Hurricane Reinforces Need to Reimagine Infrastructure

September 19, 2022

Hurricane Fiona recently hit Puerto Rico, bringing extreme rains that knocked out the island’s electric grid and left 3 million people without power. Following an earlier hurricane, Maria, that battered the island and its infrastructure, Thaddeus Miller, Mikhail Chester, and Tischa A. Muñoz-Erickson described in Issues the underlying social, ecological, technical, and institutional factors “that often seem to set infrastructure up for failure.” Problems will grow only worse with climate change and accompanying extreme weather events, the authors note. As a way forward, they offer lessons to help policymakers, infrastructure engineers, and institutional managers design, build, and maintain more resilient infrastructure systems.

Posted by Tom Burroughs