A community’s resilience to disaster primarily depends on the resilience of its critical facilities and lifelines. The failure of this infrastructure is typically the prime factor behind injury, the loss of human life, and the disruption of economic activities during an extreme event. Thus, critical facilities and lifelines provide a focal point through which UB faculty can collaborate to address the mitigation of and response to extreme events.

Focusing on the impact of disasters on both physical and social systems, with an emphasis on risk and vulnerability assessment, methodologies to prioritize the allocation of limited resources, improved methods of incident management and facility protection planning, and comprehensive diagnostic tools for existing facilities.

Research in this area looks closely at the various logistics surrounding the response to natural and manmade disasters. This includes the the interface between technology and people in the face of disaster, gathering and analyzing data supporting current disaster response protocols, and development of practical approaches to mitigation.The end result is the development of approaches to disaster that can actually be implemented and will be effective.