What is the plan for an electric grid outage that lasts for months?

Preface. There are three posts on Ted Koppel’s book “Lights out”:

I have spent a great deal of time trying to find out what the plans are for a prolonged electric grid blackout at the local, state, and federal levels. I found nothing at the federal level, such as the military, homeland security, FEMA and other agencies, so I am very grateful to Koppel for having interviewed the directors and other high-level executives at these organizations.

Guess what? There is no plan. America reacts after the fact. And realistically it would be hard to have a plan since it involves stockpiling billions of MRE rations which have a shelf-life of only five years. Most authorities think that the grid would be brought back up quickly, so dismiss this is as a concern and aren’t making plans at all.

Since a long grid outage could kill 90% of Americans, Koppel advises each of us to have a year of food on hand, like the Mormons. If you read this book, you will be motivated to do so!

As far as cyberattacks go, one of the reasons we’re so vulnerable is that private companies do not want to spend the money to prevent these attacks, and the government can’t force them to. Even if large corporations do protect themselves, they won’t share their security with smaller companies that can’t afford to do this on their own, thanks to capitalism and this dog-eat-dog world, which creates vulnerable points that can spread outward across the internet and back to the big companies.

Koppel sees cyberattacks as the greatest threat because he is energy blind, unaware of peak oil and how fossils keep the electric grid up. This isn’t a weeks or months long catastrophe, it is a forever emergency since the grid requires fossil energy to stay up as my books “Life After Fossil Fuels” and “When Trucks Stop Running” explain in detail (and posts here at energyskeptic).

But it is hard to anticipate how to prepare as well. Koppel lists the ways that Britain prepared for WWI and II, guessing that chemical weapons would be used and creating spaces to treat victims and other disasters that turned out to not be the case. Almost 2 million women and children were evacuated from London to the countryside, but German attack came so much later that most of them had moved back.

The bottom line is that if one or all of the three U.S. grids go down, coping would have to come under the management of the military to distribute emergency supplies, prevent civil unrest, establish shelters, manage millions of domestic refugees and more. But since there are no plans and no preparations are being made, well, use your imagination about how that will go! With the grid down there’s no way to communicate to everyone what to do either, coordinate a response.

Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Women in ecology Podcasts: WGBH, Financial Sense, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity, Index of best energyskeptic posts

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Koppel T (2015) Lights Out: A Cyberattack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath.

Why a long grid outage would kill people

A FERC analysis concluded that if nine of the country’s most critical substations were knocked out at the same time, it could cause a blackout encompassing most of the United States. Without ready access to electricity, we are thrust back into another age—an age in which many of us would lack both the experience and the resources to survive.

As batteries lose power, there is the more gradual failure of cellphones, portable radios, and flashlights. Emergency generators provide pockets of light and power, but there is little running water anywhere taps go dry; toilets no longer flush. Emergency supplies of bottled water are too scarce to use for anything but drinking, and there is nowhere to replenish the supply. Disposal of human waste becomes a critical issue within days. Supermarket and pharmacy shelves are empty in a matter of hours.

Emergency personnel are overwhelmingly engaged in rescuing people trapped in elevators. Medicines are running out. Home care patients reliant on ventilators and other medical machines are already dying. Round-the-clock chatter on radio and television continues, but there’s little new information and a diminishing number of people still have access to functioning radios and television sets. The tissue of emails, texts, and phone calls that held our social networks together is tearing.

Fuel is beginning to run out. Operating gas stations have no way of determining when their supply of gasoline and diesel will be replenished, and gas stations without backup generators are unable to operate their pumps. Those with generators are running out of fuel and shutting down. The amount of water, food, and fuel consumed by a city of several million inhabitants is staggering. Emergency supplies are sufficient only for a matter of days,

So many of our transactions are now conducted in cyberspace that we have developed dependencies we could not even have imagined a generation ago. The very structure that keeps electricity flowing throughout the United States depends absolutely on computerized systems designed to maintain perfect balance between supply and demand.

It is the Internet that provides the instant access to the computerized systems that maintain that equilibrium. If a sophisticated hacker gained access to one of those systems and succeeded in throwing that precarious balance out of kilter, the consequences would be devastating.

The grid is a network connecting thousands of companies, many of which still put profit ahead of security. Critical equipment that is decades old and difficult to replace sits in exposed locations, vulnerable to physical attack. Computerized systems that control the flow of electricity around the country were designed before anyone even contemplated cyberspace as an environment suited to malicious attacks.

It has been estimated that only one in ten of us would survive a year into a nationwide blackout, the rest perishing from starvation, disease, or societal breakdown. See: Testimony of Dr. Peter Vincent Pry at the U.S. House of Representatives Serial No. 114-42 on May 13, 2015. The EMP Threat: the state of preparedness against the threat of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) event. House of Representatives.

A nationwide blackout lasting 1 year could kill up to 90% Americans

What’s been done so far to prepare

In early April 2015, the Pentagon, in a move that received hardly any public attention, announced a $700 million contract with the Raytheon Corporation to relocate critical computer systems deep underground into the massive bunker under Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado to shield the electronic communications gear from an extreme solar storm or from an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack.

The commission estimated that protecting the national electric grid against an EMP attack would cost about $2 billion. It is unclear whether our elected representatives have decided that the threat of an EMP attack is not that realistic after all or whether the failure to act owes more to their conclusion that there are more pressing issues requiring the expenditure of more than $2 billion. In the endless competition for federal funding, Washington has grown inured to the chorus of lobbyists crying wolf on behalf of one cause or another.

A few reasons why preparation is not underway

The government agencies and civic organizations charged with enabling the nation to recover from catastrophe are woefully unprepared. Keith Alexander’s many years in the military provide some understanding of those confronting multiple crises simultaneously. He puts it this way: “Everybody’s out there fighting today’s alligators, and we’re talking about future alligators, and they say, ‘Look, I’ve got this problem with ISIS, I’ve got this problem with Afghanistan, Gaza keeps coming up, I got this wingnut in North Korea; and you’re talking about a potential problem.’

So what’s the plan?

The Department of Homeland Security has no plans beyond those designed to deal with the aftermath of natural disasters.

The deputy administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) believes that a major urban center would have to be evacuated. His boss, the administrator, does not. The administrator believes that a successful cyberattack on a power grid is possible, even likely. His deputy does not. The current secretary of homeland security is sure that a plan to deal with the aftermath of a cyberattack on the grid exists, but he doesn’t know any details of the plan.

As of this writing, there is no specific plan. We are unprepared, but why isn’t the issue higher on our list of national priorities? It is difficult for anyone holding public office to focus attention on a problem without being able to offer any solutions. Then, too, the American public needs to be convinced that the threat is real. And let the record show: it is not easy to convince the American public of anything.

Dispatching journalists into the field to gather information costs money; hiring a glib bloviator is relatively cheap, and inviting opinionated guests to vent on the air is entirely cost-free. It wouldn’t work if it weren’t popular, and audiences, it turns out, are endlessly absorbed by hearing amplified echoes of their own biases. It has never been more difficult to convince the American public of anything that it is not already inclined to believe. It’s divisive and damaging to the healthy functioning of our political system, but it’s also indisputably inexpensive and, therefore, good business.

There have been, as of this writing, only four secretaries of homeland security. Each of them has conceded the likelihood of a catastrophic cyberattack affecting the power grid; none has developed a plan designed to deal with the aftermath.

Where, then, might a concerned citizen find advice on how to cope with the aftermath of such an attack? “There is no answer,” said Schmidt. No government agency has guidelines for private citizens because, according to Schmidt, there’s nothing any individual can do to prepare. “We’re so interconnected,” he said, that in terms of disaster preparation “it’s not just me anymore: it’s me and my neighbors and where I get my electricity from. There’s nothing I can do that can protect me if the rest of the system falters.” It’s an answer bordering on the fatalistic: the individual can’t do anything and the government won’t do anything.

Michael Chertoff estimated that a concerted cyberattack could knock one or more power grids offline for several weeks. When I asked whether he believed the American people are prepared for anything like that, he stated the obvious: “In some parts of the country, people do stock food and buy generators. In urban centers people don’t do that. In New York you’d try to move a lot of people out over a period of time.

“Really?” I asked. “More than eight million people? Where? How?

What, I wondered, could I learn from the senior officer at my local fire department? The captain on duty at the Potomac, Maryland, fire station assured me that there are secret locations where food and water have been stored. “For all of us?” I asked. “No, just for the first responders. He would next be awaiting further instructions. “And when you get those instructions, how will you communicate them to the rest of us when the electricity’s out?” “I’m due to retire in a couple of years,” said the captain. “I’m hoping it doesn’t happen before then.

But what, I wondered, if a blackout was the result of a cyberattack? What if the affected area covered several states and efforts to restore power were ineffective for weeks or even months? Is there a plan?

“There is no plan that would be adequate in that circumstance,” Napolitano conceded.

In September 2014, Joe Nimmich was reluctant to accept my premise of a wide-ranging, weeks-long electric power outage affecting millions of people. Still, if it did happen, he insisted, the federal government would be ready to deal with it. He was confident that electric power sufficient to avoid a catastrophe could be restored quickly. “I’ve planned for a million people being homeless, I’ve planned for tens of thousands of people being deceased. I think very easily we can convert those plans.” Nimmich was describing a scenario in which Southern California is hit by a catastrophic earthquake. “When we look at the plan…we’re talking about activating 70,000 troops.” He referenced Title X, the legal basis for the roles and missions of the armed forces, saying that he had planned for “the National Guard to keep law and order, and the Title X forces to be able to go in and actually help people move.” Relocation was central to Nimmich’s plan. “The plan is, you start moving people east. You take them out of Los Angeles, put them in hotel rooms in Nevada.

In the case of a power grid going down, urging people to stay in their homes may be exactly the right thing to do, at least in the immediate aftermath. Buildings would be essentially undamaged and bridges, roads, and tunnels untouched, leaving routes open for resupply convoys and voluntary evacuation for those who choose to leave.

I put the center of this hypothetical disaster in Manhattan. Nimmich was undeterred. “If, in fact, for some reason this is going to be a long duration, we are going to start an orderly movement of people out of Manhattan. And whether you bring buses in or you use trains, you’re going to have to move them out of the area. You know, you’re giving me two alternatives: we either find some way to restore the power or we move people to where they’re no longer in a life-threatening situation.” “You’re going to move five or six million people?”

“Sure”

To Nimmich, there is no clear answer nor is there a specific plan, and there is no plan, he patiently explained, because “the dire straits you have articulated [are] not what we have gotten from the experts that we work with.” Which is yet another way of saying, “We haven’t planned for it because we don’t think it’s going to happen.

Joe Nimmich’s boss is the administrator of FEMA, Craig Fugate. As for his deputy’s mass evacuation plan for Manhattan, Fugate was dismissive. “Can’t move ’em fast enough,” he told me.

Yeah – where would you move them?

The very agencies that would bear responsibility for dealing with the aftermath of a cyberattack on the grid have yet to find common ground on even the most fundamental questions.

If asked his plan for a prolonged and widespread power outage, Fugate replied “We’re not a country that can go without power for a long period of time without loss of life. Our systems, from water treatment to hospitals to traffic control to all these things that we expect every day, our ability to operate without electricity is minimal.”

What, I asked FEMA’s administrator, is the plan for a prolonged, widespread power outage? For the first couple of days, he explained, the primary burden would be on state and local governments, but if the electricity remained out for weeks or more, it would be FEMA trying to fill in the gaps. “The plan would be to support the states to keep security, to maximize what power we do have to come back online, to look at what it will take to keep food and other critical systems like water systems up and running with generators and fuel. To prioritize where we’re going to start rebuilding our economy.

Fugate warned that there’s a limit to how much FEMA can do, but he’s confident in prioritizing certain objectives. “Keep the water on,” he said. “That means we need to have enough power to pump, treat, and distribute water through the system. You have to keep the water system up, and you’ve gotta then focus on the water treatment system. Backing up sewage is just about as bad. Those two pieces will buy you enough time to look at what your alternatives are. Basically, people have to drink water, they have to eat, that waste has to go somewhere, they need medical care, they need a safe environment, there has to be law and order.

“We’re never going to evacuate New York City. What we’d do is set up shelters for people to basically reside in. One of the biggest problems in a city like New York is the high-rise buildings. When power goes out we have hundreds and hundreds of people stuck in elevators. I can’t tell you how many calls the fire department gets during a blackout.

In the event of a regional crisis, the first lines of authority run through state capitols. It’s up to the governor of any given state to mobilize the National Guard, up to the governor to order an evacuation, up to the governor to request federal assistance. Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York would likely first turn to his state commissioner of homeland security and emergency services.

The day may come when a cyberattack has such wide-ranging consequences that it will have to be treated as a hostile act against the United States. It will be, quite literally, an act of war. Until that time, however, the federal government tends to wait until the states request assistance.

Sandy created great hardship for many people, but Hauer, like Janet Napolitano, said that the scale and duration were manageable. “The federal government was terrific,” said Hauer. “They brought in millions of meals. They brought in fuel through the Defense Logistics Agency.”

There were, Hauer explained, millions of gallons of fuel in underground storage tanks, but gas station operators lacking generators to run their pumps couldn’t retrieve the fuel. It’s another example, albeit a small one, of business owners choosing profit over resilience, because those generators can cost $50,000 or more. Following Sandy, needing to get the gas stations up and running again, federal government responders pumped $14 million worth of fuel into stations along “critical routes” and New York State installed generators in the majority of these stations, free of charge. Donating fuel and generators to key stations during a short-term, localized crisis is one thing; convincing the owners of gas stations around the country to install backup generators in anticipation of a crisis is quite another. It would seem like a no-brainer, a way for owners to ensure that their pumps will function even when the power is out. But where the bottom line is at stake, small business owners are reluctant to make the investment. In such circumstances, Craig Fugate explained, bureaucrats are left with what he called the basic tools of government, “which are extortion and bribes. Either I give you grant dollars to get you to do something you would not otherwise do, or I tax you to change behavior for what you will not do otherwise.”

New York City has a population of eight million people. Without federal assistance, Hauer said, New York City “could probably last for two days.” The City of New York has warehoused millions of MREs, or meals ready-to-eat, but with a population of eight million these are nothing more than a stopgap. Any crisis lasting more than a few days would be a struggle. In the case of something as widespread as a grid outage, Hauer explained, New York couldn’t rely on federal assistance, because it would be competing with other states for food. … FEMA “only has so many millions” of MREs stockpiled, and the private companies that produce them would be overwhelmed; states would have to get in line.

The disaster relief industry, at least that segment of it dealing with producing and distributing long-lasting food supplies, has its own operational complexities.

[prepper company could not produce freeze-dried food fast enough or get enough food in a time of crisis ] There is a limit to how much fresh food is available for processing at any given time. The manufacturers who supply government relief agencies with MREs were having to wait every bit as long for product. They just couldn’t get the necessary raw materials. I had previously explained the premise of this book to Davis and Fulton, and Davis was close to speechless. “Oh, my gosh!…That kind of thing is so far beyond…The numbers would just…It would bury us within days.

Why not just build up the MRE stockpile when supplies are available? It’s an issue of shelf life, which for MREs is only five years. “So,” explained Fulton, “you look at the MRE manufacturers who are trying to build inventory post the tsunami in Japan; they overbuilt, because when buying of MREs stops, it stops and it stops fast. Having a surplus of MREs means a warehouse full of product that loses value with each passing year. Everybody wants fresh inventory that will last a full five years. So there’s no incentive for the MRE manufacturers to build up a massive backlog. The only reason to stockpile would be if they knew for sure that an emergency will happen in the next 5 years.

FEMA and other government relief agencies are in the same boat as manufacturers. Ideally, they would want to buy MREs on short notice, but the industry is incapable of meeting crisis-level demands. Loading up on inventory is another option, but the government is disinclined to spend large sums on contingency planning when there’s no immediate crisis brewing, especially given that five-year expiration date. The critical factor, then, is the supply chain. There is a limit to how much fresh food is available for processing at any given time. It cannot simply be turned on at a moment’s notice. Freeze-dried foods are a longer-lasting option than MREs—properly processed and stored, freeze-dried and dehydrated product can last up to 25 years, but even a bare-minimum supply of such food would cost at least $2,000 per person per year.

If Congress was convinced that at some point the government might need to provide emergency food supplies to, say, thirty million people for a year, it could, for $2,000 a head, provide the basics to keep them alive. Could this be part of a solution? The $60 billion cost is hardly prohibitive when you consider how many lives would be at stake. It would probably take the industry years to accumulate the necessary raw materials, but in theory it seems a viable option. What can be projected with some confidence is that any crisis—whether EMP or cyberattack—that knocked out electricity for more than a couple of weeks over a multistate area would exhaust emergency food supplies in a matter of days.

Ray Kelly served in the New York City Police Department for a total of 47 years. People have the potential to take things by force. What happens in an elderly community, where they’re certainly susceptible to being attacked in terms of taking what they have, the limited resources, least able to defend themselves?

There were reports in the wake of Hurricane Katrina that as many as 200 members of the New Orleans police department were under investigation for deserting their posts. The number of police officers ultimately charged was closer to 50, but the stresses and challenges facing first responders worried about their own families are not difficult to understand.

Winter, when there is no safe source of heat, would take a particularly heavy toll. In an environment of crowded, hungry, freezing people, each passing day would presumably elevate the potential for violence.

We are inclined, as Tom Ridge observed, to be a reactive society. We apply unimaginable amounts of money toward dealing with the aftermath of crises.

As homeland security coordinator for Park County, Martin Knapp worries about what might happen on his turf, and what to do about it if it does. Knapp has considered the prospect of an electric grid going down, but there’s been no guidance on the subject from Homeland Security in Washington. “In fact,” said Knapp, “that even goes as far down as the state level. When I’ve called or tried to say, ‘Hey, I’m working on something here if this happens. What does the state recommend, or what are you going to do?’ they won’t tell me. They refuse to fill me in because they don’t want it to get out what we’re going to do—what they’re going to do. I’ll say, ‘I thought we’re on the same team here.’ But that’s, you know, it’s secret squirrel stuff.

I want to know what I can expect from the Red Cross if I call them for resources. In late 2014, journalists from Pro Publica and National Public Radio published an article titled “The Red Cross’ Secret Disaster.” It is a devastating account, depicting an organization more concerned with bolstering its public image and raising funds than with maintaining the actual machinery of disaster relief. Among the findings: emergency vehicles taken away from relief work and staged as backdrops for press conferences; inadequate food, blankets, and batteries in locations where these were desperately needed; tens of thousands of meals thrown out because no one knew where to find the people who needed them.

If not the Red Cross, FEMA, or the Department of Homeland Security, where should the interested citizen turn? What is available online can be pathetically inadequate, boiling down to the customary recommendation for two to three days’ worth of food and water, warm clothing, a functioning battery-powered radio, and extra batteries. Disaster preparation recommendations usually include a predetermined plan for where and how the family will meet. Beyond that, citizens are largely adrift, left to find their own solutions. To the degree that government and its disaster relief operations focus our attention at all, they direct it toward the familiar: natural disasters common to our region, or variations on terrorist attacks that have already occurred. Americans have been left to select their own approaches to the prospect of a lengthy, widespread loss of electric power.

City dwellers: Don’t think you can flee to the country

What about outsiders fleeing the cities? How would that change the dynamic? It didn’t seem to worry him: “As far as people coming in here from a couple hundred miles away, they’re going to have to get enough fuel to get here. That’s one thing. But somebody comes in here and pulls a pistol on somebody, ‘Gimme your food’ ”—the prospect was mildly amusing to Knapp—“four people in the house pull out rifles and everything else, saying, ‘I don’t think so.’ It’s like bringing a knife to a gunfight. People around here, because there are so many guns, they’ve got ways to kind of protect themselves. And a lot of them would, without thinking twice about it.” A place like Cody might very well be brimming with “western hospitality,” but this is a place that has never been put to the test of a large-scale influx of domestic refugees. How overburdened civic organizations would respond, to say nothing of individual citizens, is unknowable.

Underlying all expectations of survivability in a major city like New York is the assumption that underpopulated places such as West Virginia or Wyoming could, in extreme circumstances, absorb a couple of hundred thousand urban refugees. And perhaps they would, because the residents of those areas really do take notions of neighborliness and community values seriously. But when Joe Nimmich of FEMA and former DHS secretary Michael Chertoff speak blithely of evacuating several million people from a city like New York, there is really no concept of where they might resettle all these refugees. Insofar as the residents of a town such as Cody, Wyoming, have maintained their traditional values, they have done so in an environment of what Jeff Livingstone described with searing if unintentional candor as “non-diversity. To just assume, however, that the underpopulated rural regions of the United States are inclined or even able to absorb tens or hundreds of thousands of urban refugees—white, black, brown, many of them poor—is to place too much reliance on the notion of neighborliness.

What can you do?

The loss of electricity for tens of millions of people, extending over many weeks, requires something altogether different. The greater the level of self-sufficiency and the larger the number of social networks able to function independently for at least a week or two, the more successful government relief efforts will ultimately be.

The Mormon church has established a model that makes good common sense, one that serves to support families in times of illness or unemployment, natural disaster or international crisis. It is designed to cushion families during hard times over an extended period. Certainly most families cannot afford to immediately lay in a six-month supply of food and water. Too many families lack the resources to meet even their daily needs. But if those who can afford it take on the responsibility of longer-term survival, supplies available to emergency management agencies can be reserved for the very neediest.

Many urban dwellers, living in small urban apartments, lack space, but when what is at stake is survival, it’s astonishing how much can be tucked away in small spaces. To establish a foundation with long-lasting, nourishing foods that have sustained needy families for generations—rice, wheat berries (and the grinder to make flour), beans—and large containers of water seems ridiculous in times of plenty, but it can become the difference between survival and starvation during an extended crisis. True, the wheat berries and grinder are not likely to find many converts among city dwellers, but the goal is to build up a supply of nonperishable goods, small amounts at a time.

What will, for most people, be the most difficult to replicate in the Mormon experience, however, is the intricately organized community, existing on both the local and national levels. There are well over 2,000 Community Emergency Response Teams (CERTs) throughout the country. They are affiliated with FEMA and provide a useful structure for implementing disaster relief, but they don’t have much of a presence in America’s cities.

Our national leaders are in a precarious place. They recognize the scale of danger that a successful cyberattack represents. However, portraying it too graphically without having developed practical solutions runs the obvious risk of simply provoking public hysteria.

BOTTOM LINE: THE MILITARY WILL HAVE TO HANDLE THE CRISIS

There is in the U.S. a historical sensitivity toward the use of federal troops, particularly when it comes to maintaining or restoring order. “Every day,” Jacoby told me, “I used to say that the NORTHCOM commander’s job was to reconcile the will of the president with the authority of the governors. They own their state and they own their [National] Guard, and you know the power for authorities with enforcement capabilities really emanates from the people. So it comes up from the local police departments to sheriffs to the state to the Guard and then up to the president. And it’s a very, very deliberate legal issue to use federal military forces in an armed capacity in the homeland.

In anticipating the event of a power grid going down, however, the process will have to be streamlined and rehearsed. During the time that it takes to alert and dispatch military personnel and to mobilize the National Guard, local and state police will need to immediately secure the stores and warehouses containing essential supplies that will otherwise be stripped bare in a matter of hours. The authority exists, but without the regular conduct of combined exercises specifically designed to respond to the aftermath of a grid going down, critical supplies will be gone before law enforcement even arrives on the scene.

The question of maintaining security in the aftermath of a power grid being shut down can quickly be reduced to a matter of manpower. The U.S. military is a diminished force, with the army down to about 450,000 people. Whether that would be adequate, said Jacoby, is questionable. NORTHCOM could come up with 50,000 or so troops fairly quickly. He is torn between the discipline of military preparedness, with its indisputable value in a time of national crisis, and the American system, which is “designed,” as Jacoby said, “for inhibiting federal abuse of power, specifically armed power in the homeland. And that’s who we are as a people.

Jacoby is struck by the irony that while we have the most powerful means of communicating with the public that has ever existed, it will be essentially useless without electricity.

It should already be a settled issue how forces would be activated, and under whose command, as soon as the president is convinced that all or part of a power grid has been the target of a cyberattack. Maintaining public order and protecting the civilian population will become more difficult with each passing day. As FEMA administrator Craig Fugate acknowledged, it quickly becomes a matter of keeping as many people from dying as possible. It’s food, potable water, and enough generators to keep water flowing and a waste disposal system functioning. There is no emergency food supply even remotely adequate for what the demand would be.

Among what Jacoby described as the “pre-disaster stuff” that has to be figured out is a plan under which the federal government would acquire billions of dollars’ worth of freeze-dried food, sufficient to feed tens of millions of people for a period of months. This alone will take years once the money is appropriated and the contracts have been signed.

Americans are accustomed to going where they want to go, when they want to go. Many city dwellers have focused their survival plans on just driving to the nearest state in which the power is still on. There is no guarantee that they will be invited to stay. To the contrary. One former state employee from a small rural state told me of strategy sessions planning how they would handle a mass evacuation from an affected city. Traffic police, state police, the National Guard, and civilian volunteers wearing official paraphernalia would be stationed in key locations, offering food, water, and directions to the next gas station. But the message was stark and simple: “Our state doesn’t have the infrastructure to support large numbers of evacuees. Please keep moving.” These are issues that are quietly being discussed on a state-by-state basis. There is no national strategy.

When one major sector of the country is without electricity and the rest of the country has power, what happens? Do states have the right and the legal authority to require domestic refugees, who have neither guaranteed shelter nor the funds to rent or buy shelter, to keep moving? What happens to the economy of the darkened states? With a diminished ability to generate revenue, how long will those states be able to count on the generosity of the rest of the country? Will the federal government establish refugee camps? Where? We have barely begun to consider the problems, let alone find the solutions.

Having a plan that isn’t perfect is better than no plan at all

Koppel concludes with: What lingers, after all these years, is the sense of preparedness, of having a plan, of being ready for whatever might come. In a sense, preparing for the unknown has always been the challenge facing civil defense planners. How does a country’s leadership draw the appropriate line between prudence and paranoia when neither the timing nor the exact nature of a threat to national security can be defined?

Like the British ten years earlier, American civil defense planners concluded that their options essentially boiled down to shelters and evacuation.

There is, as yet, no real sense of alarm attached to the prospect of cyber war. The initial probes—into our banks and credit card companies, into newspapers and government agencies—have tended to leave us unmoved.

Our points of vulnerable access are greater than in all of previous human history, yet we have barely begun to focus on the actual danger that cyber warfare presents to our national infrastructure. Past experience in preparing for the unexpected teaches us that, more often than not, we get it wrong. It also teaches that there is value in the act of searching for answers.

For the first time in the history of warfare, governments need to worry about force projection by individual laptop. Those charged with restoring the nation after such an attack will have to come to terms with the notion that the Internet, among its many, many virtues, is also a weapon of mass destruction.