Guiding Principles for the Nation's Critical Infrastructure

After months of intense analysis of the New Orleans disaster, the ASCE Hurricane Katrina External Review Panel urged that 'organizations responsible for critical life-safety facilities be organized and operated to enable, not to inhibit, a focus on safety and that engineers continually evaluate the appropriateness of design criteria, always considering how the performance of individual components affects the overall performance of a system.

The ASCE Board of Direction established the Critical Infrastructure Guidance Task Committee to develop this book to ensure quality in critical infrastructure systems that may involve multiple constituents, multiple jurisdictions, and complex financing.

The Critical Infrastructure Guidance Task Committee formulated the guiding principles that are the focus of this document.

Although this document uses critical infrastructure to illustrate the importance of the guiding principles, they apply to all infrastructure systems.