The federal government has no plan for a long-term power outage As disturbing as it might be, despite the numerous threats to the U.S. electric grid, the federal government has no plan for a long-term power outage. FEMA recently admitted this at the National Preparedness Symposium on May 24, 2018: “Current planning does not include any contingencies for…
Hold DHS Accountable For Protecting the Electric Grid Recently, I asked the question: “Is DHS Dropping the Ball on Critical Infrastructure Protection?” On December 23, 2016, the provisions of the Critical Infrastructure Protection Act (CIPA) were passed as section 1913 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017. (Click here for the relevant 4…
Congress Passed Critical Infrastructure Protection Provisions in 2016 The Critical Infrastructure Protection Act was a bill introduced in Congress in 2013 and 2015 and finally passed in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017 (NDAA). Congress said the provisions were designed to “to protect Americans from an electromagnetic pulse (EMP), a…
“While each year the hurricane season comes to an end on November 30, the lessons from the response and recovery operations that we are performing this year, under incredibly difficult circumstances, will transform the field of emergency management forever.” – FEMA Administrator Brock Long, November 30, 2017. Building a culture of emergency preparedness is now…
Bipartisan agreement about threats to the electric grid There has been little bipartisan agreement in Congress about anything in the last decade. Healthcare, taxes, the budget – you name it, they disagree on it. There is one glaring exception: The threats to the electric grid from a variety of man-made and natural threats. They all…
GridEx bottom line upfront GridEx is a biennial exercise run by North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC). The latest iteration, GridEx IV, was held on November 15-16, 2017. Most Americans have never heard of GridEx and didn’t even know it was taking place. If fact, most people don’t really have a clear understanding of what…
Civil defense gradually morphed into emergency management. There are several good documents that give us the history of civil defense in the United States. Here is one from FEMA and here is an interesting manual (FEMA 107) from 1986. (Thank you to the Civil Defense Museum for making this available to us!) It can be hard to parse…
Why has so little critical infrastructure protection passed congress? I just don’t get it. I mean, I understand why Congress is struggling on health care and tax reform. The reds and the blues have different opinions and different philosophies and apparently nobody wants to compromise. I get that. It’s the same on a lot…
