a floor and onto an electrical box, tripping the system for Concourse C. “This was a freak accident that happened,” Feldman said. “We apologize for the inconvenience. This is absolutely unexpected.” (WRAL.com) An apology is a weak recovery tool for the weary traveler trapped at the airport. Conversely, information about the cause of adversity is a powerful component of resilience. DEFINING RESILIENCE “If I had only one hour to save the world, I would spend 55 minutes defining the problem, and only five minutes finding the solution.” — Albert Einstein Power outages at places such as Phoenix and Raleigh are rare. But they pack a punch. When an airport is impacted, there is often a domino effect across the nation. Delayed or canceled flights create a spiderweb of effects at far-away locations that have nothing to do with the root cause. We can learn a great deal about resilience by doing a case study about any power outage. The good news is that every event illustrates resilience tools that will help in the future. The bad news is problems are not limited to human error. Our energy infrastructure faces significant hazards such as weather events, earthquakes, fires and terrorism. The ugly news is that we don’t know how unprepared we are until disaster strikes. Therefore, it makes sense to maximize the number of available resilience resources. Consider the lifeboat on a cruise ship: It’s nice to know it is there, but passengers don’t pay much attention to lifeboat operations until the ship is going down. At that moment, two things are vitally important: The first is that somebody has been paying attention, and the lifeboat is ready. The second is that somebody is there to organize the lifeboat activity during the chaos. The lifeboat image hints at one aspect of resilience. But as with the blind men attempting to describe an elephant, there’s a lot more going on there. At its core, any definition of resilience involves bouncing back from events such as airport power outages. The idea is to take a punch and get back in the fight. If one applies those concepts to valuable power and water resources, a definition of energy resilience emerges. Presidential Policy Directive 21 provided an early description of what energy resilience means. In a nutshell, the document called it the “Ability to prepare for and adapt to changing conditions and withstand and recover rapidly from disruptions.” (White House, 2013) Five years later, the National Defense Authorization Act defined energy resilience as “The ability to avoid, prepare for, minimize, adapt to, and recover from anticipated and unanticipated energy disruptions in order to ensure energy availability and reliability sufficient to provide for mission assurance and readiness, including mission-essential operations related to readiness, and to execute or rapidly reestablish mission-essential requirements.” (NDAA, 2018) Resilience is cloaked in the classic military idea of readiness. A foundational aspect of readiness is understanding threats. In the energy infrastructure world, threats range from tornadoes to terrorists. No matter your politics about global climate change, the costs are real: The National Centers for Environmental Information found that “In 2021, there were 20 weather/climate disaster events with losses exceeding $1 billion each to affect the United States. These events included one drought event, two flooding events, 11 severe storm events, four tropical cyclone events, one wildfire event and one winter storm event. Overall, these events resulted in the deaths of 688 people and had significant economic effects on the areas impacted. The 1980-2021 annual average is 7.4 events (Consumer Price Index-adjusted); the annual average for the most recent five years (2017-2021) is 17.2 events (CPI-adjusted).” (NOAA, 2022) If the only threat were weather, resilience would demand responding to multiple punches. Once you understand what resilience means to you, the trick is to figure out how to get some. CURATING A PERSONAL RESILIENCE TOOLKIT “It is really wonderful how much resilience there is in human nature. Let any obstructing cause, no matter what, be removed in any way, even by death, and we fly back to first principles of hope and enjoyment.” — Bram Stoker, Dracula My son recently watched a movie called Ready Player One. A key character in the movie was “The Curator.” The Curator provided key clues to a mystery at key times in the story. He demonstrated an enviable high-tech ability to virtually show you 26
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