Infrastructures are more vulnerable when their latent interconnectivities are not managed ahead before an emergency

An interviewee in our recent Pacific Northwest research gave the example of a major opportunity that was not missed when altering the local hazard mitigation plan to replace an existing culvert by a new bridge:

So in the case of the county, they’re well positioned because they already had this plan, like we see this culvert is undersized, we continually see water over the road and we want to replace it with a bridge and that was the plan. If they had to wait and put that bridge in their general capital improvement process, it could have taken them another decade to replace it, right? But because they had a plan and that’s the direction they were already headed, now that the culvert washed away, it’s going to accelerate in the direction of the change that they were already headed, which is towards the bridge, which is great. . .They thought ahead of it and now they’re taking advantage of it in terms of trying to get additional funding”

As another interviewee put it, the hazard mitigation plan becomes a way to think more strategically about the federal funding component in critical infrastructure development at the local level.

Put this way, forward planning–in our terms, managing ahead–has a major role in anticipating and taking advantage of already-existing funding and construction opportunities. When the focus is on mitigating major emergencies, missed opportunities to correct for known vulnerabilities are mitigable errors to be avoided. As such, the hazard mitigation plan also becomes a mechanism to think through how the bridge would alter road transportation in ways another culvert would not.

Source: The above is a slightly edited extract 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.