Infrastructure threatened by climate change poses a 'national crisis'

http://www.dailyclimate.org/

http://www.eenews.net/stories/1059995655

Evan Lehmann, E&E reporter
ClimateWire: Thursday, March 6, 2014

The nation's aging infrastructure makes up an interconnected web of systems that are alarmingly vulnerable to the shocks of climate change, according to a report released today that will inform the National Climate Assessment, to be made public next month.

The difficulty of strengthening the systems that support the American economy -- from electricity to drinking water -- poses significant problems requiring large investments at a time of rising risk and receding political appetite for big spending initiatives.

"It's kind of a national crisis," said Tom Wilbanks, a senior scientist at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and a co-author of the 109-page report.

It is the first time the National Climate Assessment will include a section on the risks to infrastructure, a broad term that includes most major societal investments. Among them are health care systems; the nation's web of roads, airports and seaports; and communication systems relied on by every owner of a cellphone.

The threats to these systems don't include just the physical damage they might suffer during a hurricane, a flood or a heat wave. The bigger impacts are on society, the economy and the environment, all of which depend on the smooth functioning of these systems, the report says.

"Vulnerabilities are especially large where infrastructures are subject to multiple stresses, beyond climate change alone; when they are located in areas vulnerable to extreme weather events; and if climate change is severe rather than moderate," it says.

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if one piece of the infrastructure web is weak, the whole thing is vulnerable. They call it a "cascading" effect. In some cases, one system might escape damage during a disaster but still be useless, because it depends on a separate system, like electricity, that went down.

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During Superstorm Sandy, about 11 billion gallons of sewage was released into waterways after treatment plants either lost power or were flooded.

The report points to several cascading events, including a heat wave that sparked 20 different failures in the span of 11 minutes, affecting millions of people in Arizona, California and Mexico.

On Sept. 9, 2011, high temperatures tripped a transmission line near Yuma, Ariz., sparking a chain of events that shut down the San Onofre nuclear power plant, caused the release of untreated sewage and required San Diego residents to boil their drinking water.

The blackout, which lasted 12 hours, disrupted emergency communications, which made it difficult to notify people that sewage had infiltrated San Diego's drinking water. Altogether, more than 7 million gallons of sewage was released from plants in Southern California and Mexico, and 7 million people lost power.

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