Excerpt from Article on Curating Energy Resilience Resources By RICH HOUGHTON, F. SAME, USAF (Ret) FRAMING RESILIENCE “Do not judge me by my success, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.” — Nelson Mandela When the power goes out at an airport, resilience will be tested. In November 2021, two airport power outages on opposite sides of the country impacted thousands of travelers. The first occurred at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix, Arizona, and the second event happened less than a week later at Raleigh-Durham International Airport in North Carolina. Both were caused by humans (Fox 10 Phoenix, 2021). Both events tested resilience. Scenarios such as those power outages highlight the need to be resilient. But what is resilience? This article explores various definitions of the term. It also discusses information sources and some case studies that demonstrate approaches to becoming more resilient. Finally, it offers some tips about managing available resilience information and tapping into those resources. Both the Arizona and North Carolina power outages can be instructive. Not surprisingly, unexpected power outage events delay flights and cause panic and frustration. Outage events highlight some essential lessons about the concept of resilience. Those lessons teach us how we can bounce back from adversity. The takeaways range from deeply personal to organizational. The stories of those outages and their inevitable stress and suffering made me think: What if there was an available toolkit that organizations and individuals could use to be more resilient? Where might one find such a toolkit? What would be in it? What would be in an individual person’s toolkit compared to the kit for an airport authority or a Department of Defense (DOD) unit? The answer to those questions sparked an information quest that led to this article. In Phoenix, the Monday Morning quarterbacks agreed that many steps could have been taken to prevent that kind of event. That idea of prevention is a concept at the heart of any resilience discussion. Looking deeper into the Phoenix event, the root cause was a problem with the maintenance process. According to Arizona Public Service, the commercial power company for the airport, “APS crews were performing maintenance on the electrical system that serves Sky Harbor in preparation for the upcoming busy travel season when a failure occurred in a piece of equipment called a switching cabinet. We’re looking into what caused that failure” (Phoenix Central News, 2021). Ironically, preventive maintenance, often a key contributor to resilience, was the culprit in Sky Harbor’s painful outage. Less than a week after the Phoenix event, it was Raleigh-Durham Airport’s turn for an unexpected power outage. Again, human error was the culprit: RDU spokeswoman Crystal Feldman said a cleaning crew spilled a large amount of water. It seeped through 25
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