October 22, 2019—Get On with the EMP Executive Order!

“An electromagnetic pulse (EMP) has the potential to disrupt, degrade, and damage technology and critical infrastructure systems. Human-made or naturally occurring EMPs can affect large geographic areas, disrupting elements critical to the Nation’s security and economic prosperity, and could adversely affect global commerce and stability. The Federal Government must foster sustainable, efficient, and cost-effective approaches to improving the Nation’s resilience to the effects of EMPs.” Statement of Purpose of the March 26, 2019 Executive Order 13865 on Coordinating National Resilience to Electromagnetic Pulses.

Click here for President Trump’s Executive Order directing a major challenge for a dysfunctional federal government, as Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) made clear just over a month earlier in his summarizing comment following the February 17, 2019 “round table” discussion of the existential EMP threat before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which he chairs.

“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.”

I’ve previously written about 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. George Baker’s prepared testimony, which in my view was the most representative presentation of the then (and still) current situation — and one to which Senator Johnson asked all hearing participants to respond.

This condition should give local citizens and leaders a great incentive for countering this now identified potentially urgent problem “from the bottom-up.” As I have discussed often over the past several years, we have been pursuing such a bottom-up “pilot study” in South Carolina. Click here for my May 4, 2017 testimony before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources that acknowledged this condition and emphasized:

The slow pace of federal and state efforts to counter the existential threats to the electric power grid — particularly from manmade and natural EMP threats;

How to protect the grid was learned by the Department of Defense (DoD) decades ago, and no technical reason prevents using that knowledge to protect the grid;
Ignorance, resulting from over-classification of that information and other political constraints, has frustrated governmental and private efforts to apply these known solutions to protect the grid;
A “bottom-up” approach in York County, South Carolina is providing a very affordable precedent that can be exploited by other counties in South and North Carolina and throughout the United States.

Click here for my most recent discussion, just two week ago, of the current status of our Lake Wylie Pilot Study, which has demonstrated the affordability of protecting critical civil infrastructure by using the same hardening methods applied for decades to protect our most important strategic military systems (our strategic nuclear forces and their essential command, control and communications systems).

Specifically, we concluded it would cost each citizen of York County less than $100 to protect the county’s Distribution Grid that provides electricity to its hospital, water-wastewater management and delivery, other utilities, businesses, people, industry, transportation, emergency management, essential communications, etc. Imagine life without electricity. Additional funds would be required to assure the York County Distribution Grid is maintained including the connection to a hardened SC state-wide Palmetto 800 MHZ emergency management communications system. But those additional costs also should be quite affordable.

In York County, the Distribution Grid 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 these important functions. They receive electricity from the so-called “Bulk Power Grid,” composed of Power Generation Plants and the Transmission Grid — for York County, from Duke Energy’s “Transmission Grid” infrastructure that, in turn, includes electricity 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.)

As illustrated above, “Transmission” lines (in blue) carry electricity from Power Generation Plants, stepped-up to very high voltage via “step-up transformers,” transmitted over long distances, and then converted to lower voltage via “step-down transformers” to “Distribution” lines (in green) that compose about 90-percent of the nation’s Transmission plus Distribution lines delivering electricity from the Power Generating Plants 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 as discussed in my message two weeks ago, there are over 2000 municipal utility and co-op companies that manage that Distribution Grid — a major management challenge, you think???

We will be exploring those difficulties when we consider how best to share the lessons learned from the Lake Wylie Pilot Study with the 40 such companies responsoble for the Distribution Grid in South Carolina — a key product of our “bottom-up” plan, also to be shared with others around the nation, beginning especially in North Carolina counties neighboring Charlotte, the nation’s 22nd largest population center and home of Duke Energy’s corporate headquarters. Duke has from the outset been a very important partner in the Lake Wylie Pilot Study.

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, the above 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 hardening cost estimates.

This step will complete the overall assessment for York County and set the stage for extending the lessons learned elsewhere in South and North Carolina. I will discuss these plans in future messages, and I hope those plans will be spread throughout the nation as a basis for an affordable program to harden every state’s electric grid — thereby the entire nation’s grid.

This plan exploits the hardening methods pioneered decades ago by the Defense Department to harden 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 enable 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 do not argue against studies to do this job of protecting our critical civil infrastructure better, but I Insist that we should not wait on such studies — we should begin today to employ quite affordable hardening methods that the Defense Department has been using for decades.

And I believe that our Lake Wylie Pilot Study and its extension into other counties in South and North Carolina will provide the basis for making that case. We have no time to waste in making this case.

Either manmade 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.

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

That’s been the good news. But now it is time to check up on the progress of his initiative, which called for several deliverables by now. I fear such a review will find bureaucratic obstacles have caused unnecessary and most unwarranted delays.

I urge Senator Johnson to undertake an initiative to look into this status, because of his stated concern about the longstanding lethargic response to dealing with this long-ago recognized existential threat.

He should note that the Executive Order contains numerous recipes for months and even years of delays fostered by additional studies to relearn lessons mastered decades ago — and kept secret from the American people for much of the time since then. And he should understand that little has happened since 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. Click here to read the Chairman’s July 2017 personal summary report that lays out with important notable specifics the issues that future White House/National Security Council initiatives should most definitely take into account. Senator Johnson should look into whether the current plan of the National Security Council staff, now being reduced and reorganized, is taking those concerns into account.

I also urge him to consider what I believe is the wisest approach: “From the bottom-up.”

Not from top down directives from Washington, but by local and state initiatives that address the problems best known to those who manage the nation’s electric power grid day-to-day.

Again, click here for my May 4, 2017 testimony before the Energy and Natural Resources Committee that provides my perspective on this important matter.

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 that we have used for decades to design, deploy, assess and upgrade our most important military systems.

Moreover, these hardening principles are completely unclassified and available. Click here for the completely unclassified Military Standard formulated by experts who had serious experience dating from the days when we actually tested our military systems to assure they can survive these nuclear weapon effects.

I’ll close this message by repeating Senator Johnson’s statement 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!!!!” So, I urge him to check up on what is being done by the bureaucracy in allegedly responding to President Trump’s March 26, 2019 Executive Order.

Some “Due Dates” have already been passed. Were they met?

The time for action is now!

Bottom Lines.

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 Distribution Gird to deliver electric power to the citizens of Rock Hill and York County.

With Duke Energy’s promised cooperation, such estimates will also be provided for the Bulk Power Grid in York County, setting the stage for further extensions of the lessons learned.

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 Johnson could do the project a great service by looking into the status of the efforts to implement the President’s EMP Executive Order, ASAP!

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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