the system’s strengths: “So we do have a fairly robust [internal communications] system. The vulnerability is that we are responsible for that system. No one else is going to go fix it, so we have to rely on our internal resources to then have access to the sites to fix any problems that arise,” a electricity transmission interviewee told us.

The vulnerabilities of special interest in our research, though, start off as significant weaknesses before disasters. These begin when the interconnected infrastructures fail to anticipate the need for special capacities—in lateral telecommunications and communications, for instance—with respect to the demands arising from their shifting or shifted interconnectivities. Once the emergency is underway, sequential dependencies up and down chains of command are of course important (e.g., declarations of emergency to release funds under the Incident Command System). But they do not and cannot offer sufficient options in micro-coordination for requisite variety to match the shifting demands and capabilities imposed by the shocks, surprises and contingencies of a major catastrophe. Here other forms of interconnectivity–reciprocal, mediated and pooled–are required. In important cases, the resources for them are also known beforehand.

It is a mitigable error not to anticipate (predict and prepare for) the vulnerabilities that come with shifts to these other interconnectivity configurations. Coping with and responding jointly to interconnectivity shifts by infrastructure operators and emergency managers for initial service restoration without (1) prior contacts, (2) repositories and pools of back-up material, equipment and facilities, and (3) the availability of robust communication channels is an known error to avoid. It is also known that all of this subsequent micro-coordination takes place against the constraining limits that the infrastructures involved necessarily focus also on their own priorities, sequences of tasks, and duties. Yes, “First get the plant up and running!,” but they may be unable to do so without helping to restore initial service provision of other infrastructures they depend upon and/or depended upon them.

Which brings us back to stabilization. This prior, jointly-undertaken preparation extends beyond the priorities or commercial interests of a single infrastructure. Managing ahead for shifting infrastructure interconnectivity is a public good in interconnected service restoration of critical infrastructures during a disaster and its unfolding. This status must be recognized as such by policymakers, emergency management officials, and senior executives in lifeline infrastructures.

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Source: The above consolidates slightly edited extracts from 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). Research design, references and other particulars can be found there.