I’ve lived in Laclede County all my life, going on 71 years now, so I can appreciate how spoiled we are with regard to having what we consider the necessities of life. We turn on the faucet to release the cleanest and best tasting water in the state, more than we need to drink and bathe and even water our gardens and flower beds.
We flip a switch and cool our homes in the summer and heat them in the winter, and except for the occasional lightning strike or squirrel running over the power lines, at the touch of our finger we have enough power for a house full of television sets, computers, telephones, kitchen and bathroom appliances.
But there may be danger over the horizon as our power grids and water supplies become more vulnerable to threats of terrorism or even environmental upsets.
We have experienced several harbingers throughout the nation just recently, and James Woolsey, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, described the US electric power grid as “the security equivalent of a house left with the door unlocked, the windows open, and millions of dollars of jewelry and home entertainment equipment strewn about for the taking.”
In 2012, the National Academy of Science began to also see the risk and acknowledged in a major report that “terrorists could cripple the national economy by damaging or destroying the hard-to-replace electric grid components.”
We learned just last week how a shortage of water can wreak havoc in a large American city. One half million residents of Toledo Ohio were without water for drinking, bathing, cooking.
In this instance the cause was environmental when phosphorus washed from fertilized farms, leaky septic systems and cattle feedlots into Lake Erie feeding a highly toxic algae.
A much more sinister cause was suspected in April 2013, when someone cut fiber optic cables, and then hundreds of AK-47 rounds of ammunition were unleased on ten large transformers in San Jose, California.
Officials were able to re-route power around the site, but it took workers 27 days to repair the substation and get it back up to normal.
In an article in the Wall Street Journal on February 4, 2014, Jon Wellinghoff, who was chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission at the time, referred to that incident as “the most significant incident of domestic terrorism involving the grid that has ever occurred in the US” and continued to warn that if a similar incident ever happened across the country, it could “take down the U.S. electric grid and black out much of the country.”
Just a few months after the vandalism in San Jose, there was a series of three attacks on the power grid in Arkansas.
First, there was the sabotage of a power line in Cabot, AR. Then a switching station in Scott, AR, was set on fire, causing an estimated damage of over two million dollars.
In October, two power poles were cut and one was pulled down, which brought down a 115,000 volt transmission line. About 10,000 customers had their power knocked out.
James Woolsey has been very concerned about these incidents, saying, “Without electricity we aren’t a civilization, and this is a major societal vulnerability.”
The military is 99 per cent reliant upon the civilian energy grid transformers exactly like the one attacked in San Jose so this underlines the seriousness of our situation.
The Pacific Gas and Electric Co. originally referred to the California incident as “vandalism”. but in February 2014, the company began referring to it as terrorism.
Jon Wellinghoff said that attack was clearly executed by well-trained individuals seeking to do significant damage to the area, and he fears it was a test run for an even larger assault.
“It would not be that hard to bring down the entire region west of the Rockies if we had a coordinated attack like this against a number of substations,” Wellinghoff said.
What I found while doing research for this column helped me understand the magnitude of our vulnerability. Many times I have passed by the electrical station out on East Highway 32 and assumed all our power came from a local source such as that. I found it mind-boggling to learn that there are only three major power grids in the U.S., the Eastern, the Western and ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas).
According to the Department of Energy, each interconnection transfers bulk, high-voltage electricity to power homes, businesses - basically anything that can be “plugged in”.
Blackouts and brownouts occur if proper balance cannot be maintained between the supply and demand of electricity.
These large grids have been established to provide widespread availability and to help control the flow of electricity throughout a region based on supply and demand. In this way electricity is able to be directed to regions that are in high demand and diverted from others with less.
The US has almost 125 million household consumers of electricity. Rebecca Smith writing in the Wall Street Journal warns the entire US power grid could be shut down for more than a month if just nine of the over 55,000 electric substations placed throughout the nation were sabotaged by terrorists or other criminals.
A study by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission found that just a handful of American substations provide much of the electricity that flows to large swaths of the country.
And the really frightening part about all this is that aside from nuclear power plants there are no federal rules requiring utilities to be protected!
Further, disabling just nine of these substations could leave much of the country without power for weeks, or possibly even months.
There are an estimated 30 “crucial” substations that rely on large power transformers to increase the electricity’s voltage, thereby giving it the capability to move long distances.
The Journal report by Smith is only the first time the results of the study have been made public although some officials have known about the results for months.
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