Adjunct Research Professor (Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering) and instructor for our course in Explosives, Ettore Contestabile, recently wrote about our program, some of its history and the significance of our field in Frontline Security & Safety Magazine. An excerpt is below, and the article in full can be found here.
People in the field of security are often faced with defining criticalities within the identified Critical Infrastructure sectors. These can include down time/recovery time; losses (clients, money, reputation); deaths/injuries; the economy; and others. Of course, such parameters all need to be considered but, as usual, what a citizen considers appalling (ie death of an individual) and unacceptable, may not be rated as high by the government that may be more concerned with the potential future loss of hundreds of lives.
Imagine, for example, the bombing of two bridges. The first is a bridge over a main highway in Ottawa. The damage prevents its use for a period of three months. The locals are furious and demand action. They can still get to where they need to go because there are redundancies built into the transportation infrastructure but it takes them a lot longer.
Compare that with an attack to the new (yet to be built) Windsor/Detroit River crossing. A single day of closing would result in enormous costs (considering that about 40% of the Canada/USA goods trade occurs through this point). Who will feel the effect? Depending on the duration of the closure of the crossings, businesses may collapse and individuals may lose their livelihood.
These examples show how events can be highly relevant locally, nationally or internationally and yet entirely non-critical to individuals far removed. Of course, if in these examples there were deaths, the whole sphere of influence changes, as would the people, governments and other institutions that would come to consider the transportation infrastructure as critical and needing special attention.
This superficial look at two similar events (bombing of a bridge) hints at the difficulty in objectively rating critical infrastructure. There are stakeholders everywhere.