C-130 dumping retardant during Washington's Chelan-Butte fire of 2015. Photo courtesy of Ben Brooks.

The project will look at the potentially increasing impact of wildfires on critical infrastructures, help identify lessons learned during the recovery from major fires in the region and share best practices that agencies, business & industry and communities can use to prepare for fires and minimize their impact to the infrastructures that support them. 

The Pacific Northwest is home to forests that surround numerous urban, suburban and rural communities. Changes in the climate, weather patterns and the close proximity of homes and industry to forests are resulting in fires causing increasingly higher damage to critical infrastructure and communities.

More than 1 million acres burned across Washington State in 2015, the worst fire season in the state's history. In 2016, the Fort McMurray Fires in Northern Alberta destroyed 2,400 homes and displaced thousands of citizens. The fires became the Canada's costliest natural disaster. The human and financial toll of these disasters can take years to recover from and the new "normal" might not be what the community was before a fire.

Wildfires cross local, state and national political borders and require regional federal coordination. Recovery efforts are typically left to the individual jurisdictions with assistance from the state or provincial and federal governments. How to allocate and use this assistance can be a challenge for communities.

Through the grant, the CRDR will seek to:
- Identify lessons learned during the recovery from major fires in the region. This includes the efforts communities have undertaken to rebuild or relocate infrastructure
- Highlight the impacts to critical infrastructure that were impacted by fires and the challenges related to bringing those resources back online
- Look specifically for similarities and differences associated with wildland fires that do or do not impact urban areas
- Conduct one-on-one interviews with experts and stakeholders responsible for the response and recovery efforts in the region impacted by major wildfires
- Conduct or participate in a day long workshop
- Develop a summary issue document of issues and recommendations that will be combined with the efforts

The CRDR is working in partnership with the Meridian Institute, which is leading the project and investigating the impacts of wildland fires in the Eastern United States, specifically the fire that impacted Gatlinburg, Tennessee. 

Cost: $199 

Register Now! 

The symposium will be embedded within the Pacific NorthWest Economic Region's Annual Summit in Portland, Oregon, from July 23-27. Embedding the Disaster Resilience Symposium within the larger PNWER Summit will provide attendees with the opportunity to interact face-to-face with elected officials and legislators and increase awareness for important disaster resilience issues. 

	Participants practiced responding to various cyber threats while playing the Cyber Resilience Game by Sand Table during the Emerald Down V Cybersecurity Exercise

Government personnel, critical infrastructure managers and major employers put their understanding of cyber threats and resources into action Thursday, February 16 at the Emerald Down V Regional Cybersecurity Exercise. 

Watch the video

Learn more at regionalresilience.org

The daylong exercise, held at the Clover Park Technical College, brought together 133 attendees looking to improve their organizations' cyber plans, build relationships with other regional technology and security practitioners, and practice community cyber security response within an interactive cybersecurity board game.

The game is one in a series of Sand Table Resilience Games created by James Rollins, Managing Partner at Takouba. This cybergame simulates methods used by different types of hackers to access and exploit a network, such as a phishing attack for sensitive information. Network defenders then use tools and policies to try and stave off attacks, and can call for help from available resources.

"We're not looking for winners and losers. We want participants to understand how the types of cyberattacks that might occur and what tools they have to counter them," said Eric Holdeman, director of the Center for Regional Disaster Resilience (CRDR). "The goal is for guests to learn how to report a cyber attack, who can help and what resources they might expect in response."

Holdeman said a main theme of the exercise is to develop community cybersecurity response capability, where public and private entities are encouraged to securely share information on an attack to alert each other and hopefully and collectively or find solutions.

The Center for Regional Disaster Resilience works on emergency preparedness and disaster resilience projects across the Pacific Northwest from its Seattle office. The CRDR operates under the umbrella of the Pacific NorthWest Economic Region (PNWER), and is committed to working with states, provinces, territories, and communities to create public-private partnerships, develop action plans, and undertake pilot projects and activities to improve regional disaster resilience cooperation.

Our region's interconnected economies and shared critical infrastructures are subject to far-reaching and cascading impacts from disasters. The CRDR works with key public and private stakeholders to create and implement workable solutions to local and regional infrastructure vulnerability by raising awareness of infrastructure interdependencies; providing training and education; and developing tools, technologies, and approaches that build on existing capabilities. These can be utilized across the United States, Canada, and in the international community.