Critical Infrastructure Vulnerability and Protection Case Study

Critical Infrastructure Vulnerability and Protection - Case Study Example It also needs rail and road transport as well as pipeline to supply it with the fuel for generators, water for emotions control and cooling, finance and banking for purchases of fuel, and telecommunications for system status monitoring and e-commerce. Mat times of component failure or emergencies, other critical dependencies on the same infrastructure will be used by the electricity infrastructure, yet within the same infrastructure. A good example is petroleum fuel for the emergency generators and transportation of repair materials. In this example, the supported infrastructure is electricity which is supported by water, telecommunications, transport, and the other infrastructures (Ronaldi, Peeremboom, & Kelly, 2001). Interdependency is bidirectional relationship existing between two infrastructures whereby is correlated or influences the other one’s state. These increase complexity of the system or systems dramatically. They are characterized by infrastructural multiple connections, feed forward and feedback paths as well as intricate, branching topologies. An intricate web is created by the connections, which depending on its linkages characteristics could transmit shocks across the broad swaths of the economy as well as through multiple infrastructures (Ronaldi, Peeremboom, & Kelly, 2001). Infrastructure interconnection causes vulnerability to failure. For instance, a cascading failure will occur when a certain disrupted infrastructure will cause a component of the other infrastructure to fail creating disruption on the infrastructure. An escalating failure will occur when a disruption that is existing disruption in the first infrastructure will intensify an independent commotion in the other infrastructure, normally worsening the situation in terms of recovery time or restoration time of the second failure. A common cause failure will occur when several networks of infrastructure are at the same time disrupted: there is failure in components in each