Prioritizing Community Resilience Solutions
The challenge communities and their electric and water utilities face regarding extreme weather and wildfires: How do they prioritize the many potential ways to mitigate these threats?
The Challenge
Hurricanes, flooding, extreme heat, extreme cold, wildfires, and other threats are taking their toll on communities. Community leaders are taking action to protect residents and businesses—and enhance recovery after these events. But communities contend with challenges to perform this emergency preparedness rapidly and cost effectively:
- An evolving array of risks
- Limited resources and time constraints
- Multiple critical infrastructures and their interdependencies
Conventional Approaches
To address these emergency management challenges, communities and utilities adopt various methods of prioritizing community resilience solutions that yield highly-specific, tailored results. However, some of these approaches involve time-consuming data gathering and in-depth planning assessments. Because these studies use forecasting and future scenarios, their results are inherently uncertain.
Our Approach
Our community resilience software (Streetlight™) complements these data-intensive assessments with a leading practices approach to enhanced community resilience:
Solution gathering
Our resilience experts gather and update public-domain information on resilience-enhancing solutions that communities and utilities have successfully implemented, as well as expert-recommended solutions. The solutions span electric power, transportation, water supply/wastewater, buildings, food, and fire protection infrastructures—and their interdependencies.
Solutions for specific users
The community or utility that uses our software (Streetlight™) completes a straightforward questionnaire. Our software then instantaneously matches the most applicable, human-curated solutions in our proprietary solution database to the needs and preferences of the specific community and utility.
Hazard-agnostic or threat-specific solutions
Our software can deliver hazard-agnostic solutions that are applicable to a wide range of threats or risks (such as various types of extreme weather), as well as solutions that address specific threats, such as wildfires.
Benefits of Our Method
- Leading practices. Our prioritized resilience solutions are based on actual implementations at communities and utilities, or recommendations from resilience experts.
- Credible. The resilience solutions are vendor-agnostic, credible, and defendable to decision makers.
- Fast and low cost. Our process is quick, customized, and costs far less than detailed assessments.
- Actionable. For each resilience solution, we summarize its potential benefits and best online resource to learn more. This helps the community or utility take the next step: implement the resilience solution.
- Scalable. Our software and methods can be scaled to additional risks (e.g., cybersecurity threats), critical infrastructures, users, providers (e.g., product developers), and influencers (e.g., consulting firms).
- Extensible. The Streetlight™ extensible framework can be applied to other challenges besides resilience, including energy affordability, supply chain management, data management, and others.
Applications of our Software
Cities, counties, universities, electric and water utilities, and others can apply our tool to:
- Gain another perspective. Our software complements more lengthy, in-depth, data-intensive assessments by providing rapid results.
- Support decision making. Our software provides an independent third-party assessment that supports decision making on resilience initiatives.
- Empower workforce training. Our comprehensive dataset of solutions is a useful training tool on resilience solutions.
- Meet other challenges. Our platform can be used to develop leading practices approaches for other community, utility, and business challenges, such as supply chain management, energy affordability, data management, etc.
Everybody Wins
- Improve public health and safety. Our resilience solutions can help save lives and protect residents and workers from unsafe conditions.
- Provide economic benefits. Our solutions can help reduce property losses, decrease recovery costs, enhance economic development, and ease community economic impact.
- Enhance quality of life. Our solutions can help improve confidence in community and utility leadership, peace of mind of community members, and overall quality of life.