And I’m planning none of those things either, especially not with you, because you’re not planning any of them either.
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If an outage of that duration happened in a major city it could lead to some serious problems. Why? Lets look at New York. Most of the 9 million people who live in NYC live in apartments. Apartments get their water via a tower on top of the building. How does the water get up there? An electric pump. In the two day outage in 2003 the towers ran out of water within the first day. The lines at stores for bottled water were quite long. If that had gone on for two weeks there would be many, many dead older people who can’t get out to get water. As it was we worked in shifts to make sure the older folks in our building had what they needed. If this went on for two weeks I’m not sure what would’ve happened. Elevators are another problem. Imagine living on the 20th floor of a building with no elevator. Again, older people, people with small children, would have quite a time of it.
If you think taking out the electrical grid isn’t a big deal you aren’t paying attention. And yes, a smarter grid would go a long way to protecting us from this issue. And no, we are not doing anything substantial to in this regard. The power companies are too busy looting to invest, and the government is full of insane tea party idiots who think anything the government spends money on is a waste. When did this country get so fucking backwards?
I am amazed at how my country has done practically nothing (in what, 13 years since 9/11?!!?) to secure the electrical grid, chemical plants and nuclear facilities. If we purposely devised a response that did nothing to make us safer, but did everything that wouldn’t make us safer and many things which would make us less safe, we couldn’t have done better.
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I don’t know what you and GilbertWham are planning, but I’m in!
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Yep, local microgrids and storage that increases resilience are about the only possibility.
I work at Blenheim Gilboa (a 1.2 GW pump hydro storage facility) and our yard connects together several transmission paths from Canada to NYC. Our yard, and several other critical nodes are located in very rural areas. Our transformers and breakers can’t practically be hidden from the surrounding mountains. A few rounds like this to our transformers would start them leaking, and shooting them with tracers could set them on fire. We’re actually relocating buildings to reduce traffic past the transformers because of fear of a truck bomb taking out all 4 of ours.
What some of you seem to not understand is that these transformers are not easily patched and returned to service. We lost a 300 MVA transformer in Sept 2012 (in this case internal arcing) and we still have not received the replacement yet… getting one here takes a fairly major effort with special trailers and shutting down traffic on I88. If this was a team of two guys, the could easily take out our yard (from our own visitor’s center parking lot) and then get to another major node in an hour, and a third an hour after that. It’s kind of comical that the folks commenting on here really don’t get that say 20 people could take town the northeast grid (or at least everything serving NYC) for months.
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huh us? we’re not planning anything, but we’ll not consider preventing ourselves not listing you on the ‘people not included who didn’t show any interest’ in the nothing we’re not considering
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A problem with the stations in the high voltage grid is that it takes months to get rush deliveries of new transformers and there might be few spare ones in storage since they are quite expensive.
One part of the Swedish civil defence that were kept after the end of the cold war was keeping and strenghtening the concrete bunkers around a large number of these transformers. The bunkers are fire protection so that one burning transformer wont affect the next one, shrapnel protection to make military bombing of them harder and sabotage protection and it is the sabotage protection that has been strenghtened. They also dampen sound and include an oil catcher to avoid environmental damage if a transformer leaks.
A public technical overwiev in Swedish, it has some images:
http://svk.se/Global/07_Tekniska_krav/Pdf/TR9-15-utgava-5.pdf
And we even got one of the western worlds few manufacturers of large transformers, ABB. Dont think these are made anywhere in the US.
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How’s this for irony. The power happens to be out at my home right now after an ice storm last night. Buckeye Rural Electric Co-op claims part of the outage was caused by a “cutout” that had previously been shot by vandals “and the recent weather finally caused it to snap”.
Its not just money either. There are other things, such as people who need electricity to survive. There are plenty of scenarios where it can lead to death, whether its an extended care facility with people on life support whose generators fail after two days to the elderly or poor how are relying on electricity to heat or cool their homes in severe weather. Those are a couple off of the top of my head, but I’m sure you could come up with plenty of other reasons fairly quickly. Sure its only an annoyance if you’re relatively healthy and your shelter and food are adequate, but the reality is there are millions for whom this is not the case and upon whom extended long term blackouts could have serious consequences.
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Can things like pipes be moved underground/ indoors and can transformers be moved indoor? I’m sure there are plenty of other ways to take it out (take down the power lines) but can the components critical to the actual generation of power be hardened?
Saying that the effort put into taking down the grid isn’t a credible terrorist threat because it won’t kill any people is ludicrous. A well-timed blackout can kill a hell of a lot more people than 9/11 did.
How well do you think people would have survived the recent arctic front that froze out most of the country if we didn’t have electricity for even 2 days, let alone the probably week+ if it was an intelligently coordinated attack? First of all, your heat will go off. Your heat is natural gas? That’s nice - your furnace still needs electricity to turn on. Fireplace? Very few places have them anymore, and most of them have been converted to gas or electric (and most of the gas ones require electricity to operate). You can always burn wood without a fireplace? Without a working chimney you’ll suffocate from the smoke.
Switch it to summer during a heat wave and you’ll get different, but just as serious, survivability problems - heatstroke, lack of water, etc.
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After seeing Fast Food Nation, it occurred to me that since so much of the meat processing for fast food was concentrated, and the plants have ridiculously high turnover, it’d be trivial for a few dedicated individuals to infiltrate the plants and sabotage the food supply.
How bad would it be if people at McDonalds and Wendys at locations all over the country fell ill from something nasty at the same time?
And yet, we are more concerned that someone will sabotage sporting events. Heck, even our water supply is more vulnerable, and both water & food contamination would create way more fear than a random blackout.
It’s about time that we had a discussion in this country about real security, not just security theater. And if discussing the security of our power grid gets it started, so much the better.
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Oh nonsense! The 2003 blackout had no effect on the national commerce… oh. Wait.
Okay, so it was only about 6.4 billion dollars, but really, what’s that between friends?
http://www.andersoneconomicgroup.com/Portals/0/upload/Doc544.pdf
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A few years before our eleven-day summertime outage, we had a five-day outage in the dead of winter. Right after a severe ice storm, the temperatures dropped to single digits. Many people had to go to shelters and while they were gone, their pipes froze and burst. It also majorly sucked. We heat primarily with a wood stove so it wasn’t really an issue for us.
Maggie, of the BoingBoing contributors, you’re one whose opinion I hold in higher regard than most. I don’t doubt our electrical grid is in need of a major upgrade and I also believe that infrastructure is almost always a good investment. But I feel I could talk to anyone who’s been studying a subject for as long as you have and they’d assure me their concerns should be top-of-mind for everyone if they know what’s good for them. Our bridges are collapsing, our schools are ineffective, our air traffic controllers are falling asleep on the job. Depending upon who you’re talking to, any number of issues are of paramount importance if our nation is to survive.
And maybe they all are. And I’m thankful there are folks who study these issues and sound the alarm when they see a problem. I guess ultimately it is my expression of complacency that’s irrelevant here but there it is and here is why.
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Chicken McBromo Dragonfly.
A more robust grid that can route around disruptions sounds like an Internet of electricity. Call it the Intergrid.
It might not need to be able to withstand a nuclear attack like the Internet was originally designed for, but that might be a good scenario to start with.
Hey! Get your own, errrrr… no plan for anything…
And of course what about another Carrington event, which will happen sooner or later. http://www.politico.com//magazine/story/2014/01/roscoe-bartlett-congressman-off-the-grid-101720.html EMP is scary but really unlikely (it wouldn’t impact the military much, and we’d be rather pissed off).
Do we want to live in a society that’s scared of everything? Sure the power grid is vulnerable to vandalism, but you could make the same claim about a bunch of other stuff. Most water reservoirs would be easy to poison or contaminate. Our national rail infrastructure would be easy to sabotage. Our children make easy targets for a terrorist sniper while waiting for the school bus. Where does it end? We’d be way better off investing in traffic safety instead of investing in protecting against counterfactuals. Approximately 50 thousand Americans die each year in road accidents. How many die each year in terrorist attacks?
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Securing the grid costs money, though it is probably money well spent because most of the upgrades are needed.
However, the cost is almost always exaggerated. Most facilities that require “constant power” operate with backup generators and UPS systems. In fact, the redundant power requirements can get more insane than a backup generator.
Large scale industry like manufacturing and refineries might go down, but they typically have flexibility in absorbing this outage. Smaller outfits with more rigid work requirements already have the required redundancy. This really isn’t a big deal. Planes will still fly, servers will still run, hospitals will still operate, and silicon will still be made into ICs.
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