FEMA has just released its 2019 National Preparedness Report, which is intended to evaluate progress towards preparedness for the diverse range of challenges the U.S. faces, including terrorism and active shooter incidents, cyber attacks, and natural disasters. It presents findings regarding preparedness successes and challenges across FEMA’s five mission areas of prevention, protection, mitigation, response, and recovery. As part of its research into the status of some of these mission areas, it asked communities to assess their level of capability across the Community Lifelines.* In terms of two of these, response and recovery, FEMA found that overall communities are placing higher priority on the former than the latter. Water services were unique in this regard, with 60 percent of communities having indicated they had achieved most of their capabilities for both response and recovery. Understandably, in catastrophic, worst-case scenarios, the number of communities that indicated their water services had achieved most of their capabilities for responding to these incidents dropped to 37 percent. FEMA interprets this as communities needing outside assistance in these cases, and it notes that it can work with local officials to better understand long-term gaps and develop strategies to help meet needs during catastrophic incidents. The report includes other sections of potential interest, including a timeline of incidents that occurred in 2018, a review of federal grant programs, and a discussion of the adoption of the International Building Code in the U.S.

* The Community Lifelines framework has been discussed in previous WaterISAC publications, including the Security and Resilience Updates for October 31 (announcing the release of the fourth edition of the National Response Framework and the Emergency Support Function 14 Annex) and November 19 (announcing the release of the Community Lifelines Implementation Toolkit). Water and wastewater are included in the Food, Water, and Shelter lifeline.