Pennsylvania PUC conducts “Operation Blue Flame” exercise

In honor of National Critical Infrastructure Security and Resilience Month, the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission (PUC) is recognizing the need for collaborative planning to ensure public safety.

“Our critical utility systems face a variety of challenges – from severe weather and other natural disasters to physical and cyber threats,” PUC Chair Gladys Brown Dutrieuille, who also chairs the Committee on Critical Infrastructure for the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC), said. “We are committed to working closely with our regulated utilities, government agencies, and other stakeholders to help strengthen the security and resilience of our infrastructure.”

To that end, the PUC recently joined with the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency to host a second annual “Operation Blue Flame” exercise. The Blue Flame exercise simulated the disruption of natural gas distribution across a large geographic area during extremely cold weather. It was designed to encourage stakeholders to learn about infrastructure dependencies, promote interagency and multi-level collaboration, and review emergency and business continuity plans to align with evolving threats.

The exercise sought to find out how emergency response teams, state agencies, and other organizations would deal with the consequences of an outage. It sought to simulate how they would deal with the mass sheltering and feeding of residents and animals, law enforcement and security concerns, economic issues, business continuity impacts, resource coordination at the state and local levels, and other related matters.

“Exercises like Blue Flame helps us in planning for long-duration power interruptions caused by high-impact, low-probability events – which require new approaches to power system resilience above and beyond previous hardening efforts,” Brown Dutrieuille said.

Over the past several years, the PUC has coordinated several statewide exercises and forums. It also participated in national and international discussions about cyber or natural “Black Sky” threats – incidents that have the potential to disrupt electricity and other critical systems, such as natural gas, water, wastewater treatment, telecommunications, and transportation.

“Regardless of the threat, the Commission continues to promote efforts to strengthen the cyber and physical security of key systems and critical facilities – as well as efforts to improve the resilience of these systems, so that services can be restored more quickly in the event of a disaster or attack,” Brown Dutrieuille said.