Building a Resilient Nation
Ready for a Black Sky Event — household by household, community by community, state by state.
A Black Sky Event — a grid outage lasting thirty days or more across a major region or the whole nation — is the one catastrophe our national doctrine does not yet plan for. The vulnerability has been documented in the public record since the congressional EMP Commission’s first report in 2004; the governance to act on it has never been assigned.
Definition and sources: Black Sky Events · The Threat Picture · Strategic Documents
Your share of it is specific, and it is finishable. One household ready for thirty days. One water plant with a generator connection on the capital list. One installation plan that reaches past the fence line. One state planning team stood up. FIR exists to make that share obvious — and to make sure it merges into the national plan when the national plan arrives.
FIR brings together approximately 170 professionals across six lines of effort to ensure America can stand through a Black Sky Event. We work at every level of government — local, state, and federal — and are actively briefing multiple key federal agencies.
Our posture: plan against capabilities and effects, not fear of any one adversary. And what you build now is what the nation rebuilds from.
Watched One Second After? The town is the hero of that story — and the science behind it is real. Here is what the film gets right, what it leaves out, and what your household can do this week.
What’s real — and what to do →One door is yours. Take it.
Whether you shape policy, wear the uniform, run a statehouse, lead a town, own a substation, or ready your household — the next step on your line of effort is already written. We have done the sorting; you do not have to read the whole site to find your part.
You don’t need permission, and it won’t be wasted
Five first steps that are yours to take this month — small, free or self-financing, and finishable. Each is built to the FIR Framework, so what you do now merges into the state and national plans as they stand up.
Take the free course
BSE 099 — Why This Matters — is the threat as the record documents it, free and self-paced. It is the credibility floor every FIR practitioner stands on, and the normal way to begin.
When · whereEnroll today in the course catalog; finish on your own schedule.
Open the course catalog →Be ready for thirty days at home
Thirty to sixty days of basic food and a way to make water safe — affordable, and the first tier of the human foundation the whole stack stands on. A family ready for thirty days is what keeps a lineman, a nurse, or a water operator at their post.
When · whereOne shopping trip; the list is on the readiness page.
Start at home →Request the free assessment
A data-driven map of your city or county’s stack — dependencies, single points of failure, a sensible 30–60 day continuity capability, and the mutual-aid agreements to go with it.
When · whereYour community name and population is all it takes to start — one form, this week.
Request a free assessment →Build to the Diamond Blue model
An industrial park or residential community that produces its own power, water, and food — financed on its own returns, with resilience as the byproduct. Bankable with or without a national program.
When · whereRead the model; bring one site to a first conversation.
Explore the development model →Score your own gap
A scoped assessment across cyber, physical, and EMP/GMD, mapped to the standards your sector already answers to — so it drops into your existing compliance program instead of competing with it.
When · whereFind your sector on the stack page first; then see the utility package.
See the utility package →Six Lines of Effort
One mission, multiple audiences. Each line of effort is owned and administered by professionals working that domain, and each has a detailed page where specialists lead the work.
Education & Training
Educate the public and leaders at all levels about the Black Sky threat, and train the professionals and practitioners who work in that space. An informed public is an involved public, educated leaders make better decisions, and trained professionals are equipped to build resilience at every level, in every critical infrastructure. A free Foundation open to everyone; three tracks by role; stacked credentials verified in a public registry.
Explore Education & Training →National Policy & Leadership
One accountable national leader. A synchronized federal plan. FIR has drafted and advocates a proposed Executive Order to establish a National Black Sky Resilience Program and coordinate planning efforts at all levels of government.
Explore National Policy →Defense Mission Assurance
Mission assurance and force protection during a Black Sky Event. The Department needs policy for the whole force — a directive or instruction that makes Black Sky resilience a stated requirement — so that USNORTHCOM, the Services, and the National Guard Bureau can execute it. FIR works toward that policy, and toward the installation–community assessments and countermeasures that follow from it, so bases and the communities they depend on can sustain operations.
Explore Defense Mission Assurance →State Planning & Readiness
States hold statutory responsibility for disaster management. We support governors in building state-level Black Sky plans and standing up dedicated state planning teams with federal backing — and in prioritizing the state’s critical infrastructure nodes, which no community can do for itself.
Explore State Planning →Critical Infrastructure
The federal government designates sixteen critical infrastructure sectors, and most of the people who can act on Black Sky readiness think and work inside one of them — each with its own regulators, standards, and owners, most of them private. FIR meets these stakeholders sector by sector, while holding every sector to the one thing sector-centric planning misses: each sector’s continuity plan quietly assumes power, water, communications, and fuel it does not control. This line makes those assumptions explicit, then hardens what the plans in lines two through four prioritize.
Explore the sixteen sectors →Resilient Communities
From free municipal assessments to Diamond Blue developments — Diamond Blue is FIR’s designation for a location certified against our Black Sky resilience criteria — we build communities that can keep their critical infrastructure functioning through a Black Sky Event, for their residents and for the neighbors they have agreed in writing to help. No community holds every tier, so resilience is built as a network, not a fortress. Proof-of-concept, repeatable, and deployable today.
Explore Community Resilience →The problem is governance. The work is local.
One web, not sixteen lists
America’s critical infrastructure is not a list of sixteen sectors — it is one interdependent web, and every strand of it runs on the grid and on people. Drawn as a web, it shows what depends on what. Drawn as a stack, it shows the order things fail in — and the order they have to be restored. Both views are right; FIR uses both.
The solutions sit on the shelf. What’s missing isn’t technology. It’s governance: no single accountable leader, no synchronized national plan, and no defined role for the states and communities who would carry the work.
What planning has to get right
- Failure order is not restoration order. Restoring the grid needs manufacturing, transport, and fuel — sectors that stop first — and a workforce whose families are provided for.
- Thirty days, not seventy-two hours. A Black Sky Event demands a planning standard most current plans do not reach. Where a plan ends is where readiness has to begin.
- Capabilities, not fears. Multiple actors and natural hazards could cause this; the physics of failure is the same for all of them, so the plan is too.
- Agreements before the event. Ready communities sign mutual-aid compacts in writing now — who has the water, the fuel, the clinic — so help afterward is a matter of record, not improvisation.
Proceed now. Merge later — by design.
The national framework doesn’t exist yet, and waiting for it would waste years. So FIR built the community layer to run ahead of Washington without running away from it: a repeatable Resilient Community framework — the same assessment methodology, the same archetypes, the same standards and certification everywhere it is applied — so every community built on it is a standards-conformant building block that merges upward into regional, state, and national structures as they stand up. Communities supply ready building blocks; higher echelons supply prioritization and coordination. Necessary — and never wasted. Nothing built to the framework will need to be redone.
Built by practitioners, not spectators
Task forces
Specialized member teams that cut across the lines of effort, each under a designated lead, with a defined mission and deliverables that feed the FIR Framework. Members join one that matches their expertise.
Where you are needed. Most of the sixteen critical infrastructure sectors do not yet have a dedicated FIR team. If you work in one of them, this is your seat. See the task forces → · Meeting schedule (PDF)
Vision, mission, and how we work
Our Vision
A secure and prosperous future where resilient and sustainable critical infrastructure empowers communities and safeguards our nation.
Our Mission
Improve the quality of life and help ensure the continuity of the United States by facilitating sustainable communities and resilient critical infrastructures, fortified against threats and meeting the needs of the 21st century.
What we do
The Foundation for Infrastructure Resilience builds resilience within the United States from individual to Federal levels so the nation can stand through a Black Sky Event. We are a big tent: policy experts and national security professionals, military advisors and community builders, engineers and emergency managers, gear specialists and civic leaders. We don’t wait for perfect national doctrine — and we don’t wait for a community to decide what it wants, for an equipment solution to mature, for every household to prepare, or for any single partnership to prove the concept. We move on all fronts at once: we plan, train, assess, and build resilience now, level by level, so that when the event comes, the nation can stand.
How we work
FIR is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with a for-profit subsidiary, FIR Services, LLC. Our commercial work — paid assessments, development support, advisory engagements — funds our public efforts to promote and build resilience: threat analysis, free municipal assessments, training, and standards. We don’t live grant-to-grant. We have built a vibrant, self-funding organization that lets us focus on building a more resilient nation. Read more about the Foundation →
You don’t need FIR to start
Everything above can be done without joining anything. The training is free and stays free; a household, a town, or a utility that works through it on its own and never contacts us is a good outcome, and we say so plainly. Walk any of these alone:
- The free Foundation coursesThe threat as the record documents it, source discipline, individual and household readiness. No membership required.
- The Infrastructure StackHow the sixteen sectors depend on one another, how long each holds, and what to restore first — the analysis, in full, on the page.
- The strategic documentsThe draft Executive Order and the public record behind it, to brief your own leadership with.
- Ready.gov and CISAFederal readiness guidance and the official sector resources — the public baseline every FIR course builds on.
If you would rather do it with us — join the members already building this, ask for a free assessment, or help fund the public work the Foundation does.
Whichever door you take: what you build now is what the nation rebuilds from.