On the heels of Halloween, we saw the California fires finally wind down and a year-long silly season toward our next national election begin — while Washington’s leaders mostly ignore the existential EMP threat. And after Saturday’s 30th anniversary of the end of the Cold War when the Berlin Wall came down and the 244th birthday of the Marines, Veterans Day reminds us of all who have served and are serving to keep us safe and secure.
Against this backdrop, it is worth considering how long we will just muddle through a plethora of dangers?
I think we are living through the most dangerous time of my lifetime — and we seem to insist on ignoring the warning signs of pending dangers. We seem to be much more interested in trivia than one of what I consider to be among the most important of those dangers.
In a sense, this is the American way; we tend to ignore even obviously great threats until we are shocked out of our complacency. For example, just consider the history of Veterans Day.
Click here for my message on the 100th anniversary of when the armistice after World War I went into effect on the Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month of 1918, ever since the day we remember those who have worn our nation’s uniforms.
And remember that alleged “War to End All Wars” began with unanticipated events — and afterward, we disarmed and returned to our national sleep during the “Roaring 20s” that ended in depression and events leading to World War II, when “The Greatest Generation” were victorious in four-and-a-half years after their leaders were rudely awakened by Pearl Harbor in 1941.
And again we disarmed only to be reawakened by the Korean “conflict” that ended in another armistice in the early days of the Cold War, leaving us with conditions that still influence our security interests today as we deal with nuclear threats from Russia, China, North Korea and its erstwhile ally Iran.
We missed numerous warning signs that afterward were most apparent to all but the dumbest among us. Click here for my previous discussion of such “Black Swan events.”
Are we again are courting such a “Black Swan” event — perhaps this time one without a happy ending?
I fear the answer is an unqualified yes — particularly for our thus far lethargic response to the existential natural or manmade electromagnetic pulse (EMP) threat, about which we have had clear warning from almost two decades, since the formation of the 2001-2018 Congressional EMP Commission and its 2004, 2008 and the 2017-18 reports. Click here for all these public reports.
And still we dither while we know that Russia, China, North Korea and Iran all explicitly include exploiting devastating EMP attacks in their military doctrine.
Perhaps the most visible recent events that suggest catastrophic consequences of such attacks are the recent fires in California that can lead us to imagine what would have happened without electricity. By the end of last weekend, the fires were only smoldering after weeks of major firefighting battles. But without electricity, those battles against nature would have been impossible. Electricity is needed to support, operate and manage almost every system needed for vital firefighting functions.
Even given state-of-the-art functional equipment, it further seems clear that the California “powers that be” were unprepared to deal with the recent fires.
Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) had not taken commonsense preparations and upgrades to its aging infrastructure. For example, underbrush that could and should have been cleared provided fuel for disastrous fires once begun — in turn placing the electric power infrastructure at risk.
Moreover, there were reports that transformer failures actually could have been a source for initiating fires, as highlighted by a figure in my last message. And falling tree branches reportedly triggered additional fires — like in 2003 when tree branches that fell on power lines in Ohio caused a major blackout throughout the Northeastern United States, leaving 50-million people without electricity.
It took years for “regulators” to demand countermeasures to avoid a repeat of that possibility — even so, PG&E apparently didn’t get the message.
Click here for a very informative November 2, 2019 Washington Times article on these conditions and their implications by Dr. William R. Graham, who served as chairman of the EMP Commission and President Reagan’s Science Advisor (and a California resident), former CIA Director Ambassador R. James Woolsey and Dr. Peter Vincent Pry, who was Chief of Staff of the EMP Commission.
According to them — and I agree, “California’s rolling blackouts affecting millions, contributing to chaos caused by deadly wildfires consuming entire forests and neighborhoods, is an object lesson that the nation’s electric utilities cannot be trusted to protect the American people from EMP (including severe solar storms) or cyber warfare.”
Moreover, they emphasize that these conditions are not a recent condition; for example, the California Public Utility Commission in 2013 warned that “Several aspects of the PG&E distribution system present serious issues.” And since then, they report that there have been multiple specific huge PG&E related wildfires leading to major destruction and fatalities — attributable to PG&E failures.
Furthermore, they lay these failures at the feet of the federal regulatory system — perhaps most notably the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and their agent, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) — and the electric power industry and its lobbying activities.
It should be understood that FERC is responsible only for the Bulk Power Grid — the electric Power Generation Plants and the high voltage Transmission Grid. The Distribution Grid that actually receives electricity from the Transmission Grid and delivers it to essentially all customers is regulated by state regulatory commissions. Click here for my October 22, 2019 discussion of these important conditions, again illustrated below.
“Transmission” lines (in blue) carry electricity from Power Generation Plants, stepped-up to very high voltage via “step-up transformers,” to be transmitted over long distances, and then be converted to lower voltage via “step-down transformers” to “Distribution” lines (in green) that compose about 90-percent of the grid to deliver electricity to customers — perhaps most notably to private citizens, but also to commercial and other customers that provide essential support to our citizens. Imagine life without electricity!
And not just to fight forest fires!
As noted, the FERC/NERC regulatory world (supplemented by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission — the NRC) is responsible for the Bulk Power Grid — and the Distribution Grid is regulated by some 50 state regulatory bodies with operations that vary from state-to-state. As the EMP Commission Chairman’s Report warned, this current complex regulatory arrangement is “doomed to fail.”
Furthermore, Dr. Graham pointed out in his July 2017 EMP Chairman’s report that associated lobbying activities are undercutting industry’s ability to actually provide the needed protection — and he associated with this criticism the NERC, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) and Edison Electric Institute (EEI) as lacking needed expertise to protect the grid against EMP and cyber warfare threats.
It is pertinent for appropriate Congressional oversight authorities to ask if anything has subsequently happened to change this criticism.
Meanwhile I insist that our Lake Wylie Pilot Study is showing that quite technically competent protection is affordable. As such, it is a model that others can follow in protecting their electric grids from the bottom up. So, there is no technical reason why we cannot protect the overall grid and no economic reason why we cannot assure the most critical elements are viable.
Finally, I note that Graham, Woolsey and Pry observed that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Energy (DOE) have “concocted a strategy” that unwisely relies on “public-private partnerships” where “the US. Government is the junior partner, essentially trusting the expertise and competence of the utilities.”
Not only is this situation absurd, it is totally misplaced — as our Lake Wylie Pilot Study is demonstrating.
As discussed previously, the Distribution Grid in York County, SC is primarily owned, operated and managed by the Rock Hill Utility and York Electric Co-op companies that provide essential electricity to support most, if not all, important functions in York County. They receive electricity from Duke Energy’s Transmission Grid that, in turn, receives electricity the nation’s system of power plants, most notably from three Duke plants on Lake Wylie formed on the Catawba River that flows from North Carolina to South Carolina. (The Wylie Hydroelectric Power Plant and Catawba Nuclear Power Plant are in York County, SC and the Allen Coal Plant is in Gaston County, NC.)
Thanks to the support of the leaders of the Rock Hill Utility and York Electric Co-op companies who opened their infrastructure associated with providing essential electricity to support most if not all these important functions, a quite affordable cost estimate was achieved by nationally recognized experts in hardening complex systems to EMP effects. Duke Energy leaders have agreed to open their key York County Bulk Power Grid infrastructure to the same quality EMP vulnerability assessment and to provide cost estimates to protect all essential elements of the York County grid.
We are exploiting the hardening methods pioneered decades ago by the Department of Defense (DoD) to protect our strategic nuclear forces — our Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) system, our strategic bombers, our submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs ) and the associated command, control and communications systems that enabled the President to control those forces when under nuclear attack, especially after their exposure to a precursor high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) from multiple high altitude nuclear explosions.
I insist that we need not wait on additional studies to begin today to employ quite affordable hardening methods that we have been using for decades.
Either man-made or natural EMP poses an existential threat to all Americans, as I have written repeatedly over the past five years. Click here for over 200 previous messages on EMP and what we should be doing to deal with this existential threat.
The Regulatory challenge is truly problematic…and leadership is needed. The White House National Security Council needs to make sure it is constructively addressed as it manages the “whole of government” response to President Trump’s March 26, 2019 Executive Order on Coordinating National Resilience to Electromagnetic Pulses.
And I again urge Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) to look into the progress thus far in meeting the “due dates” of that important objective — as well as the Graham, Woolsey and Pry criticisms.
Bottom Lines.
Graham, Woolsey and Pry conclude: “Frighteningly, as wildfires and rolling blackouts roil California, the DHS and DOE are out-sourcing national security to the electric power industry, trusting the likes of PG&E, NERC and EPRI to safeguard electric grids and the American people from a solar or manmade EMP catastrophe.”
Meanwhile, the Lake Wylie Pilot Study is demonstrating how to accomplish a viable assessment and estimate valid associated affordable costs to assure “from the bottom-up” a viable Bulk Power and Distribution Gird to deliver electric power to the citizens of Rock Hill and York County.
This Pilot 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.
Senator Ron Johnson, in his oversight role as Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Natural Resources Committee, could do this project and others a great service by looking into the status of the efforts to implement the President’s EMP Executive Order, ASAP!
Some “Due Dates” have already been passed. Were they met?
Let’s stop “muddling through…”
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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