ABSTRACT
Being a successful security manager involves more than just understanding your facility’s security issues. It is realizing how the larger community around you affects your facility and the role your facility plays in the overall community’s security and functionality. Everything in the community is interdependent. For example, a factory is dependent on the power grid, water system, and transportation infrastructure of the surrounding community. If one or more of these sectors are destroyed or disrupted, the factory will either stop operations or have them severely impacted. Community risk assessment is a critical part of an overall security/mitigation plan for any security manager. Community risk assessments are composed of several variables, but they can be summed up into five main areas: identifying hazards, identifying critical infrastructure, realizing vulnerabilities to hazards/corrective actions, quantifying risk, and developing a community vulnerability assessment team. As you go through this chapter, you will examine in detail the five main areas of a successful community vulnerability assessment program and how to implement the plan to your facility. You also will gain an understanding of the interdependencies of the local community and how various threats can expose fragile areas of the system.
