April 2, 2019—EMP Executive Order: Good News, Bad News . . .

President Trump’s March 26, 2019 Executive Order 13865 “Executive Order on Coordinating National Resilience to Electromagnetic Threats” is very important, but it leaves a challenge for the dysfunctional federal government, a condition that should give local citizens and leaders a great incentive for countering this now identified potentially urgent problem “from the bottom-up.”

Click here for this important Executive Order and here for my colleague Peter Pry’s appropriately titled article, “Trump Rose To EMP Challenge, Now Must Fight DC Swamp.”

Indeed, President Trump’s very important benchmark initiative leaves many challenges if we are to deal urgently with the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) threat. And his continued help could be very important to achieving his announced objective.

In my opinion, President Trump also needs help from all Americans who are concerned about the possible wide-area, even nation-wide, consequences of EMP effects, which can result from a hostile attack even by terrorists or by a natural, actually certain to happen — its only uncertainty is when, solar storm that envelopes the Globe in a major Geomagnetic Disruption (GMD) that could shut down the electric power grids around the world.

Either the manmade or natural EMP possibility poses an existential threat to all Americans, as I have written repeatedly over the past five years. Click here for links to a few of the many previous messages on EMP and what we should be doing to deal with this existential threat. (Click here for 215 previous messages.)

It is important that the President took this initiative that acknowledged the existential EMP threat. It is most important that he established leadership within the White House National Security Council, and directed that leadership to produce a “whole of government” response to counter the threat.

That’s the good news. For a clue of the bad news, consider Peter’s apt title indicating that the President “must drain the DC swamp.” Let’s count a few facts about the swamp dwellers:

The Department of Energy (DOE) — and its predecessor Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) — was historically most interested in designing, testing and building nuclear weapons and not in understanding their effects and how to protect against them. That task was assigned to the DoD, and particularly to the predecessor organizations of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). Now the DOE laboratories seek to rediscover the lessons learned by others decades ago.
Meanwhile, a quarter century ago, the Department of Defense (DoD), which previously pioneered how best to understand and protect against the EMP threat (and from all other nuclear weapons effects), ceased its prior efforts to maintain its expertise and now has few residual experts. But its previously prepared manuals retain the past lessons learned about how to protect against EMP effects, while its current experts relearn those lessons.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has long had a “whole of government” responsibility but has previously placed the priority on dealing with the existential EMP threat near the bottom of its list of threats to which it is supposed to respond. It is on a steep learning curve, now that the President hopefully has moved the EMP threat to a much higher position.

For my part, I welcome everyone becoming aware of this threat and how to counter it. But I am very concerned that the Executive Order contains numerous recipes for months and even years of delays fostered by unneeded studies to relearn lessons mastered a half century ago — and kept secret from the American people for much of the time since then.

That condition has persisted even after the threat was made public by congressional actions almost 20-years ago, by establishing a Congressional EMP Commission that issued its findings and recommendations in 2004, 2008 and most recently in 2016-17. Click here the Commission’s reports.

I strongly encourage you to click here and read the Chairman’s July 2017 personal summary report that lays out with important notable specifics about issues that future White House/National Security Council initiatives should most definitely take into account, including specific assessments of recent failures of the intelligence community and the thus far faulty efforts to reinvent past forgotten or never learned lessons. In many cases, key information has been over-classified and withheld from the electric power companies that need that information to protect the electric power grid.

The Commissioners deserve thanks from the American People in spite of the actions of an ungrateful congress that abolished its operations in 2017, without giving any thanks to the commissioners, some of whom served without compensation for 17-years. Such has been the resistance to recognizing and responding to this existential threat.

Those commissioners consistently testified to Congress and through their public reports emphasized that that this existential threat deserves serious urgent attention — and the President’s Executive Order must surely be gratifying to them.

But we should not delay efforts to deal effectively with the threat with well proven technology and procedures while relearning lessons that were mastered decades ago. And I remain convinced that the wisest approach is from the “bottom-up.” Click here for my May 4, 2017 testimony before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee to that effect.

Moreover, I am persuaded from our Lake Wylie Pilot Study experience that we can quite affordably harden the electric power grid by using the same EMP hardening procedures used for decades to design, deploy, assess and upgrade our most important military systems.

Click here for a version of the completely unclassified Military Standard that was formulated by experts who had serious experience actually testing our military systems to assure they can survive these nuclear weapon effects.

Over the past several years, Dr. George Baker, who was actively involved in preparing these military standards three decades ago, worked with York County officials and engineers to assess their components of the Distribution Grid and to estimate the costs of fully protecting them against EMP.

Leaders of the Rock Hill Municipal Utility Company and the York County Electric Cooperative Company permitted Dr. Baker access to their grid infrastructure and have been very cooperative in supporting our Lake Wylie Pilot Study. Duke Energy engineers also have been very cooperative and are conducting their own assessment and cost estimates for protecting their Generation and Transmission Grid infrastructure.

While the descriptors “Transmission” and “Distribution” seem only subtly different since they both are pathways for electricity, the substance of that distinction at many levels is very important.

As illustrated below, “Transmission” lines (in blue) carry very high voltage — nominally over 100 kilovolts (KV) — electricity over long distances that is then stepped down by Extra High Voltage (EHV) and High Voltage (HV) Transformers to lower voltage “Distribution” lines (in green) that deliver electricity to most customers — perhaps most notably to private citizens, but also to most commercial and other customers that provide essential support to our citizens. Hospitals, water-wastewater infrastructure, essential communications — especially to support emergency management operations, etc. are important examples of these essential functions.

When we began our Lake Wylie Pilot Study, the engineers responsible for the Rock Hill Utility and York County Electric companies had not identified with the Duke engineers where their most important connections to Duke’s Transmission Grid should be located to meet citizens’ needs under a major stressed condition like an EMP attack.

So, while I was quite sure that Duke Engineers would do all they could to assure their grid (all components) is protected, there was little assurance that the Rock Hill/York County Distribution Grid would likewise be protected — and that fact notably left at risk such critical infrastructure as supports York County’s major hospital in Rock Hill and the water-wastewater infrastructure supporting most of York County.

In my opinion, water is next in importance to electricity itself — e.g., without water, hospital patients can be expected to begin dying within hours after the loss of water. That disconnect has been corrected.

The bottom line to Dr. George Baker’s assessment is that it would cost about $22 million to harden the York County Distribution Grid to the same EMP threat levels against which we protect our most important military systems.

When considering the population of York County, this estimate corresponds to a one-time cost of about $90 per York County citizen — or about $450 for a York County family of five, much less than what that family likely pays each month for health insurance.

This expense is clearly affordable, and I believe that the citizens of York County can themselves afford the one-time costs to do this job and probably would if asked. But their leaders and others need to engage more comprehensively to assure that all our citizens are protected — in South and North Carolina and beyond. And that expense should be shared with others, including Federal authorities who are sworn to “provide for the common defense.”

With that thought in mind, George also briefly considered the emergency management infrastructure for York County and its connections to our state capitol, Columbia. In particular he considered an initial assessment of what it would cost to assure that the “Palmetto 800” communication system can provide emergency communications throughout South Carolina following an EMP attack.

His first estimate was that hardening the statewide Palmetto 800 system would cost $17 million. While I believe we should scrub this estimate with additional scrutiny, it seems clear that dealing with the EMP threat to emergency management infrastructure should easily be affordable if shared by the over 5 million citizens of South Carolina.

From my perspective, I believe we need to more fully develop a strategy for moving ahead throughout the state of South Carolina, North Carolina and beyond. Just in South Carolina, there are about 40 Public Municipal Utility and Electric Cooperative Companies, as well as two major electric power companies, Duke Energy and Dominion Energy. Because of the complexities of the plethora of connections, there are many opportunities for inadvertent vulnerabilities and establishing sound effective maintenance/surveillance operations will be important into the indefinite future.

I believe we should continue our “bottoms-up” approach to assessing our vulnerabilities and recommending corrective actions. The lessons learned should be important to the 3000-4000 utility companies and cooperatives around the nation.

I’ve written about our Lake Wylie Pilot Study repeatedly since 2014. For the most comprehensive summary reports: click here for my December 18, 2018 message that laid out in detail the origins of our effort; and click here for my January 15, 2019 message that updated it with a focus on exporting the lessons learned beyond South Carolina, including specifically the possibility of joining forces with our colleagues in Texas. And click here for my March 12, 2019 most recent discussion.

As emphasized there, I chose to “address that threat from the bottom up” beginning in Rock Hill and York County. And we have now reached an important moment of truth, about which I briefly shared with colleagues at the recent Palmetto Panel 2019 meeting in Clemson. Click here my presentation.

I have previously refused offers for initiatives to seek support from either our SC state or federal legislators, although I have kept key legislators informed of our Lake Wylie efforts and progress. I am an engineer and wanted first to understand the problems and then what it will take to harden the key infrastructure in York County, and particularly in Rock Hill, the fourth largest city in South Carolina.

We are now at that point, and are seeking additional support for further work.

My preferred next step is to take our lessons-learned effort to Oconee and Anderson Counties of the Northwestern “Piedmont” section of South Carolina where a major Duke Energy nuclear power plant provides significant electricity to the nearby citizens, and in particular to the 263^rd Army Air and Missile Defense Command (AAMDC) which will link our efforts to a national command and control network that is key to the defense of our nation.

Assuring the related utility and co-op companies are viable will help assure continuing viable 263^rd operations if confronted with a major blackout of the electric power grid. So there would be national security benefits from this proposed “Oconee-Anderson Counties Pilot Study.” More about this proposed initiative in the future.

We have gone far enough in examining vulnerabilities of the York County Distribution Grid and estimating what it will cost to assure its viability when under a major EMP attack to take the next steps in seeking funds to achieve that viability for the citizens of Rock Hill and York County — at least insofar as the Distribution Grid is concerned. We are seeking additional funding to work up a sound architecture for moving beyond York County, next to Oconee and Anderson Counties and then throughout South Carolina.

As previously discussed, Duke Energy is cooperating with our Lake Wylie efforts and conducting its own assessment and cost estimates for protecting its Generation and Transmission Gird infrastructure. As I understand it, the Duke effort should have completed these assessment and cost estimates sometime this month.

Hopefully, our joint efforts will continue — not only in Oconee and Anderson Counties, but also into North Carolina, first by completing our Lake Wylie Pilot Study in Gaston County which borders on Lake Wylie and has similar characteristics to York County and then to a much more complex situation in Mecklenburg County, which includes Duke’s Corporate Headquarters in Charlotte.

Once we are done there — and perhaps before then — we will be prepared to take our lessons learned to other metropolitan areas around the nation.

And none too soon, I might add, because the threat is all too real. And hopefully we will proceed in a way that is responsive to the stated concerns of Senator Ron Johnson, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. You should be aware of the February 27, 2019 Round Table he chaired.

Click here for that full hearing, well worth a couple of hours of your time, and here for Dr. Baker’s prepared testimony, which in my view was the most representative presentation of the current situation — and one to which Senator Johnson asked all hearing participants to respond .

I’ll close this message with a summary statement by Senator Johnson that expresses his frustration with the past performance of the Federal response to the existential EMP threat:

“We have known about the existential threat posed by electromagnetic pulses (EMP) and geomagnetic disturbances (GMD) for decades. Because most people are either unaware of the danger, or view these as very low probability events, there has not been sufficient public pressure to take effective action to mitigate these threats. Instead, we establish commissions and study panels, conduct research, and develop plans to develop strategies. It is way past time to stop admiring this problem, and actually begin to do something concrete to protect our vulnerable electrical grid, control systems, and the ever-increasing array of electronic devices our society has become dependent upon.”

To which I say: “Amen!!!!” And do it “from the bottom-up.”

Bottom Lines.

The Lake Wylie Pilot Study has demonstrated how to accomplish a viable assessment and — by using the decades old proven technology that has been used to protect our most important military systems — to estimate valid associated costs to assure “from the bottom-up” a viable Distribution Gird to deliver electricity to the citizens of Rock Hill and York County.

Moreover, this cost is clearly affordable. Now the question is how it should/will be paid — and we are considering the possibilities for getting the needed funds.

We also hope to extend the lessons learned to the rest of South and North Carolina, and ultimately to the rest of the nation.

This bottom-up approach is an appropriate model to be pursued in responding to President Trump’s Executive Order directing the executive branch “powers that be” to protect the nation’s electric power grid.

And thank you, Mr. President, for keeping the White House in charge!

What can you do?

Join us in praying for our nation, and for a rebirth of the freedom sought, achieved and passed to us by those who came before us.

Help us to spread our message to the grass roots and to encourage all “powers that be” to provide for the common defense as they are sworn to do.

Begin by passing this message to your friends and suggest they visit our webpage www.highfrontier.org, for more information. Also, please encourage your sphere of influence to sign up for our weekly e-newsletter.

Encourage them to review our past email messages, posted on www.highfrontier.org, to learn about many details related to the existential manmade and natural EMP threats and how we can protect America against them. I hope you will help us with our urgently needed efforts, which I will be discussing in future messages.

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