Welcome to season four of Inside My Canoe Head. I came in podcasts about individual emergency preparedness, rocking an incredible life, and learning to do the things to make yourself more self-reliant in a chaotic world. Sit back, grab a beverage, and take charge of your life. Alright, welcome back to Inside My Canoe Head.
Thanks for joining us in the Ottawa studios here on this Wondrous Emergency Preparedness Week. This is the annual week where the best of public agencies put together a wonderful communication program to try to help you begin thinking about individual emergency preparedness and being more responsible for your outcomes. And you know here at Inside My Canoe Head, we know the most important question in emergency preparedness is, who is responsible for your outcomes? And the answer is obviously you.
If you believe the government is responsible for coming to your rescue, then we're here to try to inform you that that's not actually going to happen and that your preparedness and the efforts that you take to build some resilience or increase your level of resilience through becoming more self-reliant, you will be better off when disruptions occur. Because as we can see around the world, these disruptions are continuing. So right now we live in a wonderful modern society. It is interconnected.
The amazing myriad of systems that operate just below eye level, like right out of our consciousness, that keep society running, that keep your modern urban environment amazing. You turn on the tap, you get potable water, you flush the toilet, your waste disappears. When you decide you would like to acquire more food or different food items, you go to a corporation and they're readily available for you to choose. If you want to change the type of shelter that you acquire, you have the ability through the use of rent to go find a different one.
We live in an incredible society and very few of us actually take the time to examine these things that allow it to continue. Now, the study of critical infrastructure has been around for decades and it basically means we divide all of these systems that support the modern life into different sectors. Now, depending on what country you're in and depending what public agency talks about critical infrastructure, there can be anywhere from 10 to 16 different types of critical infrastructure and they cover things like power, utilities, water, transportation, government services, financial services, telecom, IT, the internet, phone communications. Like if you think of all of this that happens around you, that you just press buttons on your smartphone and you have access to, like I said, you turn on the tap, you go to the grocery store when you just make this assumption, you wake up every day assuming that the grocery store is going to have some type of food for you acquire, because we collectively by deciding to live in urban environments and I love in urban environments, we've transferred the responsibility to feed ourselves, to water ourselves, to house ourselves and to do all these other things.
We've transferred that responsibility to the state and corporations and we access those services through funding. So we buy the services either through paying property taxes, paying rents or simply buying something at a store. We no longer forage for our own food, we don't carry our own water, we don't build our own shelter, like we're an advanced society, right? So if you think of society as a dinner table, look at the dinner table in your house, right?
It probably has four legs or a big pedestal in the middle. Now, picture it with 10 legs. Each of these legs are a different size and in a position of different importance supporting that table. That's critical infrastructure, supporting your life, which is going on.
So one, maybe two, maybe even three of the smaller, less important legs can be knocked away and it stays up. You continue to run and if society continues to operate. But if you take out one or two of the really big, thick, and importantly positioned legs under that table, it becomes unstable. It becomes a little wobbly.
These are critical infrastructure. And when enough of them or the most important ones go down and stay down, your table comes to the floor. That is a visual representation of societal collapse. That's the important of critical infrastructure.
So since it underpins your life represented by that tabletop, we examine each one of those sectors of critical infrastructure to understand its importance, to understand your reliance on it, your exposure to it, as the basis of your personal preparedness plan. Now, each individual family, and we've talked at length on this podcast about how in modern society, and I think it's wonderful, that families are so differently defined. I mean, the wall or cleaver days are over, then the standard nuclear family is done. For good, bad, or indifferent, society now defines families so differently in different cultures.
You may have a multi-generational family living in your house. Your family may actually compose four different households in three different locations. You may have a member of your family who is in some type of long-term medical care, but you consider that part of your family, so therefore they are going to be incorporated into your individual emergency preparedness program. You may have, depending on where you live, you may actually grow some of your food in your small backyard in your urban structure.
So your reliance on food infrastructure, so your food critical infrastructure, is less than your neighbor in the apartment building, who doesn't produce any of their food, and is 100% reliant on the state or corporations to provide food to feed them. So each individual family is going to depend on critical infrastructure differently, but you all depend on each of these ten sectors in some way or form, which is why a carte blanche program from the government that just treats it generally is not going to be really applicable to each person. Yes, everybody has access to the power grid, but everybody's dependency on that power grid would be significantly different depending on what they use power for and do they have alternate sources of energy. For example, if you live in a home that is heated by electric, it's a huge difference than somebody who lives in a home that's heated by gas, but uses electric for the fridge.
So in the winter, for example, where I live in Canada, as long as the heat's going in the house, I can take everything out of the fridge and throw it on the back deck, and I'm not really going to have a significant problem for loss of energy for a short period of time. If power actually heated my house, I would have a significant difference. So you can understand that we all have a dependency to each one of these critical infrastructures, but our own individual family dependency is going to be different. And this is why it's important, when we build your individual and family emergency preparedness plan, that we do so on the foundation of critical infrastructure.
So what we do here at Inside My Canoe Head, and we're going to walk you through this process is lay out each one of the 10 sectors. There are four or five general important questions that we're going to ask about each one of these sectors, and then you'll be able to jot down a whole bunch of notes specific to your family. So the second aspect of considering critical infrastructure is not just only for your house. You think about you are dependent on some services that the public provides, right?
We all the traditional first responders of police, fire EMS, they themselves are also dependent on critical infrastructure to enable their execution of their mission. So it's not just your family and how you sit. It's your society around you, which is why it also informs community emergency preparedness programs. So understanding that you can see the influence that critical infrastructure has on your daily life.
And for the vast majority of time, through the brilliant support of incredibly well-educated and well-intentioned individuals, this all happens while you're blissfully unaware of everything going on around you. You just integrate with this system. You operate within the system. You leverage what it has to offer, and you don't consider significant disruptions in this critical infrastructure, which is why when we, on the business side of preparedness labs incorporated and we work with municipal governments, we talk to them about the importance of communicating reliance on critical infrastructure as part of their emergency preparedness communications programs, especially something as valuable right now as emergency preparedness week, you should be hearing a significant amount of information about critical infrastructure, the foundations of society.
What are the robustness that's built into the current system that's provided? So the one everybody usually zeros in on is power because power is the most important critical infrastructure because almost all the other elements, sectors of critical infrastructure, require power to function themselves. So when you examine the power grid in North America, the four different grids that are brought together, you see that even since a lot of incidents that have happened over the last 10 to 15 years, there remains many single points of failure within the system, the way the system is designed. So if you were to lay out the power grid in an interconnected set of systems, you would see that there are several nodes along that network that are single points of failure.
I don't have to take the network down. I just have to take the single points of failure down. And you can do them through many. And so somebody who poses a threat.
Now, threats to critical infrastructure come in two principal forms. One, they come with we refer to as natural events. Now, today's theme in a lot of preparedness information is there's no such thing as natural disasters. And that's absolutely true.
Like natural disasters don't cause human suffering. The fact that human nature or human beings have built their societies in a way that makes them exposed to risk from the natural hazard means the damage caused by an earthquake is not a natural disaster. The disaster is as we built a freaking city on top of a known fault. It fell down.
We turn around and rebuilt it on top of the same damn place. So the effects of that earthquake are not a natural disaster. That's a manmade disaster. But we think of it from the effects of a natural hazard being realized.
So the power poles can go down in an earthquake. The power poles can go down in a tornado. The power poles can go down in a hurricane. The power substations can be flooded with water.
You can see how natural hazards when they're realized can influence the ability of a power station or a power system to continue delivery. That is a natural set of hazards. Most strategies are available to overcome that. We have the intentional disruption of power services that is a net that is a threat that exists through the use of cyber attacks against critical infrastructure which are a big threat in the coming future.
They currently happen now. Most of them are not reported because they're interdicted at some point along the line and significant loss is prevented. So most public utilities will just keep their mouth shut and not publicized a cyber attack that happens against their infrastructure because that erodes public confidence in their ability to deal with it. So most of them will just report to the government agencies deal with law enforcement and carry on as per normal.
But we also have several intentional things that can be done. There were a number of attacks in western US in the early 2000s where a number of unknown shooters shot out a series of transformers at substations. Now these were very deliberate shots at very deliberate and specific elements within the substation and brought it down. They were while nothing came of that.
This was thought to be part of the initial planning for a future set of domestic terrorist attacks against the critical infrastructure. There was an attack in Quebec in Canada within the last couple of years where an individual flew a private plane with a filament line towing behind. Let that go and allow it to land across two major transformational or two major wires on each side of a tower and it shorted out the whole system for several days. Now that's open source information.
They don't public how the individual went about to do it. But I mean, you can look at the open source. That's exactly how the individual was able to short out the system for several days. So our power system is incredibly vulnerable by its very design and every not everybody, but there have been public agency reports at the US House of Representatives, the US Senate, the Canadian Senate on the exposure and the risk of the power supply within North America, yet exceptionally few public agencies have decided to provide the necessary investments to build resilience in the system.
So the point of all of that is to just say we rely on this incredibly modern power-enabled, wonderful society without considering on a daily basis that the delivery of that power is inherently fragile and exposed to an exceptional number of risks for which for the most part we have some redundancies, but there are a lot of flaws in the design of the system, and you and I both carry on each and every day, not really worried or not even thinking about when the power goes down. So that's why we here at Inside Mine, canoehead and Preparedness Labs incorporated believe that taking your individual emergency preparedness plan and founding it on your exposure to critical infrastructure will make you resilient. We'll go through all 10 of these sectors, give you some ideas and build this plan. When you look at 10 sub-sectors, you will evaluate each one of those independently.
You will ask a series of questions about how am I exposed to this, how much of my life is dependent on this, and that a really critical question that we ask all the time. What does my world look like when I no longer have access to this critical infrastructure? Remember here at Inside Mine, canoehead, we talk about disaster impact reduction. We're not worried about big-picture disaster risk reduction that you hear about which works exceptionally well at the macro level.
It does not work at the miso and the micro level. We look at disaster impact reduction, which means we're not really concerned why the power is no longer available. We're concerned that the power is no longer available, and we focus on the removal of our access to a piece of critical infrastructure. So you ask yourself that question, what does my world look like when I can no longer access power?
What does my world look like when I no longer have potable water coming out of my taps? What does my world look like when I have no longer have access to a modern transportation system? And then you build a plan from there for each of those individual sectors. When you collectively bring that together, you have a list of tasks to do, a list of skills to learn, and maybe potentially something that needs to be purchased.
And when you do those things, you've created a rock solid preparedness plan. The goal of focusing on critical infrastructure for building your preparedness plan allows us to go through that analysis where you will come out the other end of each one of these 10 setters of critical infrastructure with a small plan as to how to deal with a loss of access to that. And some of these critical infrastructure sectors, let me tell you, in the modern lifestyle, you're going to look at it and say, nothing significant to report. There's nothing here, and you just move on, and that's perfectly fine.
Some of them are going to be massive, and some of them are going to be insignificant. And each one of them is going to result in, I have to build a skill set, I have to learn how to do something. And therefore, you're generating your family's emergency preparedness program based upon your exposure to critical infrastructure, which is going to look somewhat and at times exceptionally different from your neighbors, which means it meets your needs. It's not a generic PDF downloadable document from the internet.
It's not something the public agency is spewing out, do these three things, and you're somehow magically going to be ready to deal with life disruptions. When you go through this deliberate plan, and yes, it does take a bit of time, but I think you're worth it. I think you're worth it. You think you're worth it as well.
In the end, you very well may build this incredible preparedness plan that acquires you to purchase absolutely nothing, which means it's free. You may have a few items at the other end that are distinctively related to your family that you have to acquire, but no preparedness plan starts with a generic list of here are the 15 things to stock up on. That is a recipe for failure. It is far too vague and inapplicable to you and your family.
So follow us here at Inside My Canoe Head. We're coming out with a critical infrastructure discussion. It's going to be fun. We're going to have a lot of good times at this.
And in the end, you're going to be creating a plan that helps you and your family through these incredibly disruptive times. Ladies and gentlemen, listen, the 2020s are going to be a really, really challenging decade. And it's like nothing we have experienced before in our lifetimes, and we need to get ready for it. And we're going to do it together.
So follow us on InsideMyCanoeHead.ca. All of our social media links are there. Go over and buy me a coffee and say thanks. And stick with us.
This is going to be a lot of friends. Follow us here. Take care of yourself and have yourself a wonderful emergency preparedness week.