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Ten Years After 9/11, Infrastructure Interdependence Still a Challenge in United States
Systems Engineering Expert and Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute Professor Al Wallace Identified Major
Infrastructure Challenges in the Wake of World Trade Center
Attacks
Al Wallace was watching the live television news coverage
from Manhattan when his phone rang. Only a few hours after the
unthinkable terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, a program
manager from the National Science Foundation called to ask for
Wallace’s help in assuring nothing like this could ever happen
again.
Wallace, an expert in decision sciences and systems
engineering, and a professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute, readily accepted. Within two weeks, he and his
team were at Ground Zero. The rubble was still smoldering.
Wallace collected as much information as possible without
disrupting relief efforts. His researchers scouted the area,
took photos, copied maps, and spoke to whatever officials could
spare a few minutes for an interview. A day or so later,
Wallace and the group were told to leave.
Undeterred, the researchers turned to the Fourth Estate as a
source of data. Every morning, they scoured The
New York Times and Wall Street Journal for
articles about infrastructure restoration and disruption. A
systems engineer who studies the deep interconnectedness of
seemingly independent events or entities, Wallace was looking
for the story behind the newspaper stories. A few months later
the research team returned to Ground Zero, fostering a
partnership with emergency response officials as well as
Rensselaer graduates who worked at major power utilities and
telecommunications companies. After years of study, what
emerged was a disconcerting picture of major infrastructure
systems that were highly dependent upon one another. Even
today, Wallace sees this deep interdependency as a liability
and threat to national security and the quality of life for its
citizens.
“Our infrastructure is aging, and all of the different
systems — such as power, water, communications, transportation,
and hospitals — are managed independently. Our group looks at
this situation from a 30,000-foot perspective,” said Wallace,
the Yamada Corporation Professor at Rensselaer, and a member of
the Department of Industrial and
Systems Engineering. “We map out and try to better
understand the interdependencies amongst these infrastructure
systems. The more we know about how they depend on each other,
the better we’ll be at planning for disaster situations when
one or more are disrupted or unavailable.”
The classic example of interdependent infrastructure systems
is a power plant that runs on coal, where the coal is shipped
to the plant via trains that require power from the plant in
order to operate. While this chicken-and-egg situation is less
subtle than most of the interdependencies that emerged in New
York in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks, the idea is
the same: the absence of one critical piece of infrastructure
will have far-reaching, unanticipated, and often disruptive
effects on the entire system.
Since 2001, Wallace’s group has published several widely
cited studies that map out the tangled dependencies in
Manhattan and New York at the time of the terrorist attacks and
during the long road to recovery. Along with the practical
applications of this new knowledge, the research has
interesting theoretical implications. The researchers employed
complex mathematics and computer algorithms to construct
working models of infrastructure interdependency. Their work
led to additional interest and funding from the National
Science Foundation, and these studies continue today.
Partnering with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and
the University of North Carolina, Wallace’s group developed
prototype software that enables emergency response officials to
physically see the interdependencies among the area’s civil
infrastructure systems, including wastewater, phone lines, and
power. One example that emerged is a hospital in North Carolina
designated as the area’s primary medical relief center in the
case of a hurricane. A key factor is the hospital’s backup
generator, which ensures the facility has electricity even if
the power grid goes dark. In their studies, Wallace’s group
discovered the hospital sources its water supply via a nearby
pump station, which requires power to run and lacks a backup
generator. So even if the hospital can remain open during a
storm, its operations will be severely limited by a lack of
running water.
The software created by Wallace’s team will help emergency
response officials identify these kinds of problems ahead of
time, and plan accordingly. The software also enables officials
to input data about a particular storm or hurricane, in order
to forecast how much damage will be wrought by the extreme
weather. So far, training exercises with the software are going
well, including one with emergency responders in North Carolina
prior to Hurricane Irene, Wallace said. Next, the researchers
will look at ways to incorporate social infrastructure, such as
hospitals and storm shelters, into the software.
Working on these different projects with Wallace were
Rensselaer professors Joe Chow, John Mitchell, Tom Sharkey, and
Wallace’s former graduate student David Mendonca, who has since
joined the Institute faculty. Wallace has a joint appointment
in the Department of Civil and
Environmental Engineering at Rensselaer, and is a member of
the university’s Center for
Infrastructure, Transportation, and the Environment.
Additionally, he commended the engineers and managers at
power utility Con Edison and telecom company Verizon for their
efforts in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001,
attacks. Wallace said these companies exhibited tremendous
innovation and improvisation in successfully restoring two
interdependent infrastructures—power and communications — ;and
meeting the president’s challenge of getting New York City’s
financial infrastructure up and running.
Wallace said visiting Ground Zero and his work in the wake
of the World Trade Center attacks was a “life-changing” event,
and he hopes his research will open people’s eyes to the urgent
need for richer understanding and better management of the
interdependent infrastructure systems that persist today.
“The enormity of the attacks was simply overwhelming.
There’s just no other way I can describe it,” Wallace said. “I
wanted to do whatever I could to contribute to the cause of
making our nation safer. In my view, the best way to do this is
improving our infrastructure. Not just to reduce our
vulnerability to terrorist attacks, but to make it more
resilient to wear and tear. To encourage better funding and
oversight for infrastructure projects, and to take advantage of
new materials and advanced sensing technology. There are some
good solutions out there, but they require us to take a
long-term view. We need to plan ahead, and not just be
reactive.”
For more information about Wallace’s research at Rensselaer,
visit:
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Published
September 6,
2011 |
Contact: Michael Mullaney
Phone: (518) 276-6161
E-mail: mullam@rpi.edu |
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