Instead of implying that U.S. communities can always count on being rescued from any disaster in four days – requiring three days of food and water to stay comfortable – the implication now is that local communities might not always receive assistance for a much longer period of time. The source of this change is the new Space Weather Strategy and Action Plan, which were released on 29 October 2015 and explained again at an April 2016 Space Weather Workshop.
The NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center hosted its annual Space Weather Workshop in Broomfield, Colorado, the week of 27 April 2016. This year was special because of the intimate involvement of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, which provided keynote addresses and the 2015 promulgation of the National Space Weather Strategy and Action Plan.
Of special interest to the emergency management community is the second of six goals of the strategy that contain the following four elements:
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“Complete an all-hazards power outage response and recovery plan: for extreme space weather events and the long-term loss of electric power and cascading effects on other critical infrastructure sectors;
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Other low-frequency, high-impact events are also capable of causing long-term power outages on a regional or national scale.
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The plan must include the Whole Community and enable the prioritization of core capabilities.
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Develop and conduct exercises to improve and test Federal, State, regional, local and industry-related space weather response and recovery plans: Exercising plans and capturing lessons learned enables ongoing improvement in event response and recovery capabilities.”
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