ACEC Urges DHS/CISA to Emphasize Professional Engineers in Essential Workforce Guidance

Advocacy / Coronavirus

April 22, 2020

ACEC Urges DHS/CISA to Emphasize Professional Engineers in Essential Workforce Guidance

ACEC urged the Department of Homeland Security/Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in a letter on Tuesday to refine its guidance on essential infrastructure workforce to reinforce the role of Professional Engineers.

The DHS/CISA Guidance on the Essential Critical Infrastructure Workforce: Ensuring Community and National Resilience in COVID-19 Response Version 2.0 and the recently released Version 3.0 establish a strong connection between the services engineering firms perform and the market sectors and related services deemed essential.

These services include continuous inspections to assess deterioration due to aging, weather, and hazards; completion of ongoing construction; assessing the ability to repurpose for pandemic response; renovating to protect public and worker health and safety; designing needed changes to existing infrastructure and new infrastructure identified; support for ongoing and changing of operations and maintenance of existing infrastructure; and similar activities. To be accomplished properly, these activities require site access and visits.

“We believe the guidance would be improved through more specific references to the services needed to support the critical sectors referenced, with particular emphasis on the necessary licensed professional engineering, architectural, and land surveying, and environmental science and related services,” ACEC stated in the letter.

ACEC recommended the following addition to the Guidance:

CROSS INDUSTRY AND INFRASTRUCTURE ESSENTIAL CRITICAL FUNCTIONS

• Licensed engineering and other design professionals and support personnel performing safety and functional inspections of physical infrastructure, to include buildings, transportation, energy, manufacturing, healthcare, logistics, water, waste, and utilities related facilities.
• Licensed engineering and other design professionals and support personnel performing functions related to the operations, maintenance, expansion, or renovation for reuse of essential critical public or private infrastructure.
• Licensed engineering and other design professionals and support personnel performing functions related to the completion of ongoing construction deemed to be essential and critical to pandemic response, economic recovery, or quality of life.
• Licensed engineering and other design professionals and support personnel performing planning and design of new or repurposing of existing infrastructure deemed to be essential and critical to pandemic response, economic recovery, or quality of life.

Click here to read the letter.

All comments to blog posts will be moderated by ACEC staff.