Analyzing cyber-physical threats to Pennsylvania dams through a lens of vulnerability

Abstract

Protecting critical infrastructure, such as water supply systems and dams, remains a top priority across multiple administrations in the United States. We study the ethical and environmental justice implications of potential disruptions to 29 dams across the State of Pennsylvania that serve as a water supply. Using census data, we investigate the communities surrounding these dams to look for relationships between community demographics and dam characteristics that may contribute to risk. We highlight the role of dam age, dam ownership, dam capacity, and dam downstream hazard potential in this analysis. Our results reveal associations between dam ownership, age, and capacity with the race of the population served, as well as an association between dam ownership and household income band. We conclude with a discussion on the increasing complexity of cyber-physical critical infrastructure and the need for future research which explicitly takes the populations served by this infrastructure into account.