Support for Blue Cascades II provided by:
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Blue Cascades II
Overview
Blue Cascades II is a collaborative initiative brought forth by the Pacific Northwest Economic Region (PNWER) in cooperation with the King County Office of Emergency Management (Region 6, Washington Homeland Security District), Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA region X), Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Canada (PSEPC), and the Washington State Military Department, on September 8, 2004 in Seattle, Washington. It is the follow-up to the successful first Blue Cascades held in Welches, Oregon in 2002.
Exercise Focus
Blue Cascades II was designed to build upon the key findings from Blue Cascades I by tracking improvements, and addressing new concerns. This tabletop exercise helped stakeholders continue to assess the current state of their understanding and preparedness, particularly from the perspective of infrastructure interdependencies and compare results to those of the previous exercise. One of the key findings from Blue Cascades I demonstrated the need for contingency plans in the event of the loss or damage to electronic systems. As a result, Blue Cascades II focused on the overwhelming dependency of Information Technology (IT) related resources required to communicate, continue business operations and execute recovery plans. It also examined specific cyber security vulnerabilities that could impact operational systems such as SCADA and other electronic processes. This enabled the public and private sectors to better understand IT shortfalls that could have potentially devastating consequences.
The overall exercise findings will help participants identify the needs, priorities, and resource requirements for incorporation into an Action Plan to assist the eight jurisdictions within PNWER to become a disaster-resistant/resilient region. This information, along with the key lessons learned, will help sensitize public and private sector decision makers to infrastructure security issues and provide the impetus to prioritize and implement activities that will ensure the reliability and security of critical infrastructure.
Purpose
The purpose of Blue Cascades II was to build upon the lessons learned from the first Blue Cascades and continue to build a strategy to develop a "disaster resistant" region. Blue Cascades II served as a platform for holding future interdependency exercises in other locations within the PNWER region by contributing to, and validating implementation of a comprehensive preparedness approach.
Objectives
- Raise awareness of infrastructure interdependency issues with a particular focus on cyber-security.
- Examine cyber security vulnerabilities that could impact operations, business practices, response and recovery.
- Identify ways to make infrastructure providers and organizations aware of the extent and duration of disruptions.
- Identify and focus attention on the most important vulnerabilities that result from infrastructure interdependencies and their impacts.
- Promote a mutual understanding of interdependent infrastructure service restoration priorities, challenge and time lines.
- Identify and highlight roles, responsibilities and authorities (local, county, state, federal) for responding to and recovering from infrastructure attacks and disruption.
- Determine ways to build upon private/public sector cooperation and information sharing in developing and implementing infrastructure protection, mitigation, response and recovery options.
- Looking beyond the greater Puget Sound Region at interdependencies of critical infrastructures, identify challenges and abilities to cooperatively prepare for and deal with attacks and disruptions.
- Identify interdependency shortfalls related shortfalls
- Produce an After Action Plan of activities to address these identified shortfalls.
- Examine how our regional response and recovery activities interface with the new national documents National Incident Management Systems (NIMS) and National Response Plan (NRP).
- Develop a mutual understanding of the roles, responsibilities and needs of the law enforcement, intelligence and first responder communities in relation to the needs of private sector and critical infrastructure providers.
- Lay foundation for a more focused exercise on critical infrastructures interdependencies intended to examine response and short-term recovery.
Intent
Blue Cascades II allowed participants (players) to discuss the impacts of attacks and disruptions on each represented infrastructure. This setting allowed participants to become familiar with other infrastructures and the potential for cascading effects as a result of interdependencies.
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