During disasters, disruptions rarely affect just one system. A power outage can shut down water pumps. Flooded roads can delay emergency response. Communications failures can slow down recovery. What begins as a localized incident can quickly cascade across multiple lifelines.

This reality underscores a critical shift in how we must think about infrastructure. Power, water, transportation, communications and buildings are not independent assets. They are community lifelines — deeply interconnected systems that sustain public safety, economic activity, healthcare and daily life.

To effectively protect communities, we must move beyond siloed infrastructure management and adopt a whole-systems approach — one that integrates reliability, resilience, and service continuity into planning and investment decisions.

Power, water, transportation, communications and buildings aren’t just technical systems. Since these lifelines keep communities functioning, the operators managing them face a host of complex challenges, including aging assets, frequent weather-related risks, regulatory scrutiny and budget constraints.

The good news is that there’s a growing shift in the approach to infrastructure management. Organizations are moving away from reactive repairs after failure to proactive planning that enables continuity through disruptions. The question is no longer whether to invest in resilience, but how to translate the value of prioritizing these investments for regulators, customers and communities.

Infrastructure planning has historically focused on individual assets or sectors. In practice, however, no lifeline operates alone.

• Power feeds water and wastewater systems
• Transportation enables emergency response and repair crews
• Communications connect first responders and public services
• Buildings house critical operations and healthcare facilities

When one system fails, the impacts rarely stay contained. The most severe losses from disaster often aren’t from the initial event, but from the chain reaction of failures that follow.

Reliability and resilience: Why both matter

Infrastructure performance has long been measured by reliability — keeping services running under normal conditions. Reliability investments focus on asset condition, routine maintenance and preventing predictable failures. They improve baseline performance and customer satisfaction.

But reliability alone is not enough.

A system can perform flawlessly every day and still fail catastrophically during extreme events. This is where resilience becomes essential.

Resilience determines how systems perform under stress — during wildfires, floods, extreme heat, cyber disruptions, or other high-impact events. It shapes whether outages last hours or weeks and whether communities can stabilize quickly.

The strongest infrastructure programs integrate both:

• Reliability keeps services running on good days
• Resilience means communities can function on their worst days

A reliable system without resilience can still collapse under stress. A resilient system without reliability creates unnecessary daily disruption. Communities need both.

Three practical ways to strengthen reliability and resilience:

1. Prioritize the service outcomes that matter most

Focus on protecting the services with the highest consequences if disrupted: public safety, health, economic continuity and essential operations.

This means identifying and reinforcing critical interdependencies such as:

• Electrical supply to water and wastewater pump stations
• Power and access routes to hospitals and emergency operations centers
• Transportation corridors that enable repair crews and supply chains

By prioritizing these crucial service nodes, decision makers invest where failure would cause the greatest harm. This reduces both everyday disruption and the risk of cascading failures during crises.

2. Translate resilience into measurable performance outcomes

Resilience can sound abstract. To gain support from regulators, governing boards and stakeholders, it must be framed in terms they already use. Instead of presenting a project as “resilience,” operators can describe concrete outcomes, such as:

• Reducing service restoration times from weeks to days
• Protecting power supply to critical facilities (e.g., hospitals or water utilities)
• Maintaining water quality during extreme weather
• Improving recovery time for essential services

When resilience is tied to measurable performance metrics — like outage duration, time to restore critical customers, or continuity of essential services — it becomes an accountability-driven investment, not a discretionary upgrade.

3. Embed resilience into routine capital planning

Resilience should not compete as a standalone initiative. It should be integrated into regular maintenance, modernization and lifecycle planning.

Practical examples include:

• Elevating or hardening equipment already scheduled for replacement
• Incorporating future hazard projections into standard design criteria
• Updating asset management strategies to reflect intensifying risks

Embedding resilience into planned upgrades reduces incremental costs and avoids creating isolated projects that are harder to fund or approve.

Build resilience before disaster strikes

Communities often coordinate effectively during emergencies. The larger opportunity lies before disasters by integrating whole-systems thinking into long-term planning and capital investment.

Formal frameworks and emergency management structures support cross-sector coordination. The next step is connecting those frameworks directly to investment decisions, so communities are not just responding better but investing smarter. Infrastructure is more than steel and concrete. It is the foundation of public safety, economic vitality and daily life. By adopting a whole-systems approach and investing in both reliability and resilience, communities can reduce cascading risk, accelerate recovery and strengthen the systems we rely on every day. This way we are not just coordinating during a crisis but investing ahead of time.

See Jordanna discuss this topic with other panelists at the Building for Tomorrow Conference:

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A study from the University of Washington found that predominately Black, Hispanic or Native American communities are 50 percent more vulnerable to disasters than communities overall. Native Americans have even greater levels of vulnerability due to socioeconomic barriers, making recovery especially difficult.¹ After Hurricane Ian, people with limited mobility and chronic health conditions were especially vulnerable, with nearly all the fatalities being people aged 50 or older. The devastating Maui wildfires of 2023 imposed unequal burdens on people of color and indigenous communities, many now facing long-term environmental and public health impacts.

To support the most vulnerable, disaster planners, emergency managers and recovery professionals must prioritize equitable strategies covering pre- and post-disaster response and recovery. These strategies shorten the disaster cycle for all survivors, reduce disproportionate impacts, promote community resilience, and enhance social justice. Failing to address equity has serious consequences and impacts on our most vulnerable communities.

A Federal priority

At the beginning of President Joe Biden’s term, racial equity was identified as a top Federal priority. In January 2021, the administration passed Executive Order 13985: “Advancing Racial Justice and Support for Underserved Communities through the Federal Government” and Executive Order 14091: “Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities”.  As a result, the Justice40 social Equity Initiative was created (Executive Order 14008). Justice40 is a whole-of-government effort to ensure that Federal agencies work with states and local communities to deliver at least 40 percent of the overall benefits from Federal investment in climate and clean energy to disadvantaged communities. More than 14 Federal Agencies are implementing and advancing the Justice40 Initiative from clean energy projects to floodwater protections.²

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is working to deliver better services to marginalized and vulnerable populations and has identified initiatives to address equity in its programs. FEMA’s equitable strategies include leveraging resources to meet the needs of the most vulnerable, consulting underserved communities in FEMA policy and program implementation, and providing training and tools to FEMA staff and partners to advance equitable programs. This approach can be a foundation or guiding principle for local emergency managers to design an equitable disaster response and recovery program.

Designing an equity framework for local emergency managers and disaster professionals

With FEMA’s approach as a guide, the following key steps can be used as a framework to build and implement an effective equitable approach to disaster response and recovery:

1. Gather data and analyze disparities: Tools including SoVI, SVI, EJ Screen, National Risk Index (NRI), and census data can help identify and map communities that will most likely need support before, during and after a hazardous event. During data collection, “ground truthing community” data may be required with key stakeholders, community-based organizations or faith-based organizations to make sure you have the right data, it is complete and accurate, and that you understand it. Using your data, identify inequalities in access to critical services including, housing, healthcare, education or employment and consider the intersectionality of such factors with race, gender, socio-economic or other factors that interact and exacerbate disparities.

2. Identify the desired intent, goals and objectives: Determine what you are working to achieve in an equitable response and recovery program and recognize this will be specific to your community. Reducing disparities allows access to resources and services, promoting greater trust in institutions responsible for providing them. Creating systemic change can help avoid or reduce disparities in post-event resources and support, fostering equitable distribution and appropriate differentiation of services.

3. Engage and empower stakeholders: To address a community’s unique needs, it is important to involve the community in policy and program decision-making, listen to their needs and work with them to develop a plan that meets those needs. Conduct listening sessions to collect information about the community’s specific experience and provide opportunities for stakeholders to take on appropriate leadership roles in emergency management programs. Involving community members throughout the disaster lifecycle will support an equitable emergency and disaster management approach.

4. Develop tactics and strategies: Design flexible tactics and strategies since community members have differing abilities to access recovery programs. For example, consider emergency management personnel and teams – are they multilingual? Do they have a shared vision for equity? Are you designing programs with a ‘survivor first’ mentality? Do your spaces and resources meet accessibility and functional mobility needs?

5. Evaluate and adjust: Once designed and implemented, it is important to continuously measure the success of your program and determine if you are meeting your program objectives. Evaluation metrics should help you understand access, use, and quality of services and time to recovery.

As you implement, continue to monitor and evaluate your strategies. Maintain transparency and consider feedback methods to understand program outputs such as participation rates and near- and mid-term outcomes.

At the local level, full integration of equitable principles into all phases of emergency and disaster management will help managers understand the unique needs of their communities and support the most impactful approach to response and recovery. Such a framework is essential to supporting vulnerable populations with disaster recovery because it ensures fairness, addresses disparities, reduces vulnerability, builds trust and resilience, promotes social justice, and provides a path for sustainable recovery.

¹ https://www.washington.edu/news/2018/11/02/racial-ethnic-minorities-face-greater-vulnerability-to-wildfires/

² https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Justice40-Initiative-Covered-Programs-List_v2.0_11.23_FINAL.pdf

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Jordanna Rubin has 25 years of experience implementing resilient disaster recovery programs to improve social outcomes and support vulnerable and underserved communities.

Before joining ArchTam, she served as the director of resilience and sustainability for APTIM, environmental manager for the City of Miami Beach, assistant director for the Columbia University Energy Policy Center, and as an analyst for NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Jordanna helped to relocate an indigenous community out of a high-risk zone in southern Louisiana, developed a COVID-19 food security program for vulnerable populations in Southern California and implemented residential resilience programs. She has also managed disaster recovery teams in California, New York, Florida, Texas and Guam, implementing programs that helped communities recover from disasters and enriched their futures.

Tell us about what inspired you to join the industry 

In 1992, Hurricane Andrew, a Category 5 hurricane, hit the southeast coast of Florida. Having never experienced a hurricane, my family and I collected towels, buckets and some duct tape in case a window broke. As the wind and rain picked up, I rushed from my room and huddled under the kitchen table. I grabbed my cat and a few prized possessions – to which my parents looked at me with a confused look. We listened together to the noise that can only be described as a freight train roaring through the house and we waited, holding our breath until it was over.  

Our family was beyond lucky that day because at the last minute, the Hurricane “wobbled” and turned south. But many of our friends and family further south were not as lucky. We heard stories of friends losing their homes, friends huddled in their cars when the roof tore off, schools destroyed and infrastructure damaged. 

Looking back on that day, I remember the fear and helplessness we felt before mother nature. As I journeyed on my career path, I kept that memory in my mind as I worked not only to help survivors of other human-made or natural disasters but also to mitigate future impacts and build more resilient communities. 

What is your favorite ArchTam project that you’ve worked on and why? 

My favorite projects tend to be those where we bring together a multi-disciplinary team to work with a client. Our varying backgrounds and experiences shine a light on solutions that only a diverse team can create.  

Currently, we are supporting the Utah Department of Emergency Management to enhance their disaster mitigation programs. We have brought together a team of planners, mitigation experts and programmers to deliver a digital planning tool for the state. 

Our team started by analyzing available hazard mitigation plans at both the state and local levels to understand key mitigation objectives across the state.  We are currently reviewing available social vulnerability tools to compare the various indicators used to identify and support vulnerable populations in Utah. The final objective of this project will be to build the state their own tailored social vulnerability tool and incorporate community-tailored mitigation strategies within their mitigation portfolio.   

Tell us a story of how your work positively impacted the community.  

In 2021, ArchTam supported the establishment of an emergency intake site for unaccompanied children who had come across the U.S. border. ArchTam provided clothing, toiletries, and medical and other services, to support more than 2,500 children. This included rapidly mobilizing architects, planners, engineers and case managers to design and create a safe and enriching environment for the children. I spent the first couple of months of the program supporting an amazing team that came together for one purpose: to support the children.  

People are at the heart of the work we do in disaster response and recovery. It’s all about helping people get their lives back. The most meaningful moment of this project was when I met the cutest little boy, dressed in the soccer jersey we supplied. He gave me the biggest smile, waved at me and in his best broken English wished me a “good morning and to have a happy day”! And that makes it all worthwhile.  

Share a piece of career advice 

You don’t always need to have all the answers and you don’t have to be the smartest person in the room. You just need to be skilled in knowing how to find the right answer when you need it.

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