Posted on 12/10/2018 6:53:37 PM PST by marktwain
Executive Summary
The nation has steadily improved its ability to respond to major disasters and the power outages that often result. But increasing threats—whether severe natural disasters, cyber-physical attacks, electromagnetic events, or some combination—present new challenges for protecting the national power grid and recovering quickly from a catastrophic power outage.
The President’s National Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIAC) was tasked to examine the nation’s ability to respond to and recover from a catastrophic power outage of a magnitude beyond modern experience, exceeding prior events in severity, scale, duration, and consequence. Simply put, how can the nation best prepare for and recover from a catastrophic power outage, regardless of the cause?
After interviews with dozens of senior leaders and experts and an extensive review of studies and statutes, we found that existing national plans, response resources, and coordination strategies would be outmatched by a catastrophic power outage. This profound risk requires a new national focus. Significant public and private action is needed to prepare for and recover from a catastrophic outage that could leave the large parts of the nation without power for weeks or months, and cause service failures in other sectors—including water and wastewater, communications, transportation, healthcare, and financial services—that are critical to public health and safety and our national and economic security.
What is a catastrophic power outage?
Recommendations
The United States should respond to this problem in two overarching ways: 1) design a national approach to prepare for, respond to, and recover from catastrophic power outages that provides the federal guidance, resources, and incentives needed to take action across all levels of government and industry and down to communities and individuals; and 2) improve our understanding of how cascading failures across critical infrastructure will affect restoration and survival.
There are a number of ongoing initiatives in both the public and private sector that are in line with our recommendations. We urge the continued advancement of these initiatives in conjunction with our recommendations.
The NIAC was challenged to examine events that are beyond our nation’s experience, yet would impact nearly every jurisdiction, industry, and citizen. The solutions we identified will require strong public-private collaboration—as the NIAC has recommended previously—to address the scale and significance of catastrophic power outages.
Link to NIAC paper ( 94 pages) on Surviving a Catastrophic Power Outage
Link to National Infrastructure Advisory Council at dhs.gov
They haven’t bought diddly. Just words on paper right now.
I had to look it up but does anybody here remember the Ice storm from 1998 that hit Quebec and surrounding area.
According to Wikipedia “Millions were left in the dark for periods varying from days to several weeks, and in some instances, months. It led to 35 fatalities...”
It also caused somewhere between 5 and 7 billion dollars of economic loss.
What I remember hearing was the fact that many of the emergency generation facilities installed in such critical infrastructure as hospitals, civil defense operation centers and public survival shelters started suffering mechanical breakdowns after three or four weeks of continuous operation. Something else to take into consideration.
I also find it quite amazing that in the middle of a Canadian winter the death toll was only 35 people. Obviously, the living conditions would have been less than optimal but it allowed just about everybody affected to survive.
That is one heckuva machine.
Not sure why they think this is a threat.
But the lights flickering tonight a lot. In fact right at the moment, the power here seems
...
Maybe PDJT has heard the Left, who seems to even make the stock market go down to hurt him, has players who can take out the grid and blame him...
Might be a dumb thought but would it be possible to build super large surge protectors for the power grid? I once heard someone saying it was possible.
Take the $7500 tax credit for every electric car sold and put it towards the national power grid.
There are technological ways to protect against some of the various threats.
There are some mechanisms that do rather similar to what you suggest. A comprehensive strategy is in order.
One thing we are already doing is putting berms up around the substations, so that direct attack with rifles is harder.
The globalists poo-poo the entire notion, because no one would ever attack us, according to them.
One prototype was built and tested. I think it was in 2012.
The program was started in 2008. Looks like nothing done after 2012.
Money was supposed to go into national infrastructure during the Obama presidency.
It should have gone in to projects like this.
Instead we have the insane Solyndra boondoggles to his political buddies.
I just did some searches on emergency generator failures.
Maintenance is a big factor. I will bet that over the 4 weeks operation, filters and oil were not changed as required.
Another tidbit was that older generators are more reliable than the newer due to complications for emmissions.
I found one site that showed Oregon had plans for long term use of emergency generators. Long time power outage (months) would occur in a Cascadia fault earthquake.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.