8 Quotes by Paula Scalingi

You are basically going to have a paralyzed region.

The Puget Sound region is at the forefront of the nation when it comes to looking at the needs.

Communications were one of the first things to go. What was discovered is that if you have a prolonged power outage that goes on for several hours, your infrastructure starts to degrade. Power backup only lasts so long.

The terrorists in the September 11 event had the patience to plan (and) the foresight and the understanding of the infrastructure that could be used to simultaneously or sequentially disrupt the infrastructure electronically and that could cause a major regional failure in this country. There's no question that that's doable.

A large majority of the focus up until September 11 has been on the information security side of the equation, and there has been a limited focus on infrastructures, particularly physical disruptions and the interdependencies that proved so important during the September 11 attacks.

This is the situation in which there may be a physical attack impacting one or more infrastructures and a simultaneous or subsequent cyberattack, or other type of disruption impacting a key infrastructure. Such multiple contingency events could cause a domino effect throughout an entire region, incapacitating interdependent infrastructures and exacerbating attempts to rapidly respond and reconstitute services.

The infrastructure system providers didn't understand the interdependencies among their systems. If you talk to state and local government and local utilities, they'll tell you they have great response plans. The problem is, they write them in isolation.

This is a huge 'ah ha' moment, were an awful lot of people for the first time looking at that scenario came to grips with good heavens.