Seven People of Infrastructure Resilience

Newswise — Electricity, water, transportation, healthcare and communications interact to form a broader system of systems that analysts at Argonne are committed to making more resilient.

Decision and infrastructure sciences experts at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory are dedicated to understanding how critical infrastructure operates — and why and when sometimes it won’t. By analyzing the way key systems like electricity, water, transportation, healthcare and communications interact, they form an understanding of a sort of ​“system of systems” upon which modern society relies. This includes understanding how that broad system functions normally on good days and what might happen on not-so-good days.

Meet seven people of infrastructure resilience whose scientific, analytical and technological expertise serves communities in times of stress or change and helps them plan to adapt to future challenges.

Leah Talaber, Infrastructure Analyst

The U.S. power grid is an example of something so large, so complex and so interconnected that it is truly too big to fail. And yet it does sometimes. Just ask anyone who has experienced outages during an extreme weather event.

Leah Talaber, an infrastructure analyst at Argonne, developed a sophisticated hurricane model called HEADOUT to help predict where and when critical infrastructure systems are most likely to experience outages. The model is so valuable and accurate that it runs every time the National Hurricane Center issues an advisory. In the hours preceding some storms, Talaber has been tasked with providing hourly updates to DOE and DOE’s Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Systems, and Emergency Response (CESER).

HEADOUT data is essential because it helps communities anticipate and mitigate the safety and economic impacts of losing electrical power, which could cascade to other types of infrastructure, including so-called ​“lifeline systems” — energy, water, communications and transportation — when a hurricane makes landfall.

After every storm, HEADOUT analysts review the model’s predicted storm path and reconcile that data with the storm’s actual path. They also consider the storm’s impact on electrical power. When errors between the predicted model and the actual result are found, Talaber said, it is sometimes a positive sign that regions have improved infrastructure as a result of data HEADOUT provided in previous storms. Using better models and more reliable data, regions can more accurately calculate where it is most important to make interdependent systems more resilient in anticipation of future events.

“It’s very exciting to see how these advances have the potential to save lives,” said Talaber. ​“The more information we have, the more we can prepare. That decreases the potential for lives lost.”

David Sehloff, Energy Systems Engineer

If someone has to focus on the possibility of a regional energy system having its worst kind of day, it might be David Sehloff, an Argonne energy systems engineer.

Sehloff, who lived in California during an era of rolling energy blackouts, is an expert in modeling adverse conditions on regional power transmission networks. Sometimes, he’s using Argonne’s high-fidelity downscaled future weather simulations to look many years into the future. Other times, he is modeling a system’s resilience a few months ahead. He examines how a system will respond when an adverse event propagates through it and ripples into other parts of the network. He also examines what happens to the infrastructure systems that are dependent or interdependent on the initially affected system.

“An adverse event might be a natural hazard, a cyber event or a physical attack,” said Sehloff. ​“A flood might take out a substation and we know we’ll lose power in its vicinity. But how does losing that one substation affect the rest of the system, and can we model how that entire system will respond and recover?”

This analysis can reveal a system’s most vulnerable aspects. With that information, Argonne can start making recommendations for how to mitigate effects and improve overall system resilience.

“Power systems work very well, but there is a high cost when there is a disruption,” Sehloff said. ​“It’s important to identify critical times and pieces of infrastructure so that we can make improvements and prevent worst case outcomes.”

Carmella Burdi, Geospatial Information Systems and Data Analytics Group Leader

Navigating the vast complexity of so much infrastructure in order to make it more resilient might be easier if there was a map to follow. But ask what information belongs on that map and Argonne’s Carmella Burdi will ask you what story you are trying to tell.

“What belongs on a map changes based on what you’re trying to do,” said Burdi, group leader of Argonne’s Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) and Data Analytics. ​“We have the ability — and maybe the responsibility — to think about what’s going on when we’re trying to get information across using a map.”

Unlike cartographers of old who used chain links as standard units of measure and drafted with pencil on paper, Burdi and others at Argonne use the laboratory’s high performance computing (HPC) resources to add mathematical depth and scientific meaning to spatial data. She has become an expert at piecing together GIS and data analytics to tell complex community stories. For example, with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), AT&T and DOE’s Grid Deployment Office, she helped develop a free, R&D 100 award-winning, publicly available online tool called ClimRR to make Argonne’s high-fidelity, dynamically downscaled future weather projections more accessible to both non-experts and experts alike. Local, regional and national decision-makers can use this information for forward-looking resilience planning or in immediate response to crises.

“When you’re talking about infrastructure resilience, you’re talking about an actual spot on the earth’s surface that’s important to understand,” Burdi said. ​“As technology makes more data available to us, we’re able to capture more information about the world. We can organize that data, make sense of it and make our findings discoverable for other folks who need it.”

Lawrence Paul Lewis, Community Resilience and Sustainable Development Program Lead

Lawrence ​“Paul” Lewis lived through the deadly devastation of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans as a law student in 2005. The experience was profound and formative, both personally and professionally.

“I witnessed communities lose absolutely everything,” said Lewis, who had been studying environmental law. ​“It caused me to start thinking, ​‘why did this happen? Was it the way the city was constructed? What was it about the infrastructure that caused all of the systems’ failures?’ ”

Inspired, Lewis completed his legal studies, went on to earn a master’s degree in threat and response management and is currently completing a Ph.D. in systems engineering. Today, as the Community Resilience and Sustainable Development Program Lead and co-principal investigator of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Regional Resiliency Assessment Program (RRAP), he devotes himself to finding, untangling and modeling solutions to single points of infrastructure failures that can disrupt entire systems and devastate communities.

“There’s not always a data set you can download and feed into a model,” Lewis said. ​“Some of this analysis has to be stitched together from real people who identify which part of their system is the most consequential to lose.”

Lifeline systems are the most devastating to lose and they can create cascading problems for a community. Those failures are the ones Lewis wants to help identify most.

“It’s really important to me that my work with Argonne has economic impact,” he said. ​“But, most important to me is the immediate impact we have on helping communities to be the versions of themselves that they want to be.”

Josh Bergerson, Principal Infrastructure Analyst

A better understanding of how infrastructure systems connect and relate to one another can help system operators to prioritize and restore functionality when a natural hazard or other event disrupts operations.

Josh Bergerson, a principal infrastructure analyst at Argonne, works directly with critical infrastructure owners and operators to help them gain greater visibility of their dependencies on and interdependencies with other infrastructure systems. This can be through complex analysis of a system — and its place within the broader system of systems — or by facilitating more transparency between system operators.

For example, a hospital may know it needs water and electricity, but it might not know how disruptions in these utilities could impact its usage of those systems.

“Other than knowing the direct substation to which it is connected, a hospital might not know some of the resilience challenges,” Bergerson said. ​“We can work with stakeholders to collect data and run different analyses to help them understand what they can do so their supply is not as vulnerable every time there’s a storm or other event.”

Smaller utilities might not fully understand the demands of their customers and how to prioritize restoration of power. But prioritizing a hospital’s critical functions is likely higher priority than restoring a nearby parking garage’s functionality. It also presents different resilience challenges.

Bergerson works to bridge this gap in understanding through his work in support of RRAP and DHS.

“Sometimes this work directly informs future decisions to enhance critical infrastructure resilience,” he said. ​“Sometimes it brings value by building relationships between stakeholders.”

Liz Bolton, Infrastructure Risk Analyst

When planning for and developing critical infrastructure, one of the biggest x factors in any plan may be the people who use it.

“People don’t necessarily use infrastructure in the ways we expect, even though they are the very reason why infrastructure is built in the first place,” said Liz Bolton, infrastructure risk analyst at Argonne. In addition to being a Fulbright scholar, Bolton is an expert in water security and the nexus between people and infrastructure. During one program abroad, she recalled, a community diverted water from newly constructed infrastructure for purposes entirely different than what its engineers intended. The region spent millions of dollars, but the effort didn’t result in improved water security.

Bolton believes there are opportunities to apply new ways of thinking to promote greater water security. She studies the interdependencies between water and power grids, and the critical choke points where the greatest impact is felt if part of the system, such as a power plant, should fail.

“Power and clean water are inextricably linked,” said Bolton. ​“Pumping, treating, cleaning and distributing water require a lot of energy. Energy production often requires large volumes of clean water for equipment cooling. When one fails, the other is at risk.”

Analyzing and understanding the interdependencies of water and complex systems (that include people) is Bolton’s top priority.

“We all expect water to be there until it isn’t,” she said. ​“At the point when we notice poor quality or insufficient quantity, it’s often too late.”

Duane Verner, Director, Global Energy and Climate Security

Before becoming Argonne’s director of Global Energy and Climate Security, Duane Verner considered various careers in security and law enforcement. He was a National Park Service Ranger in Glacier National Park. He earned a degree in urban planning and helped governments and organizations with infrastructure recovery efforts after disasters like Hurricane Sandy, Hurricane Katrina and the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center.

Combined, the experiences all made him pose a question to himself that he continues to ask today: How can communities be built to be more resilient to natural disasters and man-made attacks?

His efforts to answer that question have varied over time and include work on national and international programs, including the DHS’s RRAP, the DOE’s Office of International Affairs’ Partnership for Transatlantic Energy and Climate Cooperation (P-TECC), and the U.S. Department of State’s Organization for Security Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

Energy and the stability of energy systems are increasingly important to the U.S. and its allies. As a result, Verner supports P-TECC and OSCE in their shared focus to develop and implement projects on the protection of critical, sustainable energy networks and energy-related aspects of disaster risk reduction in Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

For example, recent geopolitical tensions prompted the country of Moldova to identify viable alternative routes and sources of natural gas in the event of a wintertime disruption. Verner and an Argonne colleague flew to Moldova’s capital, analyzed the interdependencies of the country’s power system, identified ways to respond to a potential disruption and jump-started a partnership that led to a viable backup plan.

That kind of expertise, Verner said, plus the HPC resources in the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, a DOE Office of Science user facility, and additional science and technology capabilities make Argonne a key contributor to infrastructure resilience — and national security.

“We have very unique capabilities at the national labs,” he said, ​“and the world knows that.”

The DOE, DOE’s CESER, DOE’s Grid Deployment Office, DHS, DHS’s FEMA, DOE’s Office of International Affairs, OSCE, AT&T and others sponsors contributed funding for research described in this article.

The Argonne Leadership Computing Facility provides supercomputing capabilities to the scientific and engineering community to advance fundamental discovery and understanding in a broad range of disciplines. Supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Science, Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) program, the ALCF is one of two DOE Leadership Computing Facilities in the nation dedicated to open science.

Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology by conducting leading-edge basic and applied research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://​ener​gy​.gov/​s​c​ience.