Case Study: Fort Collins Regional Resilience Assessment
In 2016, the City of Ft. Collins, Colorado and Larimer County sought to implement the NIST Community Resilience Planning Guide to enhance regional resilience and leverage the extensive comprehensive planning that had already been done by jurisdictions within the region. As part of this effort, they undertook a review of more than 20 local and regional plans to identify and understand potential planning conflicts and gaps that might impact their resilience.
With the support of CISA, partners identified key infrastructure systems and dependencies that could impact local and regional resilience. These twin efforts yielded an integrated set of key infrastructure assets and systems throughout the region, as well as a number of resilience issues and findings about otherwise complete current planning.
Specifically, it was determined that:
- Fort Collins, Larimer County, and the local university did not have integrated response plans for two potential high consequence hazards: 1) a long-term, areawide power outage; and 2) train derailment and hazmat release.
- Fort Collins and Larimer County did not have integrated emergency plans to address fuel supply disruptions.
- Networking and information technology (IT) functions are vital to Fort Collins and Larimer County, but City and County continuity plans do not adequately account for the impacts of IT disruption.
These findings provided the basis for a series of planning activities aimed at addressing these gaps.