Sunday night thunderstorms rolled through my area. As the wind picked up and the thunder became much louder, I decided to get out two of my LED lanterns, even though my cell phone has a flashlight and I keep flashlights in several rooms in my house, so they’re easily accessible. This habit of checking that I have emergency lighting is something I’ve done throughout my entire adult life and probably started because I hate being caught in the dark and having to fumble around.
Sure, enough about a half-hour later the power went out. The next issue was the claps of thunder had my two dogs in panic mode, so I went out in the sun room and brought the cheap weather radio into the living room and tuned in to a local country music radio station. The music helped calm down the dogs. I keep this weather radio charged now, although for about a year after I bought it, it just sat in the box. I had taken it out the box, after I bought it, looked at it, and stuck it back in the box. It was after listening to some online prepper lecturing about how prepping supplies aren’t going to do you any good, if you don’t know how to use them, that prodded me to get this weather radio out of the box. It can be charged with a USB cable, has a little solar panel and a hand-crank. So, since then I keep it charged.
My cell phone was working and my power company has an outage map, that provides updates on outages and how many people are without power. My outage was a very small area and the power company said it was due to an event, so I figured someone hit a pole or the wind caused damage. It took around 4 hours for power to be restored.
This outage was a minor inconvenience. Most of us have been through much longer power outages, plus thanks to modern technology, I had immediate access to the power company, via my cell phone, for information about the outage. In the old days, before the internet, we had no idea how large the outage area was, what caused it, and we definitely didn’t have any idea how long the power was going to be out. We could just tell all the neighbors were without power too.
Most people would just memory hole a minor power outage like this and I used to do that too. Now, I review what I did and what I might do better, as far as being prepared.
Until recent years, I didn’t even understand the vulnerabilities of our power grid in America or the magnitude of the threat of attacks on our critical infrastructure. Sure, I had read about the threat of asymmetrical attacks for decades, but didn’t consider them likely.
Then 9/11 happened and the US government jumped into fighting terrorism mode. After trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives lost in that fight, the reality is America lost – that’s the truth. Lots of military contractors and “experts” made lots of money, but our military spent 20 years eroding our military readiness. We withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021, the Taliban is back in charge there and Hamas, another terrorist regime, last October, waged a catastrophic attack on Israel. Many Israelis likely had faith in their government to ward off a catastrophic attack too. Sure, seems like we’re back to where we started with 9/11 when it comes to terrorist attacks and and we haven’t learned much of anything.
The same scenario played out with the 2020 “pandemic,” another crisis, I never gave much thought to, let alone thought about being prepared for. There again, years ago I had read a very interesting book, The Great Influenza, by John M. Barry, which chronicled the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-1920, which killed more than 50 million people worldwide. I didn’t rush to prepare for a pandemic after reading this book, but according to Wikipedia, President George W. Bush read this book in 2005: “In the summer of 2005, then-President George W. Bush read the book while on vacation at his ranch in Crawford.[26] His study would later set forth plans for the federal government to prepare for future pandemics in a November 2005 speech.[27]“ So, 15 years later, I think our government’s 2020 pandemic response failed miserably.
I have little faith in the government to respond adequately to a major crisis here in America, but even worse, most Americans aren’t prepared for even more common weather emergencies, in their own area and there’s been a concerted liberal media effort for decades to denigrate “preppers” as far-right doomsday kooks. Most Americans, at the same time, express concerns about the uncertain state of the world now, with wars spreading, domestic divides growing, border chaos, political chaos in Washington, and all sorts of fall-out from the crazy 2020 BLM “defund the police” efforts, that have resulted in a rise in crime and police retention issues.
Despite working on my preparedness in a much more serious way since 2020, I am still not adequately prepared for a long-term emergency. I am much better prepared than I used to be and continue to work on it.
A couple years ago I decided to buy a Mr. Heater Buddy when I bought one for my daughter in IN. I’m in GA and don’t really worry about freezing, plus I have a fireplace in my house, but I thought having this little heater was a good idea. I went to Lowe’s to buy more 1 lb. propane tanks and the friendly, young man who assisted me in locating them was very helpful, but what he told me stuck with me. I told him I’d become a bit of a prepper in recent years and he told me about his neighbor being an old guy, who is a sort of weird prepper, but he said that guy knows a lot. He told me if he needs help in an emergency he’ll go to his neighbor. That is the mind-set of a lot of people – they mock preppers and emergency preparedness. Rather than think about unpleasant things like emergencies, their plan is to just go to the “weirdo” preppers they know, who are stocked up. I told him that he should want to learn to be able to take care of himself, no matter what happens.
Books often spur government action. The 2009 William Forstchen fictional novel, One Second After, imagines the US grid being taken down by a hostile foreign attack. The story is set in a small town and the characters are very relatable. So, I’m a technology-challenged person and I didn’t even understand the magnitude of the impact if our grid went down and really, who wants to think about worst-case scenarios? This fictional novel got the attention of some Washington national security types and the author has made presentations about the threat of EMPs to Congress and other experts. I had heard the terms EMP and grid-down, but didn’t really understand the ramifications, because I had faith in my electric company to fix things and get the power up and running, even after hurricanes and I trusted the government had some contingency plan for worst case scenarios, so there was no need to worry about any of this.
So, what’s the big deal about grid-down and why even think about it?
About a year ago, I read Ted Koppel’s book, Lights Out: A Cyberattack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath, which was published in 2015. I watched Koppel’s Nightline show for years and he’s definitely not some far-right kook. On pages 14-15 of Lights Out, Koppel wrote:
“Ours has become a largely reactive culture. We are disinclined to anticipate disaster, let alone prepare for it. We wait for bad things to happen and then we assign blame. Despite mounting evidence of cyber crime and cyber sabotage, there appears to be widespread confidence that each can be contained before it inflicts unacceptable damage. The notion that some entity has the ability or the motive to launch a sophisticated cyber attack against our nation’s infrastructure, and in particular against our electric power grids, exists, if at all, on the outer fringes of public consciousness.”
So, our grid is actually three grids, different areas of the country, is my understanding. Then there was this term, black start, which is starting the grid back up from nothing. Here’s a 2022 Practical Engineering article, How Long Would Society Last During a Total Grid Collapse?, which explains the threat of grid-down in easy to understand terms and the difficulties. Here’s a key point about preparedness:
“At both an institutional and personal level, finding a balance between the chance of disaster striking and the resources required to be prepared is a difficult challenge, and not everyone agrees on where to draw the line. Of course, the other kind of preparedness is our ability to restore service to a collapsed power grid and get everyone back online as quickly as possible. That’s called a black start, and it sounds simple enough, but there are some enormous engineering challenges associated with bringing a grid up from nothing.”
Here’s a 2022 follow-on Practical Engineering article on a black start, What Is A Black Start Of The Power Grid?.
A month ago there was this warning: “FBI Director Christopher Wray said Tuesday he has never seen a time during his decades-long career when so many threats against the US were all as elevated as they are now, warning senators he sees “blinking lights everywhere.”
Last week, FBI director, Chris Wray testified to Congress about the threat Chinese hackers pose to our critical infrastructure. Here’s the warning from an NBC report, FBI director warns Chinese hackers aim to ‘wreak havoc’ on U.S. critical infrastructure :
““China’s hackers are positioning on American infrastructure in preparation to wreak havoc and cause real-world harm to American citizens and communities, if or when China decides the time has come to strike,” said excerpts of Wray’s prepared testimony released by the FBI.”
“Wray also argued that “there has been far too little public focus” on Chinese hackers’ targeting critical infrastructure in the U.S., such as water treatment plants, electrical grids, oil and natural gas pipelines and transportation systems, according to the prepared remarks.”
““And the risk that poses to every American requires our attention — now,” his prepared testimony said.”
I’m not suggesting we should all panic, but I do believe every American should think about having adequate basic supplies to manage a few weeks (or longer) in a power outage. Most people don’t want to imagine worst-case situations and that’s understandable, but when you’re warned that a hostile country is actively working now, to be able to wreak havoc on our critical infrastructure and the world situation has become very unstable, with wars starting and other chaos spreading, then perhaps we should all heed these warnings
Most people can’t afford to buy a private island for a getaway location in a crisis or some high-tech bunker, like some billionaires, but most people can afford to gradually start storing some extra water, buying some extra food, considering home security measures, learning basic first-aid, etc. I had a neighbor years ago, who told me she did not have a flashlight in her home, when she was talking to me the day before a hurricane was ready to make landfall, where our area was in the “cone of uncertainty.” The conversation began with me asking her if she was prepared for the storm and she told me she doesn’t mess with that. I then asked her if she at least had a flashlight. She didn’t and she didn’t seem concerned. I felt like I was talking to an alien. I insisted on giving her an LED lantern and extra batteries. She looked at me like I was a weirdo. Our power was out over 24 hours. Was she an alien or am I a weirdo?
These escalating warnings (Wray’s blinking lights everywhere) are like being in that hurricane “cone of uncertainty,” even if your area doesn’t take a direct hit, it can still cause a lot of devastation. There are usually severe thunderstorms, tornados, and plenty of wind damage and flooding to go along with them as they move inland. I have no idea how well prepared our power companies or government are for attacks on critical infrastructure – but I do know the likelihood of this sort of attack is way more likely than it was even just a few years ago. Wray said FBI cyber staff is outnumbered at least 50 to 1 by the Chinese hackers. So, let’s think about those Iranian proxies continuously firing missiles and launching drone attacks against the US military since last fall – we didn’t suffer any fatalities until a week ago.
That’s enough doom and gloom for today, but I am going to keep talking about this. I understand that most people don’t want to hear any of this, but I believe it’s very important.
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