Forget about the horrors of an EMP attack in space or a gigantic solar flare.
Forget about the SHIELD Act to harden our power grid.
It’s languished in the House Energy and Commerce Committee for several years, probably because there’s not a snowball’s chance of its passing the Senate or surviving a veto.
ISIS
Think now about ISIS, our southern border and 9/11.
We’ve heard from 3 online news reports that ISIS is in Juarez, all along our Southern border, and ready to attack on 9/11. Anything goes, from car bombs into El Paso to smuggling individual jihadi’s over the river just anywhere.
We’ve heard from Breitbart Texas about a document leaked from the Texas Department of Public Safety warning Federal agents to be on the alert. Federal agents deny the document and the warning.
OK. Let’s Wait See until 9/11.
Our Power Grid, FERC and NERC
More to the point are some hard facts on the vulnerability of our high voltage transformers that carry 60-70% of the nation’s electricity. They are located in relatively few places, maybe 20 or 30 at most. A few sharpshooters can blow one up or shut it down. Remember the attack on the PG&E substation near San Francisco in 2013, followed by another lesser attack 2 weeks ago, which was not noticed by onsite night watchmen until daylight!
The US House of Representatives recognized the vulnerability and passed by voice vote in 2010 the bipartisan Grid Reliability and Infrastructure Act to allow the government to strengthen the grid. It never reached the Senate floor!
Which brings us to March, 2014, when FERC (the Federal Energy and Regulatory Commission) ordered NERC (the North American Electric Reliability Corporation) to submit new reliability standards requiring certain transmission owners to demonstrate steps they’ve taken to address security risks. Note that the new standards are not in place but will be required by FERC in the future. NERC by the way represents the private power transmission companies that own our grid.
You can read the details of all this in the June, 2014, report of the Congressional Research Service entitled “Physical Security of the U.S. Power Grid: High-Voltage Transformer Substations”
ISIS, FERC and NERC
Here’s where it all comes together.
There’s strong reason to believe that ISIS individuals will cross our Southern border.
The locations of our high voltage transformer substations are known and purportedly there is an unclassified report listing 20 of them. Try as you might to find it in online officialdom.
We also know for a fact that the Department of Homeland Security does not even list EMP or protecting the power grid in its dozen top preparedness categories.
Last Wednesday the Secure the Grid Coalition sponsored a news conference at the National Press Club. The report at World Net Daily is impressive.
Speakers included
“threat expert Dr. Peter Vincent Pry; Ambassador Henry F. Cooper; actress and activist Kelly Carson; and F. Michael Maloof, a former senior security policy analyst in the office of the secretary of defense and now a senior writer with WND.”
The report then said
“There have been multiple reports of ISIS terrorists in Iraq and Syria making statements threatening an attack on the U.S. homeland. And it’s well-documented that al-Qaida, the Muslim terror world’s bad boy before ISIS arrived, is linked closely with drug cartels, many of which have a presence inside some 1,200 of America’s large cities.”
The evidence is impressive. The report is here for the reading.
9/11 may or may not be a target date despite social media chatter to that effect.
The power grid may or may not be a target.
Our power grid is vulnerable. The utilities have not hardened it. The government has not voted to share the costs.
Whose heads are in the sand?
A concerned citizen