This fact has made recovery and preparation for the next disaster all the more difficult.

The critical infrastructures in the world, and in the U.S. In particular, have become increasingly dependent on one another. Disasters that singly affect one critical infrastructure will have cascading negative effects for all of the other interdependent infrastructures. In those cases in which energy infrastructures are damaged from the outset, the impacts on the rest of the network of interdependent systems and infrastructures are especially dramatic. Without access to energy, recovery after any disaster is difficult and since all infrastructures depend on energy inputs in one form or another, the collapse of an energy infrastructure can be especially devastating. Nonetheless, the important lesson to retain from these disasters discussed above is that all of our existing critical infrastructures are increasingly dependent on each other to operate and, as a result, increasingly susceptible to collapse and...
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