This publication, EPRO Handbook II, offers proposals to address both of these challenges. Section I of this executive summary briefly summarizes the findings and recommendations of EPRO II for strengthening the resilience of the water sector, which includes both water and wastewater systems, against Black Sky outages. Section II examines opportunities to strengthen the resilience of fuel supplies for power generation in Black Sky events, especially natural gas. Section III identifies future priorities for analysis, including those that reflect the ongoing evolution of cyber threats and other Black Sky hazards. 

A key finding of the EPRO I Handbook was that the ability of the water and wastewater systems to sustain emergency operations in a Black Sky event will offer a particularly valuable means to avert catastrophic threats to societal continuity and human life. Water pumps, lifts, water and wastewater treatment systems and other critical system components depend on electricity to function. If those components fail in a power outage across multiple cities and states in a wide area, long duration blackout, it will not be possible to provide emergency drinking water to millions of affected U.S. citizens. Failure of wastewater systems across multi-state regions would also result in contamination of available surface water, and likely become a primary factor in spreading disease. EPRO I emphasized that, “Nothing could pose such an immediate threat to public health and safety, or be more likely to prompt a massive, unplanned migration from a major urban area, than the loss of municipal water service for drinking and fighting fires.”

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