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I wrote this letter to the editor in response to a one year investigation by the Oregonian into the 2015 Canyon Creek fire.  The letter was published on August 25th, 2016. Canyon Creek fire:  improving the way households and communities live with wildfires … Continued

This post first appeared in Energy Central on August 6th, 2016. In the recent Wall Street Journal article entitled “How America Could Go Dark” (July 14), Rebecca Smith argues that the electric power grid “is in danger of widespread blackouts lasting days, weeks … Continued

In the last post I provided a technical analysis of Concern’s 2016-2020 Strategic Plan.  To do this, I also poked around at the plan using NVivo, a programme I use for conducting qualitative analysis.  This post shows you some of the results and … Continued

  Strategic planning is a way for organisations to set priorities and guide actions toward a common goal.  Concern calls its most recent strategic plan an “evolutionary development rather than a radical shift in organisational direction”.  Is this actually the … Continued

Last week I presented my research at CISAC’s science seminar.  The presentation went well: attendance was good, I enjoyed talking about my stuff, and there were some nice discussions at the end. In the first half of the presentation, I … Continued

I recently had the opportunity to take a five day course on the NERC CIP standards, the federal government’s mandatory cybersecurity standards for the electric sector.  I wrote a review of the course, which you can read here.

This article appeared in the Department of Homeland Security’s Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team Industrial Control Systems Joint Working Group March 2016 Newsletter.   The ability to keep the lights on in the event of a cyber-incident is a major … Continued

Most of the people in my field seem to approach disasters from a pragmatic perspective. They know disasters can happen and try to reduce the probability or impact of them. None of the people I know act like the world is going to end: they … Continued

I just finished reading Bill McKibben’s Opinion piece on the Zika virus.   In it McKibben argues that the spread of the virus is the outcome of how we’re destroying the environment.  We’re releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which is … Continued

This post is the first in a series focused on using network analysis to analyse disaster risk. Disasters beget disasters. The 2010 Haiti earthquake for example, killed hundreds of thousands on its own, but it also led to a cholera … Continued