334
S. Lindbergh and J. Radke
caused severe damage to New York’s Metropolitan subway, impacting millions of
commuters for several days. Failure in the electric grid caused immediate impacts to
information and communication infrastructures as well as to the fuel supply system.
A part of refineries, terminals, rail yards, shipyards, and truck racks suspended their
operations, which, together with the disruption of pipelines and freight transportation infrastructure caused bottlenecks to the distribution of fuel in the Petroleum
Administration for Defense District of the East Coast (PADD 1). Even if some critical fuel infrastructures managed to restart operations a few days after the outage
peak,
3 backup power was not available at the last node of the fuel distribution chain.
Commercial gasoline facilities were then unable to function, which in turn led to
immediate disruptions of aboveground transportation services as well (DOE 2013).
The interdependency between the fuel sector and the electric sector was considered
as a major choke point of this disaster (Comes and Van de Walle 2014; DOE 2013).
Lessons learned highlighted (1) the need to expedite regulation for gasoline rationing
or waivers that provide flexibility to the fuel supply chain companies
4 in the production and distribution of commodities; (2) the need to improve situational awareness
of fuel resources and interdependencies between electricity and the fuel sector; and
(3) the need to ensure mutual assistance networks for the fuel sector, that differently
from the electric utility, is challenged by the competitive nature of their business and
does not have decades of experience on multi-organizational arrangements for the
response of natural disasters.
One of the major policy changes motivated by Hurricane Sandy was Executive
Order 13653 “Preparing the U.S. for the Impacts of Climate Change” that established
the interagency Council on Climate preparedness and Resilience that is tasked to
promote engagement and partnership between governmental agencies (DHS 2015).
The President’s Climate Action Plan issued in June 2013 that establishes the National
Strategy for Information Sharing and Safeguarding (NSISS) was another policy reaction to the vulnerabilities uncovered by the Hurricane Sandy disaster. The NSISS
establishes “information-sharing process and sector specific protocols with private
sector partners” to improve timeliness and information sharing practices for the
security of CI (DHS 2013).
Overall, the challenges that CI owners and operators, and disaster response agencies dealt with during Hurricane Sandy reinforce the need to incorporate organizational and social approaches to the traditional CI protection premise. It is important
to consider that the power outage conditions in 2012 were aggravated by the June 29–
30 derecho, a mesoscale convective system that behaves as an extremely severe and
widespread summer thunderstorm (Livingston 2013). The derecho that had already
3 The energy outage peak occurred on October 30, by November 13 99% of fuel terminals were open
and by November 27 the last remaining affected refinery in PADD1 resumed normal operations
(DOE 2013).
4 Jones Act Waiver, Reformulated Gasoline waiver, Ultra Low Sulfur Diesel waiver for emergency
response vehicles and equipment, Non-Action Assurance allowing fuel loading and unloading
without the use of vapor recovery systems and the release of the Northeast Home Heating Oil
Reserve for the first time (DOE 2013).
S. Lindbergh and J. Radke
caused severe damage to New York’s Metropolitan subway, impacting millions of
commuters for several days. Failure in the electric grid caused immediate impacts to
information and communication infrastructures as well as to the fuel supply system.
A part of refineries, terminals, rail yards, shipyards, and truck racks suspended their
operations, which, together with the disruption of pipelines and freight transportation infrastructure caused bottlenecks to the distribution of fuel in the Petroleum
Administration for Defense District of the East Coast (PADD 1). Even if some critical fuel infrastructures managed to restart operations a few days after the outage
peak,
3 backup power was not available at the last node of the fuel distribution chain.
Commercial gasoline facilities were then unable to function, which in turn led to
immediate disruptions of aboveground transportation services as well (DOE 2013).
The interdependency between the fuel sector and the electric sector was considered
as a major choke point of this disaster (Comes and Van de Walle 2014; DOE 2013).
Lessons learned highlighted (1) the need to expedite regulation for gasoline rationing
or waivers that provide flexibility to the fuel supply chain companies
4 in the production and distribution of commodities; (2) the need to improve situational awareness
of fuel resources and interdependencies between electricity and the fuel sector; and
(3) the need to ensure mutual assistance networks for the fuel sector, that differently
from the electric utility, is challenged by the competitive nature of their business and
does not have decades of experience on multi-organizational arrangements for the
response of natural disasters.
One of the major policy changes motivated by Hurricane Sandy was Executive
Order 13653 “Preparing the U.S. for the Impacts of Climate Change” that established
the interagency Council on Climate preparedness and Resilience that is tasked to
promote engagement and partnership between governmental agencies (DHS 2015).
The President’s Climate Action Plan issued in June 2013 that establishes the National
Strategy for Information Sharing and Safeguarding (NSISS) was another policy reaction to the vulnerabilities uncovered by the Hurricane Sandy disaster. The NSISS
establishes “information-sharing process and sector specific protocols with private
sector partners” to improve timeliness and information sharing practices for the
security of CI (DHS 2013).
Overall, the challenges that CI owners and operators, and disaster response agencies dealt with during Hurricane Sandy reinforce the need to incorporate organizational and social approaches to the traditional CI protection premise. It is important
to consider that the power outage conditions in 2012 were aggravated by the June 29–
30 derecho, a mesoscale convective system that behaves as an extremely severe and
widespread summer thunderstorm (Livingston 2013). The derecho that had already
3 The energy outage peak occurred on October 30, by November 13 99% of fuel terminals were open
and by November 27 the last remaining affected refinery in PADD1 resumed normal operations
(DOE 2013).
4 Jones Act Waiver, Reformulated Gasoline waiver, Ultra Low Sulfur Diesel waiver for emergency
response vehicles and equipment, Non-Action Assurance allowing fuel loading and unloading
without the use of vapor recovery systems and the release of the Northeast Home Heating Oil
Reserve for the first time (DOE 2013).