Question:

Review and reflect on the Sectors, Assets, and Vulnerabilities Discussion Board. Based on your review and reflection of new learnings in this course, write at least 350-400 words on the following:

Peer Response:
"One of the Critical Infrastructures and Key Resources that is within my community that other's and myself rely on the most are the medical facilities in South Carolina. This includes Biotechnology and Life Science, as there are over approximately 600 manufacturing life science-related research, development, and service companies. They employ more than 13,000 people with in the state of South Carolina. In just Charleston alone there are roughly 35 medical device and pharmaceutical manufacturers and about 50 research laboratories and development companies. (Hicks, Cindy, 2015 April 10)

The reason I believe this to be one of the areas of CIKR that my community and I rely on the most is, well, everyone needs healthcare at someone, if not on a regular basis. We rely on healthcare and research facilities to be able to treat out illnesses whether it is a simple cold all the way up to fighting cancer, from getting a couple stitches to having brain surgery. Others also rely on these facilities to be able to work and earn a living. It not only affects the people who seek out care, but it is important to the ones who have chosen to work in this field. (Hicks, Cindy, 2015 April 10)

Within the medical and medical research field there is possible opportunity for vulnerabilities. Medical and medical research facilities often use computers, which could be targeted by hackers. It could be something that is that level of difficulty, or it could be something as simple as there being an unlocked door that could leave the facility vulnerable to the possibility of an attack. Another vulnerability that could fall upon these facilities would be natural disasters, for example, the recently Columbia, South Carolina experienced a flooding they had not experienced since 1969. With these floods the hospitals were threatened, luckily, with hard work from the fire department the hospitals were not required to evacuate. Although, had these plans not been implemented and the fire department not assisted the hospital within this area, people would have had to be evacuated. The question would have been, are the hospitals prepared, do they have a plan for evacuations? Other natural disasters could potentially take out the hospitals power, endangering people's lives. (Glover, Emery, 2015 October 4th) There is the potential for a variety of vulnerabilities for Hospitals and other medical facilities. With hospitals, they are also open to the public, so anyone could enter. That would leave it open to a possible active shooter incident as well.

The hazards I believe that would adversely impact the asset that I have described would be the event of there being an active shooter or if the power was to go out and their back up generators did not come on. The reason I say this is because with the risk of an active shooter, they could not only take out many civilians, but Doctors and nurses as well, and with the loss of personnel there would be less people, or no people to tend to the injured. Now with possible power outages, this could be highly catastrophic for the hospital, losing many of their patients that rely on the medical equipment to get better/survive.

In my personal opinion, I believe that out of the 16 Critical Infrastructures sectors vulnerability would be the food and agriculture sector. In the food and agriculture sector there are roughly 2.1 million farms, 935,000 restaurants, and over 200,000 registered food manufacturing, processing, and storage facilities. This particular sector accounts for about roughly one-fifth of the nation's economic activity. With this sector there is the vulnerability that we run out of water, go through doubts that endanger out crops and than there is no food for those restaurants, stores, or factories. (Homeland Security, n.d.) If something were to happen to our food it would be the beginning of catastrophic events.

Some mitigation efforts that I would suggest a technique that scientists are researching to better improve watering efforts for crops in the West that battle with droughts. It is an improvement on wasteful irrigation technologies. It use to be that farmers would just grab a handful of soil and feel it clump up to be able to tell the amount of water the land was getting. Now there is other information that is helping farmers to establish this information, data, sensors, satellites, and software that add piles of new data to help the farmers manage water on their farm. With many droughts that have affected different states, Texas, California, Colorado and etc., it has forced the farmers to realize that they needed something other then just the rain to rely on to water their crops. Some ways of doing this would be to dig deeper wells, or develop new sensors for irrigation devices that might help the farmers to use less precious groundwater. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FOA), agriculture accounts for approximately 69 percent of our global freshwater withdrawals. There is a system that has been developed that farmers could use for their crops which is called the O'Shaughnessy, which helps make center-pivot systems even more efficient. It is an on-site computer, which is the brain of the U.S. $3,000 system. This system processes data from the infrared sensors along with weather information. This system helps identify stress threshold for each crop and will map the area, creating a more precise watering schedule. Even with this idea t help with irrigation for crops and agriculture, farmers have about 5 percent each day to make irrigation decisions. The rest of their day is filled with choices about labor, management, tractor work, pest control, and etc. A lot of farmers are so bogged down during their day that they have pretty much abandoned the soil moisture system since they don't have the time to try and decipher the information. (Weiser, Matt, 3 August 2015)

References:

Hicks, Cindy (2015 April 10) Top 5 Industries in South Carolina: Which Parts of the Economy are Strongest? Retrieved from newsmax.com

Glover, Emery (2015 October 4th) Fire Dept. Delivering Water to Hospital to Prevent Evacuations. Retrieved from wistv.com

U.S. Department of Agriculture. (2007). An overview of the CARVER plus Shock method for food sector vulnerability assessments. Retrieved from http://www.fsis.usda.gov/PDF/Carver.pdf

Homeland Security (n.d.) Food and Agriculture Sector. Retrieved from dhs.gov

Weiser, Matt (3 August 2015) How We Can Use Less Water to Grow More Crops. Retrieved from civileats.com"

What have you learned from others'' responses?

What were the most compelling points from the interaction with your fellow students?

How did participating in this discussion help in your understanding of the Discussion Board task?

What approaches could have yielded additional valuable information in the students'' networking?

What is still unclear after the discussion with your classmates that needs to be clarified?