Electromagnetic Pulse (3 page)

Compare that event with the incident in Auckland, New Zealand. Cables supplying power to the downtown business district failed in 1998. The center of the city went dark. Companies were forced to shutter or relocate their operations outside of the affected area. The local Auckland utility had to adopt drastic measures to move in temporary generators. They even enlisted the assistance of the world's largest cargo plane—owned by rock band
U2
, to transport massive generators into the area. It took five weeks for the power grid to be fully restored.

There are contrarians. Jeff Dagle, an electrical engineer at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, who served on the Northeast Blackout Investigation Task Force argued, “one lesson of the 2003 blackout is that the power grid is more resilient than you might think.”

The task force investigators pinpointed four separate root causes for the collapse, and human error played a significant role. "It took an hour for it to collapse with no one managing it," Dagle said. "They would have been just as effective if they had just gone home for the day. That to me just underscores how remarkably stable things are."

As awareness was raised by Congress, the National Academies of Science produced a report detailing the risk of a significant solar event. The 2008 NAS report paints a dire picture, based on a study conducted for FEMA and Electromagnetic Pulse Commission created by Congress.

While severe solar storms do not occur that often, they have the potential for long-term catastrophic impacts to the nation’s power grid. Impacts would be felt on interdependent infrastructures. For example, the potable water distribution will be affected immediately. Pumps and purification facilities rely on electricity. The nation’s food supply will be disrupted, and most perishable foods will spoil and be lost within twenty-four hours. There will be immediate or eventual loss of heating/air conditioning, sewage disposal, phone service, transportation, fuel resupply, and many of the necessities that we take for granted.

According to the EMP Commission, the effects would be felt for years, and its economic costs could add up to trillions of dollars—dwarfing the cost of Hurricane Katrina. More importantly, the commission’s findings stated a potential loss of life that was staggering. Within one year, according to their conclusions, ninety percent of Americans would die.

But some skeptics say it's the opposite. Jon Wellinghoff, who served as Chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission—commonly known as FERC, from 2009 to 2013, has sounded the alarm about the danger of an attack on the system. The heightened awareness came as a result of an April 2013 incident in Silicon Valley, California, in which a group of attackers conducted a coordinated assault on an electrical substation, knocking out twenty-seven transformers. FERC points to the fact that the U.S. power grid is broken into three big sections known as
interconnections
. There is one each for the Eastern United States, the Western United States, and—out on its own—Texas. In fact, the East and West interconnections also include much of Canada and parts of Mexico.

In a 2013 report, FERC concluded that if a limited number of substations in each of those interconnections were disabled, utilities would not be able to bring the interconnections back up again for an indeterminate amount of time. FERC’s conclusion isn't classified information. This information has been in government reports and widely disseminated on the internet for years.

FERC also noted that it could take far longer to return the electrical grid to full functionality than it did in 2003. Wellinghoff said, "If you destroy the transformers—all it takes is one high-caliber bullet through a transformer case, and it's gone, you have to replace it. If there aren't spares on hand—and in the event of a coordinated attack on multiple substations, any inventory could be exhausted—it takes months to build new ones.”

"Once your electricity is out, your gasoline is out, because you can't pump the gas anymore. All your transportations out, all of your financial transactions are out, of course because there are no electronics," Wellinghoff also stated.

FERC’s proposed solution was to break the system into a series of
microgrids
. In the event of a cascading failure, smaller portions of the country could isolate themselves from the collapse of the grid. There is a precedent for this. Princeton University has an independent power grid. When a large part of the critical infrastructure collapsed during Superstorm Sandy, the Princeton campus became a place of refuge for residents and a command center for first responders.

These doomsday scenarios may be beside the point because the electrical grid is already subject to a series of dangerous stresses from natural disasters. Sandy showed that the assumptions used to build many parts of the electrical infrastructure were wrong. The storm surge overwhelmed the substations, causing them to flood, and subsequently fail. Experts determined that significant portions of the grid might need to be moved to higher ground.

Even away from the coasts, extreme weather can threaten the system in unexpected ways. Some systems use gas insulation, but if the temperature drops low enough, the gas composition changes and the insulation fails. Power plants in warmer places like Texas aren't well-prepared for extreme cold, meaning power-generating plants could fail when the population needs them the most to provide power for heat. As utilities rely more heavily on natural gas to generate power, there's a danger of demand exceeding supply. A likely scenario is a blizzard, in which everyone cranks up their propane or natural gas-powered heating systems. As the system becomes overwhelmed, the gas company can't provide to everyone. Power providers don't necessarily have the first right of refusal from their sources, so they could lose their supply and be forced to power down in the middle of a winter storm.

Summer doesn't necessarily offer any respite. Even prolonged droughts can play a role. As consumers turn up their air conditioners, requests for more power will increase. There can be a ratcheting effect. If there are several days of consistently high temperatures, buildings will never cool completely. The demand from local utilities will peak higher and higher each day. Power plants rely upon groundwater to cool their systems. They will struggle to maintain cooling as the water itself heats up. Droughts can diminish the power from hydroelectric plants, especially in the western United States.

If such extreme weather continues to be the norm, the chaos that was unleashed on the grid by Sandy may have been a preview of the kinds of disruptions to the grid, that might become commonplace. As the New York Herald argued in 1859, referring to the Carrington event, "Phenomena are not supposed to have any reference to things past—only to things to come. Therefore, the aurora borealis must be connected with something in the future—war, or pestilence, or famine." Although the impact of solar storms was not fully understood at the time, the prediction of catastrophe remains valid.

What protective measures are possible?

The Obama administration has taken steps to replace some of the aging satellites that monitor space weather, and extra-high-voltage transformers that are vulnerable to solar storms. The administration’s new plan also calls for scientists to establish benchmarks for weather events in space, incorporating something similar to the Richter scale. The strategy also includes assessing the vulnerability of the power grid, increasing international cooperation, and improving solar-flare forecast technology — a crucial step.

But Dr. Peter Pry, Chairman of the EMP Commission, says that neither the White House, nor Congress, is taking the threat seriously enough or acting with the appropriate urgency. According to Dr. Pry, it would cost about two billion dollars— the amount of foreign aid we give to Pakistan — to harden the nation's power grid to minimize the damage from either a nuclear EMP or a solar flare. "If we suspended that [aid] for one year and put it toward hardening the electrical grid," Pry says, "we could protect the American people from this threat."

Is this Science Fiction or Reality?

All of the events described above are plausible and have their roots in history. What could happen? Global Panic. Martial Law. Travel Restrictions. Food and Water Shortages. An Overload of the Medical System. Societal Collapse. Economic Collapse.

This is why we prep. Prepping is insurance against both natural and man-made catastrophic events. The government now requires you to carry medical insurance. Your homeowner's insurance may include damage from tornadoes. Even though you may never incur damage from a tornado, you pay for that coverage monthly nonetheless. This is what preppers do. We allocate time and resources to protect our families, in the event of seemingly unlikely events, but events that are occurring daily or have historical precedent.

At Freedom Preppers, we hope none of these catastrophic events occur, but
what if
?

Cyber Warfare

We explored this concept in depth with the first book released into the
Prepping for Tomorrow
series, entitled
Cyber Warfare
. A #1 bestseller in an unprecedented eight Amazon categories,
Cyber Warfare
is a primer on the threats that we face as a nation, from the bad actors mentioned earlier. It explores the history of cyber attacks and discusses the nuances of the terminology. The United States and its allies have evolved over the past decade in their policies. Throughout the book, the problem of attribution is explored as cyber space allows hackers a convenient place to hide.

The all-important issue is raised:
When does a cyber attack become an act of war
?

After a thorough review of the threat that a devastating cyber attack poses for America, in particular, the critical infrastructure, Cyber Warfare provides preparedness solutions. Like Cyber Warfare, this guide will also help you answer the question:

What if the preppers are right?

Simply put, a cyber attack is a deliberate exploitation of computer systems. Cyber attacks are used to gain access to information, but can also be used to alter computer code, insert malware, or take over the operations of a computer-driven network.

Why would terrorists bother with an elaborate and dangerous physical operation—complete with all the recon and planning of a black ops mission—when they could achieve the same effect from the comfort of their home? An effective cyber attack could, if cleverly designed, produce a great deal of physical damage very quickly. The sheer amount of interconnections in digital operations would mean that such an attack could bypass fail-safes in the physical infrastructure that would normally stop cascading failures.

A single string of ones and zeros could have a significant impact. If a computer hacker could command all the circuit breakers in a utility to open, the system would be overloaded. Power utility personnel sitting in the control room could do that, but a proficient cyber-terrorist could do it as well. In fact, smart-grid technologies are more susceptible to common computer failures. New features that have been added to make the system easily manageable, might render it more vulnerable.

At least one major public official downplays the cyber attack scenario. The nation's top disaster responder, FEMA director, Craig Fugate shrugs at the threat of a power grid collapse.

"When have people panicked? Generally what you find is the birth rate goes up nine months later," he said, then turned more serious: "People are much more resilient than the professionals would give them credit for. Would it be unpleasant? Yes. Would it be uncomfortable? Have you ever seen the power go out, and traffic signals stop working? Traffic's hell, but people figure it out."

Fugate's big worry in a mass outage is communication, he has said. When people can get information and know how long power will be out, they will handle it much better.

Don’t worry, the government will take care of you. Naïve.

Is there a precedent for the use of a cyber attack to take down a nation’s power grid? Let’s look at 2015.

On March 31, 2015, the majority of homes and businesses in Turkey lost power as the result of alleged cyber attack by Iranian proxies. Analysts initially declared this the first full-blown blackout utilizing Cyber Warfare. Months later, Turkey announced the blackout was caused by an equipment malfunction, not by a cyber attack. One has to wonder if the Turkish government denied the cyber intrusion in order to avoid admission of the vulnerability of its critical infrastructure to cyber attack.

On December 23, 2015, when a cyber attack on the power grid in Ukraine thrust that part of the nation into darkness, nearly 80,000 homes in Ukraine’s Ivano-Frankivsk region were without power. Believed to be part of Ukraine-Russian hostilities in the region, initial reports pointed to Russian hackers armed with a malware called
BlackEnergy
. This is the most recent successful attack on a power grid by hackers with the largest impact on a nation.

Reports reveal that a Russian proxy group known as
Sandworm
carried out the attack by remotely switching breakers to cut power, following the installation of the
BlackEnergy
malware in order to prevent technicians from identifying the attack. The attack also included a denial of service to the utility's phone systems. Robert Lee, a former US Air Force cyber warfare operations officer who helped compile the report, was quoted by Reuters as saying, "This was a multi-pronged attack against multiple facilities. It was highly coordinated with very professional logistics. They sort of blinded them in every way possible."

In poll after poll, one of the threats that concerns preppers is the use of a cyber attack to cause a grid-down scenario. There are many bad actors on the international stage. Each one is capable of wreaking havoc in the US, by shutting down our power grid and enjoying the resulting chaos.

No bombs. No bullets. No swordfights. Just a few keystrokes on the computer, and we're done.