Emergency Services and Electricity Part Two – Saving Lives and Light
In the first edition of this blog, I noted that “the electric sector underpins every other essential industry sector, and it also relies on many of them. I…think of the overlaps like the Olympic rings – all interlinked, with some overlapping more than others.”
For the next few editions (we’re even closer!), I’ll continue to focus on each critical infrastructure sector in relation to the electric sector because electricity – which began to be deployed as a service close to 150 years ago – has enabled the progress, convenience and abundance that are hallmarks of modern life. Thereafter, I’ll get into the overlapping policy issues in more detail.
For this edition, I’ll continue to compare the Emergency Services Sector and the Electric Sector. As I noted in Part 1 of this blog, I have an extreme bias related to this topic. I believe that, at least in emergencies, electric service should be considered emergency service. As such, utility operators should heavily coordinate with emergency services sector representatives. Electric utility personnel deployed in the field, often known as “line-workers” are highly trained in handling electrical equipment and, in many cases, operating in environments where live electricity can kill them if not managed properly. They are trained in CPR and other basic first aid, can literally climb poles and rescue someone who is hurt from the top of a pole. These skillsets dovetail with many of those needed in firefighting, emergency medical services, and emergency response.
As a reminder, the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency defines the Emergency Services Sector as follows:
The mission of the Emergency Services Sector is to save lives, protect property and the environment, assist communities impacted by disasters, and aid recovery during emergencies.
Five distinct disciplines compose the ESS, encompassing a wide range of emergency response functions and roles:
Law Enforcement
Fire and Rescue Services
Emergency Medical Services
Emergency Management
Public Works
The ESS also provides specialized emergency services through individual personnel and teams. These specialized capabilities may be found in one or more various disciplines, depending on the jurisdiction:
Tactical Teams (i.e., SWAT)
Hazardous Devices Teams/Public Safety Bomb Disposal
Public Safety Dive Teams/Maritime Units
Canine Units
Aviation Units (i.e., police and medevac helicopters)
Hazardous Materials (i.e., HAZMAT)
Search and Rescue Teams
Public Safety Answering Points (i.e., 9-1-1 call centers)
Fusion Centers
Private Security Guard Forces
National Guard Civil Support
If I tried to tackle the history of each of these areas individually, it would be too much ground to cover, even for a longer-form newsletter like mine. So, I have focused on the history of medical emergency response, fire emergency response, policing, and disaster response. Even with that narrower focus, however, I’ve decided to tackle this sector in two parts. The history of each of these elements is deep and individualized such that doing them justice required such an approach. In this second part, I’ll focus on policing and disaster response.
Policing
According to Wikipedia, evidence of policing activities in the historical record in ancient Egypt go as far back as 4,700 years ago, but policing evolved early on in ancient civilizations across the world from then on. In Egypt, interestingly, warriors charged with catching criminals used various trained animals to help, including dogs, monkeys, and baboons. While a bit later than some of the critical infrastructure activities I’ve discussed here, this function almost naturally follows the others – water, agriculture, and transportation enabled population centers to flourish around 5,500 years ago. The relative wealth and prosperity underpinned by these breakthroughs meant that people had more things to protect. Unfortunately, under the Egyptians, police also developed interrogation methods and meted out punishment. Special police units guarded borders and prevented slaves from escaping, as depicted in the biblical book of Exodus.
In ancient Greece, beginning about 3,200 years ago, a select group of slaves trained in archery were used for crowd control in Athens and others were used by magistrates for general policing. Ironically, other policy forces were used to guard slaves.
The evolution of population centers and increased prosperity spurred policing in ancient China about 2,700 years ago, with “prefects” being appointed by local magistrates to enforce the law. Women could serve in these roles as well. Around the same time, evidence from ancient India indicates that kings appointed various subordinates to fight crime.
As with many critical infrastructure sectors, Roman innovations included policing. The etymology of the word vigilante stems from vigiles, the Roman guards and watchmen who protected the million-population Rome from petty criminals. Beyond these citizen police, the Romans widely used their soldiers to maintain control and enforce laws.
I’m going to pause here and state the obvious. The existence of police is a dichotomy – keeping the peace and protecting the populace from criminals is necessary and worthy, but if the structure of the government allows for those same police to subjugate the law-abiding citizens for the pursuit of power or control, then the police can enable authoritarianism. Examples abound of the latter phenomenon even in recent history, but a great example bridging the ancient world and modern times is that of the Spanish Inquisition. King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella after winning the War of the Castilian succession and reestablishing Catholicism throughout Spain, instituted the Inquisition to uncover “heretics.” The Holy Brotherhood was established as the national police force to undertake this sweeping Inquisition, which was brutal and lasted for three centuries – a sad legacy for two brilliant leaders and an abject lesson in how centralized police forces can sometimes devolve into instruments of terror.
This European experience, among others, coupled with the oppression exerted by the British military in colonial America made some early Americans skeptical of police forces. According to Time magazine, quoting historian Gary Potter of East Kentucky University:
Policing in Colonial America had been very informal, based on a for-profit, privately funded system that employed people part-time. Towns also commonly relied on a “night watch” in which volunteers signed up for a certain day and time, mostly to look out for fellow colonists engaging in prostitution or gambling. (Boston started one in 1636, New York followed in 1658 and Philadelphia created one in 1700.) But that system wasn’t very efficient because the watchmen often slept and drank while on duty, and there were people who were put on watch duty as a form of punishment…In cities, increasing urbanization rendered the night-watch system completely useless as communities got too big. The first publicly funded, organized police force with officers on duty full-time was created in Boston in 1838.”
In the American South, police/sheriffs were used to enforce slavery before and during the Civil War, harkening back to the nefarious beginnings of policing in ancient Egypt. Outside the South, while not used to enforce slavery, police forces in urban areas were often used as tools of political machines, at the whim of local politicians and businessmen who used intimidation and violence to further their own ambitions. Such behavior led President Herbert Hoover to establish the Wickersham Commission in 1929, a move that resulted in a decoupling of police and political jurisdictions as well as a professionalization of police forces – the latter coming with both benefits and drawbacks.
According to a ThoughtCo., article written in 2020:
Today, more than 420,000 officers in more than 18,000 U.S. police departments deal with about 8.25 million crimes and make over 10 million arrests a year. Since the early 2000s, U.S. police departments have increasingly been criticized of unequal enforcement, racial profiling, militarization, and excessive use of force, especially against people of color. Police have responded to this criticism by employing “community policing” reforms intended to gain the trust of the people they serve.
My respect for ethical police officers who put themselves in harms’ way to protect us inevitably clashes with known examples throughout recorded history of police themselves using their power for ill or being used as pawns of politicians and authoritarian governments to prey on law-abiding citizens or oppressed groups. This inevitable dichotomy must be managed in an ongoing way by elected officials at the local, state, and federal levels.
Disaster Response
According to Wikipedia quoting the American Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA):
A natural disaster is the highly harmful impact on a society or community following a natural hazard event. Some examples of natural hazard events include: flooding, drought, earthquake, tropical cyclone, lightning, tsunami, volcanic activities, wildfire.
As we know, natural disasters on our volatile planet go back to our beginnings and predate recorded history. While humans have long had to respond to such disasters by fleeing, rescuing people and/or animals stranded or injured by the event, and rebuilding damaged homes and property, the organized, nation-state response to such disasters began – you guessed it – with the Romans.
According to “Origins,” a publication by Oklahoma State University, three major disasters in the first century A.D. pushed the Roman Empire to develop plans and procedures to respond to such events in a concerted way. In 17 A.D., a major earthquake caused severe damage and loss of life in the Roman province of Asia, in what is now known as Turkey. Emperor Tiberius responded by funding the rebuilding efforts, and was himself rewarded with the citizens’ undying gratitude, including statues erected in his honor. In 64 A.D., a huge fire engulfed Rome. In response, Emperor Nero himself directed the firefighting efforts, instructing members of his own household to help. As a result of his hands-on approach, Nero, “instituted building and fire codes for the first time in the history of the city to prevent future fires. Buildings had to be built with ground floors of stone, with no common walls between buildings, and with fire-fighting equipment on site. He personally paid bonuses to builders who completed their work ahead of schedule.”
Then, in A.D. 79, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and related earthquakes destroyed Roman towns, including Pompeii and Herculaneum, resulting in the deaths of approximately 2,000 people. Emperor Titus responded in a way very reminiscent of the way heads of state do today – by visiting impacted areas, funding restoration, and deploying government staff to help with the rebuilding. Note to readers – if you have not yet visited that part of Italy, I would highly recommend a tour of Herculaneum, which is much better preserved than Pompeii.
Fast forward to more recent efforts to respond and rebuild from disasters -- while some reports may emphasize recent disasters due to the more granular data that we have been able to gather on such events in the last 100 years, the truth is that disasters have been an unfortunate fact of life for Americans since the country’s inception.
According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, “the first legislative act of federal disaster relief in U.S. history followed a devastating fire in Portsmouth, New Hampshire in December 1802. The destruction of large areas of the city’s seaport threatened commerce in the newly founded nation. In 1803, U.S. Congress provided relief to affected Portsmouth merchants by suspending bond payments for several months.”
Another example of an early disaster was in 1816, when a volcanic eruption caused an abnormally cold summer, eradicating crops and causing a major regional famine in the Northeastern U.S. and Eastern Canada. Resulting deaths are estimated at 100,000 people, a mind-boggling number. Another disaster later in the century also had devastating impacts on the other side of the country -- according to Wikipedia, “an atmospheric river led to 43 continuous days of rain, lasting from December 1861 until January 1862. When it was over, much of California's Central Valley was covered with inland seas that remained for months; the state's government had to move to San Francisco as Sacramento was under 10 feet of water. California nearly went bankrupt due to the costs of the damages and the loss of tax revenues from so many farms and mines; it is considered to be the worst disaster in the state's history.” And then, in 1900, the Great Hurricane in Galveston, Texas, killed anywhere between 6,000 and 12,000 people, which is still considered the worst natural disaster in our country’s history.
These are just a few early examples, but there are many more, eventually resulting in a consolidation of federal response capabilities when President Carter signed into law an Executive Order establishing FEMA in 1979. In 1988, Congress passed a law signed by President Reagan that further fleshed out FEMA’s role and the allocation of federal disaster relief funding. In response to the 9/11 terrorist attack by the militant Islamist organization, Al-Qaeda, Congress created the Department of Homeland Security, under which FEMA was subsumed. While FEMA’s response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster of 2005 was notoriously poor, it has faired better in its mission in recent years.
Nexus with the Electric Sector
While the federal structure and response to disasters is an increasingly important one, disaster response is inherently localized in its initial phases. As such, the response ripples out from local, to state, to regional, to federal. This model mirrors the actions taken by electric utilities to prepare for and respond to natural disasters for which there is warning. Modern weather analysis now enables electric utilities and other emergency responders to prepare for hurricanes. Utilities do so by communicating with each other, prepositioning line crews and materials, and preparing to feed and house line crews once they arrive on scene to restore power. American (and some Canadian) utilities help each other in this response, with some crews being flown across the country in the case of serious disasters such as SuperStorm Sandy in 2012.
In the case of less predictable disasters such as wildfires, and as I mentioned during Part 1 of this newsletter, utilities are often the first on site to manage the electric infrastructure. I have heard stories of utility line crews literally evacuating people from fires, using their bucket trucks and equipment to get around downed trees and other hazards created by the fire.
Pivoting to policing, electric utility personnel often interact with the communities they serve – whether via meter reading (while many utilities now have remote capabilities, some still use traditional meters that require in-person review), managing vegetation, repairing and maintaining utility lines and poles, or accepting payments in customer service centers. As such, they may, unfortunately, witness criminal activity that they in turn report to the police. Conversely, utility property can often be subject to theft or damage by criminals. Thus, police and utility personnel derive mutual benefit from cooperating and maintaining ongoing, trusted relationships.
The Nexus with Electricity
Here are some other ways that emergency services and electric utilities overlap:
Reliance on transportation. Emergency services inherently rely on transportation for response. Electric utilities of all kinds transport coal, but also must ensure deliveries of critical grid components, bucket trucks, copper wire, poles, and the list goes on…
Reliance on critical manufacturing. Emergency responders need specialized equipment such as protective gear, firearms, and ladder trucks, to name a few – all of which require reliable manufacturing. Electric utilities derive all their infrastructure from manufacturers and the chemical industry that provide inputs into those manufacturers.
Reliance on communications. Emergency communications are critical for both emergency management and electric utilities. In some cases, they share private communications networks (as delineated in a previous edition of this newsletter) that they both can use everyday and during a disaster.
Reliance on water. Firefighters, of course, must have reliable access to water when fighting fires and other disaster response activities include access to potable water for both the disaster workers and the people impacted by the disaster. Electric utilities use traditional hydropower and new water-power technologies to produce emissions-free electricity. They also use water to cool fossil-fuel fired power plants. But the resource can be constrained in drought conditions, especially out West.
Workforce challenges and the knowledge drain that has resulted from retirements in recent years impact both industries’ regular operations. Both the emergency services and electric utilities must also train their workforces for current and future challenges such as ongoing technology capabilities.
Supply chain constraints that impact every aspect of infrastructure deployment and maintenance.
How to best use technology to create efficiencies and minimize expenses.
How to manage the cybersecurity risk that comes with those technology deployments – this is particularly important related to the telecommunications infrastructure on which both rely.