Can you help me understand this Environmental Science question?

Prior to beginning work on this assignment please read the Identifying, Understanding, and Analyzing Critical Infrastructure Interdependencies article and review the Critical Infrastructure Sectors (Links to an external site.) web page. Also, conduct preliminary research in the Ashford University Library by typing “critical infrastructure” into the search field and review the Research Starter on critical infrastructure. You will also need to research at least two additional credible, scholarly, peer-reviewed, and/or professional sources to include in your written report. For additional help, visit Ashford University’s MSCJ Resources (Links to an external site.) web page.

This week’s assignment focuses on critical infrastructure in a city near you. The reason emergency planners must be aware of critical infrastructure is that whenever a hazard affects critical infrastructure there is a magnified effect on the population. Generally, if one infrastructure is affected there is a cascading effect on other critical infrastructures. In this assignment, you will take the theoretical and demonstrate why it is important to address critical infrastructure in all emergency plans. Each of the cities below have multiple critical infrastructures. You will examine the critical infrastructure and graphically place it on a map and include it in your analysis of the critical infrastructure for your chosen city.

Choose a city with which you are familiar. The city must have an electrical grid that can be accessed through the U.S. Energy Information Administration: U.S. States (Links to an external site.) web page in addition to several other critical infrastructures represented, such as water, sewage, highway, or rail.

You will analyze at least three critical infrastructure sectors (electrical substations, rail lines, and highway transportation) in your chosen city that will allow you to see how these sectors fit together after consulting a critical infrastructure sector map. Then, based on your analysis, you will write a report evaluating the impact of a natural, technological, or terrorist initiated hazardous event in your chosen city.

Include the following elements in your paper:

For your maps,

• Create a map of critical infrastructure from a state view.
  • Access the S. Energy Information Administration: U.S. States (Links to an external site.) web page. On the map, select the state of your chosen city. Then use the zoom feature to identify the electrical sectors, rail lines, and freeways in your state. Ensure you have the energy infrastructure view activated (Note the “Layers/Legend” button in the upper left of your map). You may identify additional critical infrastructure or facilities on your map, such as hospitals, airports or port facilities, rail yards, etc. Once you get the view you seek, take a screen capture. (For assistance with screen capturing, you may wish to access the Take-A-Screenshot (Links to an external site.) web page. Save your screen capture image and insert it into the “Appendix” section of your report.
• Create a map of critical infrastructure from a city view.
  • Now go through the same process to develop a city view. Once you see all of the icons, take a screen capture of the layers/legend window. Insert this image onto a new page. Highlight critical facilities such as hospitals, schools, rail yards, port facilities, water treatment plants, etc. You may wish to access the provided Appendix sample for guidance.
• Save the images of the two maps and develop a legend for your map.

For your report, you will show the relationships between the infrastructure sectors in your chosen city. Your goal is to analyze one critical juncture where multiple infrastructures come together in your city, not all possibilities. Be sure to include all of the following elements:

• Identify the locations of intersections between critical infrastructures, single point failures, and the implications of these failures for critical infrastructure in your chosen city using your maps as a guide.
  • Place a circle on the map around these critical points.
• Determine the impact when we remove one of these critical junctures.
  • For instance, explain how you would reroute traffic. Assess the impact on travel time in such scenario. Or, if you were to have an accident in a rail yard that damaged an electrical substation, discuss the cascading effects of losing the infrastructure on other infrastructures.
• Assess the impact to human life should these single-point failures be unavailable due to a natural disaster or terrorist attack in such a densely populated city.
  • What consideration will you have to consider managing special needs populations?
• Analyze the first-, second-, and potentially third-order effect of a hazardous event that incorporates multiple critical infrastructures.
• Insert a picture of your map and of the legend into an “Appendix” section at the end of your report. Label the map with the name of your chosen city, and label the Layers/Legend image with “Legend.”

The Critical Infrastructure Analysis paper

• Must be a minimum of three double-spaced pages in length (not including title and references pages) in addition to the two maps described above, and formatted according to APA style as outlined in the Ashford Writing Center’s APA Style (Links to an external site.).
• Must include a separate title page with the following:
  • Title of paper
  • Student’s name
  • Course name and number
  • Instructor’s name
  • Date submitted