ASME Completes RAMCAP Guidelines for Two New Sectors
October 11, 2007 // Published as a news service by IHS
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The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Innovative Technologies Institute (ASME-ITI) announced the completion of two new Sector-Specific Guidance (SSG) documents under a contract with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
The documents apply ASME-ITI risk analysis methodology - Risk Analysis and Management for Critical Asset Protection (RAMCAP) - to water and wastewater utilities, and to conventional dams and navigation locks.
Created and developed by ASME-ITI and adopted by DHS, RAMCAP is a framework for analyzing and managing the risks associated with terrorist attacks against critical infrastructures.
The purpose of RAMCAP is to provide essential information to government decision-makers about consequences and vulnerabilities in the private sector, which owns 85% of the nation's critical infrastructure.
Experts said RAMCAP is unique in that it facilitates the comparison of risks within a sector and across multiple sectors by employing a common terminology and standardized measurement metrics.
The RAMCAP methodology is a seven-step process for asset analysis - asset characterization, threat characterization, consequence analysis, vulnerability analysis, threat assessment, risk assessment and risk management.
The process is then tailored to specific aspects of various sectors of the critical infrastructure in the SSG documents. The SSGs enable companies and utilities to identify and report on the vulnerabilities and potential consequences of terrorism by providing guidance on how to complete both preliminary and in-depth assessments.
The SSG for the water sector was completed in cooperation with DHS, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and many water sector security partners. For the first time under the RAMCAP program, existing risk tools in the sector were modified to be RAMCAP-consistent.
Experts said the modified tools will better enable drinking and wastewater utilities to conduct risk analyses of their systems, including the analysis of natural hazards. The SSG for the dams sector was completed in cooperation with DHS, the Army Corps of Engineers and the owners/operators of dams across the nation.
"We have now completed RAMCAP guidance for seven industry sectors and we believe that a comparative risk framework continues to be needed for decision-makers to properly allocate finite resources for risk reduction," said Reese Meisinger, president and CEO of ASME-ITI. "We continue to seek new public and private sector partners that will join our effort to protect the nation’s critical infrastructure."
Source: American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).
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