Tag: Critical Infrastructure

Posted inElections, Policy Topics, Public Planning

Live in King County? Vote Yes by April 28th, 2015 to upgrade our region’s emergency public safety radio network

by Andrew Villeneuve

April may not seem like an elec­tion month, but in Wash­ing­ton, it’s actu­al­ly one of two times dur­ing the year when local juris­dic­tions may sched­ule spe­cial elec­tions, most often for the pur­pose of send­ing the vot­ers a levy for their con­sid­er­a­tion. This year, the nine-mem­ber King Coun­ty Coun­cil has opt­ed to place a propo­si­tion on […]

Posted inPolicy Topics, Public Planning

Frontier working round the clock to restore service to Redmond area after major outage

by Andrew Villeneuve

For the past few days, many homes and busi­ness­es in the greater Red­mond area have been with­out phone, Inter­net, and tele­vi­sion ser­vice after a con­struc­tion crew work­ing on a stormwa­ter treat­ment project sliced through fiber and cop­per lines belong­ing to Fron­tier Com­mu­ni­ca­tions when they dug in the wrong place. The dam­age caused was appraised by […]

Posted inPolicy Topics, Public Planning

Redmond communications outage shows how vulnerable our critical infrastructure is

by Andrew Villeneuve

This morn­ing, at around at 9:30 AM Pacif­ic Day­light Time, a con­struc­tion crew work­ing on a stormwa­ter treat­ment project in NPI’s home­town of Red­mond, Wash­ing­ton acci­den­tal­ly caused a major telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions out­age for near­ly six thou­sand cus­tomers of Fron­tier Com­mu­ni­ca­tions (includ­ing yours tru­ly) when they dug in the wrong place and sev­ered vital fiber and cop­per wires. […]

Posted inPolicy Topics, Public Planning

New coastal radar now online near Copalis Beach; local meteorologists thrilled

by Andrew Villeneuve

Thanks to the tire­less efforts of our two U.S. Sen­a­tors — par­tic­u­lar­ly our junior sen­a­tor, Maria Cantwell — the Pacif­ic North­west final­ly has a state-of-the-art Doppler radar sta­tion locat­ed on the coast, capa­ble of assist­ing mete­o­rol­o­gists in prepar­ing more accu­rate and use­ful fore­casts for our region. The radar sta­tion, which has been under­go­ing con­struc­tion since […]

Posted inEvents, Media & Culture, World Commmunity

LIVE from Minneapolis: Building a stronger netroots community abroad

by Patrick Stickney

Here in the Unit­ed States, we don’t always hear about efforts abroad to uti­lize social media and devel­op new ways of orga­niz­ing online, because we don’t give our neigh­bors in the world com­mu­ni­ty much atten­tion. But we ought to, because pro­gres­sives in oth­er coun­tries are try­ing to make use of the Inter­net to bring about […]

Posted inEvents, Policy Topics, Public Planning

Peter Steinbrueck: Our fractured metropolis (Text of the keynote from NPI’s 2011 gala)

by Peter Steinbrueck

Edi­tor’s Note: Fol­low­ing the con­clu­sion of our Spring Fundrais­ing Gala a few days ago, we have been asked if we could make the text of Peter Stein­brueck­’s keynote speech avail­able. He has kind­ly agreed to do so; what fol­lows are a pol­ished ver­sion of his pre­pared remarks, deliv­ered on April 28th at the Com­mu­ni­ty Center […]