And as some security professionals are pointing out, those weaknesses are increasingly connected to the Internet, leaving large parts of America's critical infrastructure exposed to anyone with moderate information technology training and a laptop.
In particular, the phenomenon of risk aversion may be a significant factor in decisions for civil infrastructure exposed to low-probability events with severe consequences, such as earthquakes, hurricanes or floods.
Risk mitigation decisions for civil infrastructure exposed to rare natural and manmade hazards are often impacted by risk aversion, a behavioral phenomenon in which the decision maker's perception and judgment of risk are systematically distorted, resulting in decisions that might be viewed as excessively conservative when compared to those from a traditional minimum expected cost analysis.
The continuing negative impact of lead remains in soil, homes and infrastructure exposed to lead in the past, before we were able to ban it from products.
Acetobacter spp. are present in a variety of environments and have been reported to contaminate ethanolic environments such as fuel-grade ethanol fermentations (Heist 2009) and wines (Du Toit and Pretorius 2002; Bartowsky and Henschke 2008); thus, the presence of these microbes in fuel industry infrastructure exposed to ethanol and water is likely.
The Yamal peninsula is increasingly exposed to a network of developing infrastructure (Kumpula et al. 2012).
Life-cycle performance, safety, reliability and risk are emergent issues for civil infrastructure systems exposed to recurring natural and man-made disasters.
Similar situations are encountered on the ground where relatively few people and non-critical infrastructures are exposed to risk by a reawakening volcano.
But many other bridges in the area were thought to be in an even worse condition, so the work was not prioritised, and the true state of the bridge became apparent only when it failed, with tragic results.Such catastrophes are rare, but the Mississippi River Bridge highlights a wider problem: old infrastructure is often exposed to much greater loads than it was originally designed for.
In the next decades, buildings and infrastructure will be exposed to significantly different climatic strains than they are today.
