Municipal critical infrastructure assurance plan places focus on services

The City of Hamilton and the Niagara Region are proposing a joint Critical Infrastructure Assurance Program (CIAP) that, if approved by city officials, would be the first of its kind in Canada, Richard Kinchlea, emergency management coordinator, City of Hamilton, told delegates of a seminar hosted by the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction.Typically CIAPs are run at the federal and provincial levels and consist of committees representing the different sectors of infrastructure assets, Kinchlea explained.The sector groups take an inventory of critical infrastructures and determine the interdependencies between them before ranking the vulnerabilities and developing mitigation plans, should a catastrophe occur, he said.Essentially the CIAP approach is a method of looking at problems with infrastructure and increasing communication across sectors to plug holes that may exist, he added.But no one is looking on a local level, he added, noting that federal and provincial priorities differ from municipal priorities. CIAPs tend to very concerned with physical assets, but our program will be more focused on service delivery, he explained.Instead of sector groups, the program will have service groups that include continuation of government, fuel and energy, food availability, potable water and sewage, public safety and security, transportation, communications, economic health, and emergency health care.