Continuity of all critical life-safety services

Summary

Recent events have highlighted the extreme vulnerabilities and interdependencies of core life-safety infrastructure and utilities (e.g. energy, water and sanitation) and the need for their combined secure, continuous operation during crisis. Advance planning for large-scale, high-impact events is critical to ensuring that these incidents do not overwhelm either immediate response capabilities or the long-term well-being of highly vulnerable segments of Boulder’s community. The city will design and implement a community wide network of resilience centers that ensures continuity of critical community services, protection for high-risk populations and infrastructure, and an enhanced capacity to provide and maintain basic services at a neighborhood scale, and develop the capacity to ‘island’ critical infrastructure provision without jeopardizing core life-safety functions. These resilience centers will contain small-scale or compartmentalized infrastructure systems that can operate independent of the larger utility system to sustain a sheltering facility during wide-scale disruption.