Most Americans will never see or interact with the massive industries and infrastructure that keep the country running. Yet, when something goes wrong with them, it has a domino effect on everyone. According to data from the World Economic Forum, disruptions to critical infrastructure are a serious issue today. These disruptions arise from multiple sources.
For instance, climate stress has started to affect critical infrastructure like water supply, transport networks, and energy grids. Likewise, systemic fragility is also a problem, as failure in one sector can have a domino effect on others as well.
This is why it’s so important that industries are always monitoring and aware of key operational risks. In this article, we’ll look at three unique disruptions that have massive consequences for large-scale industrial facilities.
#1. Infrastructure Disruption From Climate Stress
It may sound odd to pair infrastructure disruption and climate stress together, but there’s a real reason for this. In a conventional sense, large-scale industrial facilities are carefully designed. At least in America, the extensive regulations mean that safety is of paramount importance.
In many facilities, even the failsafes have failsafes. If disruption occurs, it either has to be deliberate or an act of God. Unfortunately, humans have made the latter a more common issue than it used to be. While industrial facilities can withstand a lot, they certainly aren’t able to deal with the consequences of natural disasters.
No failsafe is going to help when wildfires and floods come knocking at the door. Currently, this is one of the few disruptions that we don’t have a straightforward solution to. The most that we can do right now is build facilities in low-risk areas. However, in some situations, that’s not an option, and climate-related disruptions are unavoidable.
#2. Environmental Compliance and Regulatory Exposure
Another common, yet serious, disruptive factor comes in the form of compliance-related problems. Essentially, when a facility operates on a massive scale, the responsibility to limit environmental impact is significant. This is why many facilities invest so much in proper stormwater management industrial solutions.
As NDS notes, compliance and operation disruptions can arise from something as simple as excess runoff on an industrial site. In many cases, such violations can mean serious fines, especially if discharge goes into waterbodies.
For instance, discharge of oil or hazardous substances can fall into either negligent or knowing violations. The former draws fines of up to $25,000 per day or up to $50,000 for subsequent convictions. Meanwhile, knowing violations doubles these fines to $50,000 and $100,000 per day, respectively. Even failure to report such discharges can draw massive penalties.
#3. Data Breaches and Cybersecurity Issues
On a more technological front, hackers and cyberattacks are one of the most problematic disruptions that industries face. IBM points out that critical infrastructure, like water treatment facilities, is vulnerable to cybersecurity threats. What’s more, each attack comes at a significant loss. For instance, the average cost of a data breach in the industrial sector was $5.56 million in 2024. This was an 18% increase compared to 2023.
To make matters worse, cyberattacks often come from outside the country. Thus, there aren’t a lot of countermeasures you can employ. Big infrastructure facilities can only rely on having superior cybersecurity protocols to prevent attacks in the first place.
This is why, with some facilities, operations are set up completely off the grid. They use an intranet system that makes external attacks far more difficult. That said, vulnerabilities still exist if a worker is compromised and brings in malware knowingly or unknowingly.
Things get even more complicated when you remember that not all cyberattacks are sabotage operations. Some attacks will sit in the background and keep collecting and transmitting sensitive industry data to the hacking party.
This information is often sold on the dark web or to competitors. The financial hit that such a breach creates is often worth billions of dollars, and in many cases, it causes shutdown or bankruptcy. The result is a significant impact on critical infrastructure, a theme that has been explored thoroughly in research.
All things considered, industrial facilities are surprisingly more at risk and fragile in some ways than people would expect. They still do a great job given how many moving parts are involved, but even a single slip-up is not an option.
As we’ve seen today, in some situations, regulations can penalize you $100,000 per day if mistakes are made. Likewise, even a single cyberattack can lead to multimillion-dollar damage figures. This is why industrial facilities are willing to pay premium rates for protection, whether that be via insurance or active countermeasures.
