March 25, 2020 — Assure Viable Grid Operations During COVID-19!

This message provides a direct link to a very important report, “Preserving Operational Continuity for Electric Utility Control Rooms During the COVID-19 Pandemic” from the Foundation of Resilient Societies on whose Board of Directors I serve.

This report’s primary author is Tom Popik, the Foundation’s Founder and President and a MIT Electrical Engineer with a Harvard MBA. I was pleased to join him in co-authoring this report with Dr. Alan Nichols, a retired Rock Hill, SC physician who has played an enormously important role in our Lake Wylie Pilot Study, and Ms. Lanaanne Tyrell, who holds a Masters Degree in Public Health and is an Adjunct Faculty Member at the River University of Public Health. I strongly recommend that you read this effort, and especially pay attention to requirements for assuring continuity of operations of our essential Operations Centers. Click here, and consider its following Abstract.

“Modelling of the COVID-19 pandemic shows control room operators at electric utilities will have high probability of being exposed and possibly infected. High absenteeism in operator teams, if not proactively managed, will reduce electric reliability and could cause blackouts. Reported COVID-19 cases used in a generalized logistic growth model indicate unmitigated spread in the U.S. could peak in the last week of April 2020. Alternatively, if mitigations are successful, the peak might be delayed until September or later. Utilities should plan for multiple scenarios. CDC guidelines should recommend asymptomatic testing of operators. When community infections are prevalent, operators should have priority for N95 masks and other personal protections. Monitoring and reporting of workforce health status to organizations such as the E-ISAC will be critically important during the COVID-19 pandemic. Medical personnel may be assigned to the most critical control facilities. Information sharing will enable better support to utilities from state, local, and federal governments. Modeling indicates that pandemic planning should be reexamined and updated by early April 2020.”

As I ended my message yesterday, “While we can hope for the best, we should plan for the worst.” This important report should help those who share in preparing for the worst. And we all should pray for deliverance.

Click here for yesterday’s High Frontier message with more information and additional links to supporting/backup information.

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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E-Mail Message 200325