Guiding Principles for the Nation's Critical Infrastructure

Abstract

• The devastating consequences of the levee failures in New Orleans focused the nation's and the civil engineering profession's attention on the root causes of what is considered one of the worst infrastructure disasters in our nation's history. After months of intense analysis of the New Orleans disaster, the ASCE Hurricane Katrina External Review Panel urged that "organizations responsible for critical life-safety facilities be organized and operated to enable, not to inhibit, a focus on safety and that engineers continually evaluate the appropriateness of design criteria, always considering how the performance of individual components affects the overall performance of a system." These insights have become an imperative to all organizations and individuals involved in planning, funding, designing, constructing, and operating critical infrastructure. This report is an important step in addressing the types of engineering and institutional failures that were brought to light by the studies following Hurricane Katrina and other recent infrastructure disasters.

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