California’s water supply is under intense pressure due to the severe drought afflicting much of the western United States. Drought conditions, however, are not the only hazard impacting the state’s water supply. In fact, there are multiple natural and human-related hazards for utilities to consider in their security and resilience planning.
As the winter season sets in, WaterISAC is sharing some tips and stories of other utilities taking proactive steps to increase their resilience against winter-related hazards. During the devastating winter storm in Texas earlier this year, Austin Water lost power and many of its pipes froze due to extreme cold, leading to long-term water outages.
Over the past year, extreme weather events have plagued the globe. Many of these disasters have been linked to human-caused climate change and as the climate continues to warm the increasing frequency of these events will likely persist. One particular climate trend afflicting the U.S. is a stark national precipitation divide between the east and the west, the east is too wet, while the west is too dry. In other words, many eastern U.S. states witnessed above-average precipitation levels this year, while much of the Western U.S. experienced below-average precipitation.
A new study from the Hudson Institute assesses the economic and national security impacts resulting from a quantum computer attack on the U.S. power grid. The study predicts that a quantum computer attack, launched by a nation-state actor, could leave the entire contiguous United States without power for almost a month. The societal impact would be catastrophic, since virtually every sector relies on electricity to operate. This would of course be a blended attack, wherein hostilities commence in the cyber domain but quickly cascade into the physical world.
The domestic extremist threat environment is rapidly evolving and presenting new challenges to counterterrorism officials seeking to understand and confront this dynamic threat. Last week in Germany, law enforcement arrested multiple suspected domestic extremists over an alleged plot to assassinate local politicians over renewed COVID-19 restrictions. Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, seemingly disparate groups of extremists from across the political spectrum have come together based on shared grievances against government responses to COVID, such as lockdowns and vaccine mandates.
A new report from the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS) examines the connection between human-caused climate change and increasing extreme weather events. This report, Explaining Extreme Events in 2020 from a Climate Perspective, comprises 18 new peer-reviewed studies of extreme weather across the globe during 2020. One of the studies, conducted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), investigated the drought in the American Southwest.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has issued a status update on its work with the National Critical Functions (NCFs), which has focused on a decomposition of each of the 55 NCFs to enable a deeper understanding of how critical functions like supplying water and managing wastewater are provided and where failures might occur and that might point to sustainable risk reduction solutions.
FEMA’s Dam Safety Warning Signs Best Practices is a compilation of existing leading practices for dam owners and operators to warn the public against hazardous conditions resulting from the general operation of these facilities.
A new article in Lawfare seeks to identify how terrorist groups and non-state actors may adapt and innovate new technologies, specifically drones, for their own nefarious purposes. By understanding these trends counterterrorism professionals will be better positioned to disrupt, degrade, or destroy future threats.
A new article from the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) seeks to forecast the terror trends of 2022. The analysis contends that the terrorist threat environment is now more diverse than ever before, and current terror threats are likely to intensify in 2022. The article, written by Colin Clarke, Senior Fellow in the National Security Program at FPRI and the Director of Policy and Research at The Soufan Group assesses that Islamic extremism and far-right extremism will likely remain the most lethal terror threats in 2022.
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