Planned drill will simulate a catastrophic blackout

By  Matthew L. Wald

The New York Times Sunday August 18, 2013 10:07 AM

 

WASHINGTON — The electricity grid, as government and private experts describe it, is the glass jaw of U.S. 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 superstorm Sandy and the Sept. 11 attack.
That is why thousands of utility workers, business executives, National Guard officers, FBI anti-terrorism 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. 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 Corp., 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 Hbert, a former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, said at a recent conference held by the Bipartisan Policy Center.
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 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 electricity 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.
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.