We Need to Heed Warnings

“The power grid now faces a range of threats it was never designed to survive.”

– Paul Stockton, former assistant secretary of defense

We can become desensitized to clear and present dangers because we are barraged almost daily with outrages to civilization around the globe.

This is one I hope will garner enough attention to inspire steps to shore up our defenses: the potential catastrophe of a national blackout of our electric grid system failing due to terrorist attacks or equipment failures.

A Wall Street Journal article, “Grid Vulnerable to Sabotage” on March 13 revealed a report by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that a coordinated attack on just nine of our 55,000 electric-transmission substations could take out the whole country’s grid for weeks and possibly even months.

M. Granger Morgan, head of the department of engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, wrote “it is no stretch of the imagination to think that such attacks could produce damage costing hundreds of billions of dollars.”

A nationwide outage is possible for several reasons, including:

Because the nation’s three regional electric systems have limited interconnections, it is difficult for them to help each other in an emergency.

Important equipment lacks up-to-date technology that would limit outages.

In recent years, we have experienced equipment failures in our antiquated grid systems that have led to widespread power outages. In 2003, a blackout affected 55 million people in the United States and Canada. In September 2011, a transmission line failure in Arizona set off a chain reaction that cut off power to millions of people.

Morgan reported that despite a National Research Council report in 2007 warning that the bulk of the nation’s power system could be out for months, very little has been done.

Less serious incidents of grid sabotage are already occurring, according to New Jersey’s Regional Operations Intelligence Center. Following at least eight “reports of intrusions at electrical grid facilities in New Jersey,” ROIC issued a report warning that the U.S. electrical grid is “inherently vulnerable” to attacks that could wipe out power across large swaths of the country.

A 2013 attack on a lightly defended electric substation near San Jose nearly knocked out Silicon Valley’s power supply.

David Ortiz, an Energy Department deputy assistant secretary, said that FERC’s conclusions are exaggerations and that the U.S. power grid is designed to handle natural and man-made disasters.

We can remedy our vulnerabilities.

As former FERC chairman Jon Wellinghoff told the Journal: “There are probably less than 100 critical high voltage substations that need to be protected from a physical attack. It is neither a monumental task, nor is it an inordinate sum of money that would be required to do so.”

Congress has been battling for years over proposals that would force utilities to improve security.

One proposed measure, the Grid Reliability Infrastructure and Defense Act of 2010, would have given federal regulators authority to set specific rules. Its author, Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., blamed its demise on aggressive lobbying by power generation companies.

FERC’s warnings should be heeded, given the dire consequences of a coast-to coast blackout.

We should not dismiss the danger from attacks on our electric grid system just because the damage to date has been slight. The 1993 car bomb attack on the World Trade Center caused relatively little damage, only to be followed by the 2001 devastation there.

It’s a lesson as old as Greek mythology.

Cassandra had the power of prophecy and the curse of never being believed. Because the citizens of Troy failed to heed her warnings about the dangers of bringing into their city a wooden horse, Troy was annihilated.