Massive Government Drill Planned to Test Possibility of U.S. Electric Grid Going Down
August 28, 2013
The U.S. Government is gearing up for a major Preparedness Drill that will simulate a Grid Down Scenario, one that will examine what would happen if the county’s electric grid was taken down by both physical and cyber-attacks.
powerlinesThe threat is very real and is something that we’ve covered in great detail in the past. Our electric grid is extremely vulnerable to an attack that could leave our country in the dark for weeks, maybe even months.
In preparation for this type of attack, our government is going to test the grids vulnerabilities, as thousands of utility workers team up with anti-terrorism experts, Homeland Security, the F.B.I. and other governmental agencies.
On November 13 – 14, 2013, the United States; Canada; and Mexico, along with more than 150 companies and organizations in all three countries, will take part in the GridEx 2013 Preparedness Drill - one of the largest preparedness drills in our country’s history. They will practice for an event unlike anything this country has ever seen, one experts fear is only a matter of time away from happening.
The drill will look at how the three governments react to the loss of the power grid, and a crippled supply chain that would inevitably follow the event.
Most people don’t realize how important the grid is to almost everything in today’s world.
cell towerIt basically runs everything from our communication infrastructure, to our drinking water and our food distribution systems. But that’s really just the start. The economy, our hospitals and everything people depend on in today’s modern world would be gone.
If the grid goes down, this country will see mass panic and chaos like nothing we’ve ever experienced. And this is why we keep talking about personal preparedness.
The fact is, during a grid down situation you will be on your own. The government simply doesn’t have the ability, or the resources to help you survive. If you don’t have adequate training, emergency supplies, and the ability to survive this type of situation, your timing might be running out.
I would take this drill as a warning that you need to run your own drills, and figure out how you’ll respond to the chaos that will likely come after the grid goes down. Check out our Preparedness Resources, and learn everything you can while you still have the chance to do something about it.
November 2013 – America’s “Power Grid” Scheduled for Nationwide “Drill” Friday, August 23, 2013 11:30
More than 150 companies and groups will take part in a drill that will simulate attacks on the power grid.
By MATTHEW L. WALD NY Times Published: August 16, 2013 The electric grid, as government and private experts describe it, is the glass jaw of American industry. If an adversary lands a knockout blow, they fear, it could black out vast areas of the continent for weeks; interrupt supplies of water, gasoline, diesel fuel and fresh food; shut down communications; and create disruptions of a scale that was only hinted at by Hurricane Sandy and the attacks of Sept. 11.
This is why thousands of utility workers, business executives, National Guard officers, F.B.I. antiterrorism experts and officials from governmentagencies in the United States, Canada and Mexico are preparing for an emergency drill in November 2013 that will simulate physical attacks and cyberattacks that could take down large sections of the power grid. They will practice for a crisis unlike anything the real grid has ever seen, and more than 150 companies and organizations have signed up to participate.
“This is different from a hurricane that hits X, Y and Z counties in the Southeast and they have a loss of power for three or four days,” said the official in charge of the drill, Brian M. Harrell of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, known as NERC. “We really want to go beyond that.” One goal of the drill, called GridEx II, is to explore how governments would react as the loss of the grid crippled the supply chain for everyday necessities. “If we fail at electricity, we’re going to fail miserably,” Curt Hébert, a former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, said at a recent conference held by the Bipartisan Policy Center. Mr. Harrell said that previous exercises were based on the expectation that electricity “would be up and running relatively quick” after an attack. Now, he said, the goal is to “educate the federal government on what their expectations should or shouldn’t be.” The industry held a smaller exercise two years ago in which 75 utilities, companies and agencies participated, but this one will be vastly expanded and will be carried out in a more anxious mood. Most of the participants will join the exercise from their workplaces, with NERC, in Washington, announcing successive failures. One example, organizers say, is a substation break-in that officials initially think is an attempt to steal copper. But instead, the intruder uses a USB drive to upload a virus into a computer network.
As Worries Over the Power Grid Rise, a Drill Will Simulate a Knockout Blow Frank Franklin II/Associated Press
WASHINGTON — The electric grid, as government and private experts describe it, is the glass jaw of American industry. If an adversary lands a knockout blow, they fear, it could black out vast areas of the continent for weeks; interrupt supplies of water, gasoline, diesel fuel and fresh food; shut down communications; and create disruptions of a scale that was only hinted at by Hurricane Sandy and the attacks of Sept. 11. National Twitter Logo. This is why thousands of utility workers, business executives, National Guard officers, F.B.I. antiterrorism experts and officials from government agencies in the United States, Canada and Mexico are preparing for an emergency drill in November that will simulate physical attacks and cyberattacks that could take down large sections of the power grid.
They will practice for a crisis unlike anything the real grid has ever seen, and more than 150 companies and organizations have signed up to participate.
“This is different from a hurricane that hits X, Y and Z counties in the Southeast and they have a loss of power for three or four days,” said the official in charge of the drill, Brian M. Harrell of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, known as NERC. “We really want to go beyond that.”
One goal of the drill, called GridEx II, is to explore how governments would react as the loss of the grid crippled the supply chain for everyday necessities.
“If we fail at electricity, we’re going to fail miserably,” Curt Hébert, a former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, said at a recent conference held by the Bipartisan Policy Center.
Mr. Harrell said that previous exercises were based on the expectation that electricity “would be up and running relatively quick” after an attack.
Now, he said, the goal is to “educate the federal government on what their expectations should or shouldn’t be.” The industry held a smaller exercise two years ago in which 75 utilities, companies and agencies participated, but this one will be vastly expanded and will be carried out in a more anxious mood.
Most of the participants will join the exercise from their workplaces, with NERC, in Washington, announcing successive failures. One example, organizers say, is a substation break-in that officials initially think is an attempt to steal copper. But instead, the intruder uses a USB drive to upload a virus into a computer network.
The drill is part of a give-and-take in the past few years between the government and utilities that has exposed the difficulties of securing the electric system.
The grid is essential for almost everything, but it is mostly controlled by investor-owned companies or municipal or regional agencies. Ninety-nine percent of military facilities rely on commercial power, according to the White House.
The utilities play down their abilities, in comparison with the government’s. “They have the intelligence operation, the standing army, the three-letter agencies,” said Scott Aaronson, senior director of national security policy at the Edison Electric Institute, the trade association of investor-owned utilities. “We have the grid operations expertise.”
That expertise involves running 5,800 major power plants and 450,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines, monitored and controlled by a staggering mix of devices installed over decades. Some utilities use their own antique computer protocols and are probably safe from hacking — what the industry calls “security through obscurity.”
But others rely on Windows-based control systems that are common to many industries. Some of them run on in-house networks, but computer security experts say they are not confident that all the connections to the public Internet have been discovered and secured. Many may be vulnerable to software — known as malware — that can disable the systems or destroy their ability to communicate, leaving their human operators blind about the positions of switches, the flows of current and other critical parameters. Experts say a sophisticated hacker could also damage hard-to-replace equipment.
In an effort to draw utilities and the government closer, the industry recently established the Electricity Sub-Sector Coordinating Council, made up of high-level executives, to meet with federal officials. The first session is next month.
Preparation for the November drill comes as Congress is debating laws that could impose new standards to protect the grid from cyberattacks, but many in the industry, some of whom would like such rules, doubt that they can pass.
The drill is also being planned as conferences, studies and even works of fiction are raising near-apocalyptic visions of catastrophes involving the grid.
A National Academy of Sciences report last year said that terrorists could cause broad hardship for months with physical attacks on hard-to-replace components. An emerging effort led in part by R. James Woolsey, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, is gearing up to pressure state legislatures to force utilities to protect equipment against an electromagnetic pulse, which could come from solar activity or be caused by small nuclear weapons exploded at low altitude, frying crucial components.
An attack using an electromagnetic pulse is laid out in extensive detail in the novel “One Second After,” published in 2009 and endorsed by Newt Gingrich. In another novel, “Gridlock,” published this summer and co-written by Byron L. Dorgan, the former senator from North Dakota, a rogue Russian agent working for Venezuela and Iran helps hackers threaten the grid. In the preface, Mr. Dorgan says such an attack could cause 10,000 times as much devastation as the terrorists’ strikes on Sept. 11, 2001.
Despite the growing anxiety, the government and the private sector have had trouble coordinating their grid protection efforts. The utility industry argues that the government has extensive information on threats but keeps it classified. Government officials concede the problem, and they have suggested that some utility executives get security clearances. But with hundreds of utilities and thousands of executives, it cannot issue such clearances fast enough. And the industry would like to be instantly warned when the government identifies Internet servers that are known to be sources of malware.
Another problem is that the electric system is so tightly integrated that a collapse in one spot, whether by error or intent, can set off a cascade, as happened in August 2003, when a power failure took a few moments to spread from Detroit to New York.
Sometimes utility engineers and law enforcement officials also seem to speak different languages. In his book “Protecting Industrial Control Systems From Electronic Threats,” Joseph Weiss, an engineer and cybersecurity expert, recounted a meeting between electrical engineers and the F.B.I. in 2008. When an F.B.I. official spoke at length about I.E.D.’s, he was referring to improvised explosive devices, but to the engineers the abbreviation meant intelligent electronic devices.
And experts fear government-sponsored hacking. Michael V. Hayden, another former C.I.A. director, speaking at the Bipartisan Policy Center conference, said that the Stuxnet virus, which disabled some of Iran’s centrifuges for enriching uranium, might invite retaliation.
“In a time of peace, someone just used a cyberweapon to destroy another nation’s critical infrastructure,” he said. “Ouch.”
"While Foreign Terrorists were plotting to murder and maim using homemade bombs in Boston, Democrap officials in Washington DC, Albany and here were busy watching ME and other law abiding American Citizens who are gun owners and taxpayers, in an effort to blame the nation's lack of security on US so that they could have a political scapegoat."
How dare the United States; Canada; and Mexico, and 150 companies who run the grid, plan to handle a grid malfunction or terrorist act!
Planning... that's damn near Communist! They should be shot!
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. John Kenneth Galbraith
planning is saying: yup,,,it's gonna happen...now what are you going to do to help yourself off the grid while the machine is down.
Really Senders??? You are AGAINST this group making plans for a terrorist attack on the grid? or An accident that takes down much of the grid? or Planning for a natural disaster that destroys much of the grid?
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. John Kenneth Galbraith
Really Senders??? You are AGAINST this group making plans for a terrorist attack on the grid? or An accident that takes down much of the grid? or Planning for a natural disaster that destroys much of the grid?
not against it....point was so that folks prepare THEMSELVES. not just wait for the 'expert' to get your sh!t up and running again. we all pay a lot in taxes/fees and heating/electric bills....why the hell is it so old and fragile....it comes down to value for taxes/fees paid....there are A LOT of fed/state charges on our national grid bills....not to mention that national grid is ONLY 1 step removed from being it's own state agency/authority.....
people should be wary of the value in the fees/taxes/surcharges we pay....just a little wider view than the hamster cage
...you are a product of your environment, your environment is a product of your priorities, your priorities are a product of you......
The replacement of morality and conscience with law produces a deadly paradox.
STOP BEING GOOD DEMOCRATS---STOP BEING GOOD REPUBLICANS--START BEING GOOD AMERICANS
I thought August 2003 was the drill. When they told us it was lightning, and then when it was proven there was no lightning, no reasonable explanation was ever provided. If the cause was unknown, what was the point of lying? Much like Benghazi. Once you tell a fat lie, people tend to disbelieve anything you say afterward.
If the grid is ever really shut down, the people shutting it down will be the federal gubermint, in case they ever need to cling to power and have no other option but to kill several million people with darkness and cold. That sort of thing ends an uprising pretty quickly.
practice makes perfect
"While Foreign Terrorists were plotting to murder and maim using homemade bombs in Boston, Democrap officials in Washington DC, Albany and here were busy watching ME and other law abiding American Citizens who are gun owners and taxpayers, in an effort to blame the nation's lack of security on US so that they could have a political scapegoat."
Ain't rhetorical FEAR a great 'mass controller'????
Right out of the NAZI handbook!!!
Gee....and I thought that all of these 'so called war on terror' CONFLICTS....were making us safer. I thought all of the blood shed over these political 'conflicts'....made us safer....no?
Or is GOV ALMIGHTY just preparing for the anticipated 'blow back' from all of these 'constitutional war on terror conflicts'???
GOV ALMIGHTY is playing Russian Roulette with our lives!!
When the INSANE are running the ASYLUM In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
“How fortunate for those in power that people never think.” Adolph Hitler
Really Senders??? You are AGAINST this group making plans for a terrorist attack on the grid? or An accident that takes down much of the grid? or Planning for a natural disaster that destroys much of the grid?
The only plans they will be making is how to keep control of the US citizens when this type of event occurs.
They state nowhere that their intent is to use this test to beef up against attacks.
It is to coordinate government agencies to keep control of the people in the future.
I thought August 2003 was the drill. When they told us it was lightning, and then when it was proven there was no lightning, no reasonable explanation was ever provided. If the cause was unknown, what was the point of lying? Much like Benghazi. Once you tell a fat lie, people tend to disbelieve anything you say afterward.
I believe that Grid Ex was first done in 2011.(grid exercise)
This one is call Grid Ex II.
The objectives of the NERC Grid Security Exercise (GridEx) series are to exercise the current readiness of participating Electricity Sub-sector entities to respond to a cyber incident and provide input for security program improvements to the bulk power system. GridEx is a biennial international grid security exercise that uses best practices and other contributions from the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
NERC conducted the first sector-wide grid security exercise, GridEx 2011, on November 16-17, 2011. The exercise was designed to validate the readiness of the Electricity Sub-sector to respond to a cyber incident, strengthen utilities’ crisis response functions, and provide input for internal security program improvements. The GridEx 2011 after-action report is below. On November 13-14, 2013, GridEx II will exercise NERC and industry crisis response plans and identify actionable improvement recommendations for plans, security programs, and skills. The scenario will build on lessons learned from GridEx 2011 and include both cybersecurity and physical security components.
The only plans they will be making is how to keep control of the US citizens when this type of event occurs.
They state nowhere that their intent is to use this test to beef up against attacks.
It is to coordinate government agencies to keep control of the people in the future.
like fire drills/bomb drills/terrorist drills etc etc....how to control chaos.....let's see...how does one control chaos? BE PREPARED to act to survive.
we all know how well the government behaves as a mom/dad....especially after katrina and the superdome incident...or how about the local schoharie/junction floods....yeah...those who control the water flow control the flooding AND the power downstate....
how did those experts work out for us?????
...you are a product of your environment, your environment is a product of your priorities, your priorities are a product of you......
The replacement of morality and conscience with law produces a deadly paradox.
STOP BEING GOOD DEMOCRATS---STOP BEING GOOD REPUBLICANS--START BEING GOOD AMERICANS
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