Breaking the cascade: Three keys to establishing reliable, resilient community lifelines
Essential lifelines like power, water, transportation and communications operate as deeply connected systems. Our senior vice president and disaster resilience lead Jordanna Rubin explains why identifying the most critical interdependencies is key to making smarter investments that strengthen both reliability and community resilience.
During disasters, disruptions rarely affect just one system. A power outage can shut down water pumps. Flooded roads can delay emergency response. Communications failures can slow down recovery. What begins as a localized incident can quickly cascade across multiple lifelines.
This reality underscores a critical shift in how we must think about infrastructure. Power, water, transportation, communications and buildings are not independent assets. They are community lifelines — deeply interconnected systems that sustain public safety, economic activity, healthcare and daily life.
To effectively protect communities, we must move beyond siloed infrastructure management and adopt a whole-systems approach — one that integrates reliability, resilience, and service continuity into planning and investment decisions.
Power, water, transportation, communications and buildings aren’t just technical systems. Since these lifelines keep communities functioning, the operators managing them face a host of complex challenges, including aging assets, frequent weather-related risks, regulatory scrutiny and budget constraints.
The good news is that there’s a growing shift in the approach to infrastructure management. Organizations are moving away from reactive repairs after failure to proactive planning that enables continuity through disruptions. The question is no longer whether to invest in resilience, but how to translate the value of prioritizing these investments for regulators, customers and communities.
Infrastructure planning has historically focused on individual assets or sectors. In practice, however, no lifeline operates alone.
- Power feeds water and wastewater systems
- Transportation enables emergency response and repair crews
- Communications connect first responders and public services
- Buildings house critical operations and healthcare facilities
When one system fails, the impacts rarely stay contained. The most severe losses from disaster often aren’t from the initial event, but from the chain reaction of failures that follow.
A whole-systems approach shifts the focus from protecting isolated assets to protecting service continuity across interdependent lifelines. It asks different questions: not just “Will this asset perform?” but “What happens across the system if it does not?”
Reliability and resilience: Why both matter
Infrastructure performance has long been measured by reliability — keeping services running under normal conditions. Reliability investments focus on asset condition, routine maintenance and preventing predictable failures. They improve baseline performance and customer satisfaction.
But reliability alone is not enough.
A system can perform flawlessly every day and still fail catastrophically during extreme events. This is where resilience becomes essential.
Resilience determines how systems perform under stress — during wildfires, floods, extreme heat, cyber disruptions, or other high-impact events. It shapes whether outages last hours or weeks and whether communities can stabilize quickly.
The strongest infrastructure programs integrate both:
- Reliability keeps services running on good days
- Resilience means communities can function on their worst days
A reliable system without resilience can still collapse under stress. A resilient system without reliability creates unnecessary daily disruption. Communities need both.
Three practical ways to strengthen reliability and resilience:
1. Prioritize the service outcomes that matter most
Focus on protecting the services with the highest consequences if disrupted: public safety, health, economic continuity and essential operations.
This means identifying and reinforcing critical interdependencies such as:
- Electrical supply to water and wastewater pump stations
- Power and access routes to hospitals and emergency operations centers
- Transportation corridors that enable repair crews and supply chains
By prioritizing these crucial service nodes, decision makers invest where failure would cause the greatest harm. This reduces both everyday disruption and the risk of cascading failures during crises.
2. Translate resilience into measurable performance outcomes
Resilience can sound abstract. To gain support from regulators, governing boards and stakeholders, it must be framed in terms they already use. Instead of presenting a project as “resilience,” operators can describe concrete outcomes, such as:
- Reducing service restoration times from weeks to days
- Protecting power supply to critical facilities (e.g., hospitals or water utilities)
- Maintaining water quality during extreme weather
- Improving recovery time for essential services
When resilience is tied to measurable performance metrics — like outage duration, time to restore critical customers, or continuity of essential services — it becomes an accountability-driven investment, not a discretionary upgrade.
3. Embed resilience into routine capital planning
Resilience should not compete as a standalone initiative. It should be integrated into regular maintenance, modernization and lifecycle planning.
Practical examples include:
- Elevating or hardening equipment already scheduled for replacement
- Incorporating future hazard projections into standard design criteria
- Updating asset management strategies to reflect intensifying risks
Embedding resilience into planned upgrades reduces incremental costs and avoids creating isolated projects that are harder to fund or approve.
Build resilience before disaster strikes
Communities often coordinate effectively during emergencies. The larger opportunity lies before disasters by integrating whole-systems thinking into long-term planning and capital investment.
Formal frameworks and emergency management structures support cross-sector coordination. The next step is connecting those frameworks directly to investment decisions, so communities are not just responding better but investing smarter. Infrastructure is more than steel and concrete. It is the foundation of public safety, economic vitality and daily life. By adopting a whole-systems approach and investing in both reliability and resilience, communities can reduce cascading risk, accelerate recovery and strengthen the systems we rely on every day. This way we are not just coordinating during a crisis but investing ahead of time.
See Jordanna discuss this topic with other panelists at the Building for Tomorrow Conference:
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