ASC Department of Infrastructure

__NOCATEGORYGALLERY__The ASC Department of Infrastructure (ASCDI or DoI), otherwise known as the Infrastructure Department, is a castle department of the Unitary Government of Cyberia which, despite its official name, is concerned with all things structural within the country, not just infrastructure, including but not limited to underground/underwater pipes and sewers, internet lines, residential zoning, public architecture, military architecture, and building codes. The latter of these aims to regulate a minimum quality of living and working standard for civilians and military personnel alike.

History
The formation of the Infrastructure Department came during a large series of government restructures, following the Treasury, Resource Management, Agriculture, and Energy departments in the later and earlier months of 2017 and 2018 respectively. Somewhat unlike most other departments, instead of splitting its responsibilities off from the Defense Department, the DoI was split from the department of Resource Management, which used to concern itself with all things land-based as well as below-ground.

Office of the President of Infrastructure
In the Office of the President of Infrastructure, the President of Infrastructure is kept informed of all government activities dealing with man-made frameworks and the regulation regarding their building. The Infrastructure President themselves has the right to modify these regulations in any way they see fit either by recommendation or by changes to infrastructure laws.

Major Responsibilities
The Department of Infrastructure's field of responsibility contains a very broad amount of divisions and subdivisions that may seem to overlap, but actually require specialized knowledge in each of their respective designations.

Building Regulations
Building regulations, commonly known as "building code" or "building codes", are sets of laws that, while having to be ratified by the Department of Justice, are are almost entirely influenced by the Infrastructure Department. These codified laws are adopted and built upon expressly for the health, safety, and quality of life of the general population. Examples include, a minimum level of soundproofing in civilian residential constructs, a minimum level of insulation in residential constructs, a minimum level of fireproofing, a minimum temperature of 60 F in non-residential interiors open to the public; standards for maximum occupancy, utility connection, stair and corridor size minimums, handicap access minimums, other rules for specific non-public room and building usages, and more.

District Heating
Most but not all buildings in Cyberian cities enjoy a public heating service known by the technical term of district heating. This is achieved by the Infrastructure Department operating heat plants, as opposed to power plants, which burn various types of fuels for the sole purpose of transferring heat into a specially formulated liquid with a very high heat capacity, and distributing that heat by pumping the liquid through well-insulated underground pipes into the heat storage system, which then supplies its stored heating liquid to the heating systems of all kinds of buildings.

In addition to operating their own heating plants, the Infrastructure Department works jointly with the Energy Department to provide readily available heat to the general public. The two departments do this by taking the waste heat of the country's many nuclear reactors and transferring that heat to the district heating system, instead of letting it escape to the environment through cooling towers.

Public & Private Transportation
Public transportation such as air, bus and rail systems, and also construction that facilitates private transportation such as roads, highways, and tunnels are in varying degrees built, regulated, and inspected by the Department of Infrastructure. The most prominent of these is the ownership and operation of the majority of airports, the underground metro system of rapid public transport between key points within cities which the government owns and operates, and the above-ground high-speed rail system connecting between cities that is not owned by the government but is scrutinized and regulated by it.

Pollution Management
The Infrastructure Department minds concerns regarding air, water, and noise pollution (AWNP). In collaboration with the Justice Department, they regulate sources of AWNP to prevent extensive damage to the environment and those that live in it. Common examples of these regulations are emissions such as from cars and factories, waste disposal such as from nuclear power plants or residential refuse, and noise such as from roads or airports and low-flying aircraft.

Water Management
A high-quality supply of water, the receiving and treatment of wastewater, and all the separate passages necessary to transfer these, are all built and maintained by the Infrastructure Department. This includes focuses in water provision, water treatment and purification, sewer infrastructure, snow clearing, active and passive avalanche control, and more.

Military Base Architecture
The construction, maintenance, and expansion of all military bases, their utilities, their amenities, their extremely long aircraft runways and many other aspects, is chiefly handled and upheld by the Department of Infrastructure. They work closely with the Department of Defense in the strategic resilience, planning, and placement or relocation of many emplaced assets, large and small. This includes assisting in the fixed emplacement of extremely large artillery batteries, such as coastal naval guns.

Prison Architecture
The Infrastructure Department is also a close cooperative effort with the Defense Department on the construction and maintenence of prisons, both civilian and military.

Civilian Engineering Division
The Civil Engineering Division (CED) is where the majority of civilian-focused structural and regulatory work is done. This includes everything from safe foundations atop and inside ice sheets, to imposingly tall skyscrapers and all the infrastructure necessary to service them, and the many regulations regarding how all different types of buildings must be built.

Environmental Engineering Division
The Environmental Engineering Division (EED) is where all concerns regarding the monitoring and protection of the environment are held, along with regulations and other intangible as well as tangible procedures put in place in the pursuit of these concerns. The EED can be requested to investigate into potential violations of environmental regulation; they can also launch investigations of their own accord. The EED has previously come under fire by moderate amounts of media and civilian unrest for supposedly not doing enough for the environment and otherwise not conforming to its own recommendations.

Military Engineering Division
The Military Engineering Division (MED) is the second largest infrastructure field in the DoI, concerned with all structural work done in a military capacity. It is more or less known to the general population that the regulatory part of the MED is markedly more lax than would be in the CED, in the context that building codes are less made to fit the person and more made to fit the function of the structure itself.

Cyberian Military Bases (CMBs) are well-known for being, for all intents and purposes, separated, fenced off, and independent from the civilian grounds that surround them. They have often been regarded as cities in and of themselves, with relatively few entrances and exits, which are guarded by mostly CMB Security Forces. These bases have their own airstrips, freeways, metro rail tunnels, power generation, power storage, and many other amenities typical of large population centers.

Work done in the MED can and has overlapped into the CED's field, to form structures commonly used by civilians yet can be cleared for use by military personnel or even emergency uses. An interesting example of this implementation of civilian-military infrastructure is in the form of inter-city highways having been reinforced for the military or emergency landing of aircraft.