Glenn Reynolds: We aren’t ready for the lights to go out…”The preppers aren’t the only ones worried anymore about a debilitating attack on the U.S. power grid.”
Glenn Harlan Reynolds
USAToday.com
March 7, 2016
Could it be lights out for America? That’s something that people are starting to worry about, and these worries aren’t coming solely from the usual crowd of survivalists and preppers. Shut down the computers that run the power plants and distribution systems and you shut down America. That’s looking more possible, lately.
One of those worrying is former ABC News anchor Ted Koppel, whose new book, Lights Out: A Cyberattack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath, looks at the danger of losing electrical power due to a cyberattack. The picture Koppel paints isn’t a pretty one: Cities, unpowered for weeks and months, could become largely uninhabitable.
But, says Koppel, nobody is thinking about this very clearly: “It would be comforting to report that those agencies charged with responding to disaster are adequately prepared to deal with the consequences of a cyberattack on the grid. They are not.”
In fact, he writes, they can’t even agree on what’s involved: “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.”
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