City of Somerville (fiscal agent for MVP Grant) with Boston, Chelsea, Everett, Revere, Winthrop, and the Mystic River Watershed Association Several Communities, MA

Resilient Mystic Collaborative Regional Climate Assessment

BSC Group served as a subconsultant to Arup to design a critical infrastructure tabletop exercise for a regional climate assessment involving six municipalities, the local watershed association, and more than a dozen critical infrastructure and community-based organizations. The project aims to identify critical infrastructure vulnerabilities to climate change and will prioritize measures to storm-harden regional infrastructure through the lens of community resilience and equity. The regional project is taking an innovative approach by conducting separate infrastructure and social vulnerability assessments then using GIS and other analysis to identify overlap.

BSC is responsible for leading the design of a virtual, multi-day severe weather exercise simulating the impacts of a 100-year storm using 2050 climate projections. The exercise will involve over 20 organizations and identify critical interdependencies and potential cascading failures of regional infrastructure. With key staff possessing deep expertise in emergency management and business continuity, BSC is incorporating both physical and operational vulnerabilities into the modeled storm to produce a realistic and challenging exercise that will achieve the project’s objectives. Data collected through the exercise will inform both the critical infrastructure and social vulnerability assessments.