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Hurricane Sandy motivated the federal government to examine how it might improve community and infrastructure resilience so that communities are better prepared for existing and future threats, including those exacerbated by climate change. To ensure that federal agencies incorporate key principles of resilience into their formulation, evaluation, and prioritization of infrastructure investments related to Sandy rebuilding, the Presidential Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force developed Infrastructure Resilience Guidelines in 2013. In 2014, the RAND Corporation conducted an initial assessment of federal agencies’ implementation of these guidelines.

This report covers how the guidelines have been implemented, lessons learned from implementing them, and how they can be applied to non-recovery environments.

The assessment found that the resilience guidelines reflect worthy resilience principals, but some challenges need to be addressed, such as finding the right balance between providing guidance that is broad enough to be relevant to all agencies and missions but that is also specific enough to allow agencies to determine when a guideline has been met, and finding appropriate and sufficient resources and expertise to implement the guidelines. Additionally, a more comprehensive considerations of how to improve national resilience may be needed.

The Hurricane Sandy Task Force’s Infrastructure Resilience Guidelines: An Initial Assessment of Implementation by Federal Agencies