Addressing Utility Fragility in the Face of Escalating Climate Disasters

Climate-related disasters are becoming more frequent. In 2024, there were 27 weather and climate disasters that caused at least $1 billion in damage, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Centers for Environmental Information.

Some disasters have revealed fragility in utility infrastructure that also presents security issues that can quickly escalate. Recent examples include:

• The 2025 Texas Hill Country flooding, which claimed more than 100 lives.
• The 2025 Los Angeles urban conflagration that destroyed over 15,000 structures.
• Hurricane Helene’s winds and flooding in the Southeast, which claimed more than 200 lives in 2024.
• The 2023 wildfire in Lahaina, Hawaii, that resulted in more than 100 fatalities.

Utility Fragility Must Be Addressed
Every disaster is unique, yet infrastructure limitations are common to all of them, including utility fragility. This article focuses on three critical but often overlooked elements: transportation, utilities and telecommunication, or what I refer to as TUT infrastructure.

For decades, civil engineers have designed infrastructure based on community-adopted standards. Like much of local government, these codes are a patchwork of rules often influenced by land developers and the private sector, intending to provide the least expensive, most sensible level of infrastructure for the foreseeable future.

Lately it has become apparent that our infrastructure lacks critical “real resiliency,” meaning it cannot support the increasingly destructive nature of disasters. More importantly, public safety officials sometimes ask infrastructure experts and civil engineers to get involved when it is already too late. Firefighters engage fires when hydrants run dry, evacuations are chaotic and deadly, or – as in Texas, Hawaii and the Southeast – emergency officials try desperately to reach people when fragile telecommunication lines are destroyed in the earliest phases of a disaster.

These realities demand a hard reboot. We must explore cross-functional relationships and responsibilities across security, public safety and public works officials, with a goal of genuinely changing the way we plan for natural disasters.

What Should Be Done?
Fatalities increase when TUT infrastructure fails. For example, the 2023 Lahaina fire resulted in the most fatalities from a U.S. wildfire in more than a century. Five years earlier, the Camp Fire ravaged Paradise, California.

Given the increasing occurrence of such events, public safety officials must collaborate more closely with public works professionals who manage critical infrastructure. They must support infrastructure that is slightly more expensive but truly resilient.

Urban Conflagrations and Water Pressure
When a house is engulfed in fire, nearly every pipe inside can melt or burn, releasing pressurized water. A typical house with a 1-inch water line can flow about 50 gallons per minute, while a typical attack fire hose will flow about 160 gallons per minute.

Many municipal water tanks hold about 1 million gallons. If there is a major suburban fire with 300 homes bleeding water and firefighters with attack hoses, that tank will drain in about an hour. This preventable problem was reported in a 2022 Denver-area fire that consumed about 1,000 homes. Consider that the 2025 California fires consumed more than 15,000 structures.

Water pressure issues are easily controllable with off-the-shelf remote-control valves and dashboard control systems, yet virtually none of these have been installed. Often this is because municipal water agencies bear no firefighting responsibilities.

Failures Cause Confusion
Commercial telecommunication providers install fiber-optic and telephone lines in the least expensive but often the most vulnerable ways, most commonly through aerial deployment.

These lines often hang among tree branches, which can ignite or break in storms. During a fire, wooden poles – coated with highly flammable preservatives – can also ignite and burn instantly. In fact, they can burn so quickly that fire crews sometimes call them Roman candles because they are nearly impossible to extinguish.

These wooden poles are crucial to telecommunication and electric service. If one pole burns and collapses, services for an entire community could be shut off.

During floods, critical lines often cross rivers only 15 to 20 feet above water, making them highly vulnerable. While FEMA has mapped 100-year flood elevations, few regulations require coordination with telecommunication or electric utility installations.

Reports have indicated that more than 75% of all cell sites were out of service after Hurricane Helene hit western North Carolina in 2024. Only seven outages were due to physical damage; about half occurred because transport lines failed, sometimes due to a single pole or branch.

What can be done? Along with moving more lines underground, inexpensive fireproof sleeves can be wrapped around utility poles to prevent them from becoming Roman candles during fire events.

Other Approaches
Lessons learned from previous disasters demonstrate the need for a resiliency scorecard with more than 100 steps local officials can take. Many involve TUT infrastructure and are not cost prohibitive. Examples include remote shutoff valves that preserve water for hydrants; low-cost wayfinding sign networks with resilient telecommunication backbones, which can save lives during chaotic evacuations; and continuity plans to ensure communities can operate virtually when necessary.

Team Efforts Create Better Disaster Response
It’s time for all infrastructure stakeholders, including security teams, to sit together at the same table and build out the cross-functional steps that must be taken to create truly resilient infrastructure.

Most importantly, all levels of government should conduct a critical infrastructure vulnerability assessment, examining their total public infrastructure – both publicly and privately owned – and adopting a big-picture approach to resiliency. Proactive public officials and legislators must do all they can regardless of ownership, refocusing on protecting critical TUT infrastructure and ultimately human lives.

About the Author: David Zelenok, P.E., is the founder and CEO of ZK Engineers LLC.