Avoiding a water crisis: how Capetown avoided ‘Day Zero’

Cape Town, South Africa has now weathered a full year past its so-called “Day Zero,” the day when the municipal water supply for this major city was estimated to run out. Most of Cape Town relies on dams to supply the city with water. Three years of inadequate rainfall caused dam levels to fall to 25% of capacity by late January 2018, and water was expected to drop to the critical 13.5% of capacity by April 12, 2018. At that critical point, water would only be supplied to critical services such as hospitals, and municipal taps would be shut off. Residents would be forced to line up for daily water rations of 25 liters per person at one of 200 collection points. Day Zero was defined as the point at which stricter regulations would begin because defining Day Zero at 0% capacity would only prompt action from residents when it was too late.

Battered by Harvey, Houston braces for even more flooding

Officials released more water from Houston-area reservoirs overwhelmed by Harvey early Monday in a move aimed at protecting the city's downtown from devastating floods but that could still endanger thousands of homes, even as the nation's fourth-largest city braced for more rain. Harvey, which made landfall late Friday as a Category 4 hurricane and has lingered dropping heavy rain as a tropical storm, sent devastating floods pouring into Houston on Sunday. The rising water chased thousands of people to rooftops or higher ground and overwhelmed rescuers who could not keep up with the constant calls for help.

Blackout hits northern Puerto Rico following fire, explosion

An explosion and fire at an electric substation threw much of northern Puerto Rico into darkness late Sunday in a setback for the U.S. territory's efforts to fully restore power more than five months after Hurricane Maria started the longest blackout in U.S. history. The island's Electric Power Authority said several municipalities were without power, including parts of the capital, San Juan, but they were optimistic it could be restored within a day as they worked to repair a substation that controls voltage. The blast illustrated the challenges of restoring a power grid that was already crumbling before it was devastated by the Category 4 hurricane. In many cases, power workers are repairing equipment that should have long been replaced but remained online due to the power authority's yearslong financial crisis. PREPA is worth roughly $4 billion, carries $9 billion in debt and has long been criticized for political patronage and inefficiency. It also struggled with frequent blackouts, including an island-wide outage in September 2016. It was not immediately known what caused Sunday's fire, which was quickly extinguished. Officials said the explosion knocked two other substations offline and caused a total loss of 400 megawatts worth of generation.

Book Interview | Critical Infrastructures Resilience: Policy and Engineering Principles

"This book is the result of having taught a graduate course comprising public policy and engineering students at Northeastern University, Boston, for the past 4 years," co-author Bahtia told editor-in-chief Zoran Obradovic. "The genesis of this textbook came out of teaching the course, and the final contents have evolved significantly given the pace of new developments within this field. Throughout these years, we have found no good textbook that covers the engineering and policy aspects of critical infrastructures resilience in comprehensive yet principled way."