America The Vulnerable

In what can be called our “normalcy bias,” Americans take for granted that they always will have that pampered lifestyle. What gives us that lifestyle is the ability to generate our own power supply. This is a well oiled highly regulated machine and has kept us safe for some time. Many of us have had disruptions of power when the machine has failed due to inclement weather or some other accident.

This machine provides us comfort, warmth, entertainment, and information. This machine cooks our food, it makes it possible for us to get money and it can cool us off from a heat wave.

Flip the switch and the machine makes things come to life. Turn a spigot and clean water fills your tub, sink or glass and you are able to drink cool water.

The grid also provides us with our information and intelligence that we pass from person to person, whether in a social network or with something as complex as matters of defense and national security.

Pick up a telephone and you hear the voice of someone just down the street or someone that is on the other coast. You push a button and a screen lights up. The screen gives you less complex information for your day, or it can entertain you with movies and television shows. It can also provide hours of amusement with games and other activities.

The machine that we have had for hundreds of years that seems to never go away is the power grid.

Without that power grid, without that vital machine that we plug into, our world would not only plunge into despair, but many people would die and many others would have to adapt and in the chaos would find themselves doing things like looting or even killing to find a power source so that their lives could feel a sense of normalcy.

We have seen situations in fictitious stories where people are faced with the fear of having to live in a world with limited or virtually no resources to give them comfort. Television shows like “Under the Dome” and “Revolution” may be for some, a look into what an unplugged dystopia may be like.

For the majority of time the continental United States has nonchalantly taken for granted that the great power machine known as the grid won’t fail us. There are little inconveniences like power outages from a transformer that may have short circuited because of an unforeseen circumstance and we always hope that a lineman or electrician will be there to restore our sense of entitlement so that we can get on with our day.

Take away that comfortable necessity and the United States turns into a land mass that becomes quite literally an obstacle of big trees, huge rivers that need to be crossed, rugged mountains, deserts and plains that become disconnected with terrified people that realize that they are alone and desperate when the night falls.

Problems at a Maryland electrical station caused widespread power outages across the nation’s capital. The power failure affected the White House, the Capitol, museums, train stations and other sites.

Many of the outages were brief, but some were longer and forced evacuations. Officials said a mechanical failure at a transfer station led to the outages, and terrorism was not suspected. Tens of thousands of customers lost power.

At the White House, the interruption lasted only a few seconds before backup generators kicked on. The complex quickly went back onto regular power. Electricity in the press briefing room dipped around lunchtime, briefly darkening cubicles and blackening TV screens.

When the outage hit, the internet was abuzz with all kinds of scenarios that hypothetically explained the outage, many of them more outrageous than any substation failure.

It is like when the body suffers from a heart flutter, sometimes it is enough to send the signal to the brain that perhaps it is a heart attack or something far more dangerous.

Well yesterday all it took was a power failure in D.C. and immediately the area was ready to defend itself against any enemy infiltration.

The question is why the overreaction?

U.S. officials are showing some very telling extreme paranoia when it comes to cyber security, the power grid and the ability of rouge countries to detonate an EMP attack on the United States.

U.S. Intelligence is reporting that Russian hackers are behind the damaging cyber intrusion of the State Department in recent months and used that perch to penetrate sensitive parts of the White House computer system.

While the White House has said the breach only ever affected an unclassified system, that description belies the seriousness of the intrusion. The hackers had access to sensitive information such as real-time non-public details of the president’s schedule. While such information is not classified, it is still highly sensitive and prized by foreign intelligence agencies, U.S. officials say.

The White House in October said it noticed suspicious activity in the unclassified network that serves the executive office of the president. The system has been shut down periodically to allow for security upgrades.

The FBI, Secret Service and U.S. intelligence agencies are all involved in investigating the breach, which they consider among the most sophisticated attacks ever launched against U.S. government systems. The intrusion was routed through computers around the world, as hackers often do to hide their tracks, but investigators found tell-tale codes and other markers that they believe point to hackers working for the Russian government.

In the fourth installment of the Die Hard series, Live Free or Die Harder, Gabriel a hacker, successfully shuts down the stock Market and transportation grids through a series of computer hacks. The market fails, transportation services become cumbersome and another hacker believes that the next step for the cyber terrorists is to shut down the power grids.

Another hacker tells the Bruce Willis character McClane that whoever is responsible for the grid hacks is trying to run a “fire sale”, to demonstrate the over reliance of the country on computer-controlled systems, creating an “everything must go” situation by shutting down grid systems one by one destroying the entire infrastructure.

PBS’ “Frontline” aired a documentary about hackers and how quickly they could compromise and disable a power plant. . A government “hacker” claimed that within a week he could have the whole power grid shut off. An unidentified “hacker” said that within 20 minutes he could have the grid shut down.

Since the beginning of the 21st-century the United states has been scaring itself to death with stories of grid shutdowns. Our entire way of life can be ended in a single day, and it wouldn’t even take a nuclear war to do it. All it would take for a rogue nation or terror organization to bring us to our knees is the explosion of a couple well-placed nuclear devices high up in our atmosphere. The resulting electromagnetic pulses would fry electronics from coast to coast.

That is why it has now been reported that the US military command that scans North America’s skies for enemy missiles and aircraft is now planning to move its communications gear to a Cold War-era mountain bunker. The shift to the Cheyenne Mountain base in Colorado is designed to safeguard the command’s sensitive sensors and servers from a potential electromagnetic pulse or (EMP) attack.

The Pentagon last week announced a $700 million contract with Raytheon Corporation to oversee the work for North American Aerospace Command (NORAD) and US Northern Command.

Admiral William Gortney, head of NORAD and Northern Command, said that “because of the very nature of the way that Cheyenne Mountain’s built, it’s EMP-hardened.”

The Cheyenne Mountain bunker is a half-acre cavern carved into a mountain in the 1960s that was designed to withstand a Soviet nuclear attack. From inside the massive complex, airmen were poised to send warnings that could trigger the launch of nuclear missiles.

But in 2006, officials decided to move the headquarters of NORAD and US Northern Command from Cheyenne to Petersen Air Force base in Colorado Springs. The Cheyenne bunker was designated as an alternative command center if needed.

That move was touted a more efficient use of resources but had followed hundreds of millions of dollars worth of modernization work at Cheyenne carried out after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Now the Pentagon is looking at shifting communications gear to the Cheyenne bunker, officials said.

“A lot of the back office communications is being moved there,” said one defense official.

Officials said the military’s dependence on computer networks and digital communications makes it much more vulnerable to an electromagnetic pulse, which can occur naturally or result from a high-altitude nuclear explosion.

Under the 10-year contract, Raytheon is supposed to deliver “sustainment” services to help the military perform “accurate, timely and unambiguous warning and attack assessment of air, missile and space threats” at the Cheyenne and Petersen bases.

Of course a cessation of power to the grid or even an EMP could also be accomplished without any attack. Scientists tell us that massive solar storms have hit our planet before, and that it is inevitable that there will be more in the future.

One of the biggest black outs of the grid took place on August 14th, 2003. This blackout was a widespread power outage from the northeastern to Midwestern United States. The blackout also spread throughout Canada. The blackout affected an estimated 10 million people in Ontario and 45 million people in eight U.S. states.
While this event was probably remembered by more people on the east coast it is important to recall the events that took place prior to the blackout

Six months before the Aug. 14th 2003 blackout, 200 scientists were working on analyzing the impact of a terrorist attack on the power grid. They came out with their report just 3 weeks after the Aug. 14th blackout.

Now it goes without saying that this was a traumatic experience for many people. This event was the first major disaster that affected east coast since the terrorist attacks of 2001.

While we were told by the major media that the cause of the blackout was a lightning strike or an overload due to the use of air conditioners — there are still arguments that the power grid loss was part of an even bigger false flag. It started with the warnings, the testing, the terrorist impact analysis and then the real test on unsuspecting people.

The grid was carrying a heavy load that day; it was a typical load for August.

According to the “Independent System” nerve center the grid was operating at 75 percent of capacity. The grid was not overloaded due to “air conditioning demands.” Around four in the afternoon there was an interesting anomaly that many people needed to know about. Newsweek reported that there was a large amount of power flowing from New York toward Ontario through the transmission lines.

This usually happens when a power plant goes down and it is not so unusual.

However what was unusual is that the power surge reversed course. It headed back towards New York. It was an 800-megawatt pulse from an unknown source! Generators immediately shut down to ward off the surge, something that they are supposed to do to protect them from burning out.

The grid was shutting down out of control and workers at the control stations watched helplessly as the Northeast was grinding to a halt.

New York, Pennsylvania, the Midwest and parts of Ontario were all at a standstill in about nine seconds.

America was now in the worst blackout in history and the experts had to figure out where the tidal wave came from. An estimated 50 million people were left without power. Nuclear power plants and oil refineries were forced to shut down.

The first report said that a power station fire caused the shutdown. In order to deflect rumors of a possible terrorist attack another report was issues stating that lightning had struck a station on the border of New York and Canada.

The Canadian government dismissed this, stating that there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, at least within a hundred miles of the Niagara Mohawk station.

In the meantime the images that were broadcast on the networks showed New Yorkers sauntering home in the 100-degree heat. The pictures were reminiscent of the many New Yorkers who had to walk home after the World Trade Center was attacked in September of 2001.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about the power failure is that there was an obvious omission that I caught in the reporting of the blackout.

The media failed to point out that this blackout was an impressive “first warning.” I stood back and realized that while the experts were scrambling to get power back on, someone had to have been taking notes on what was happening.

I am sure that in a black notebook somewhere someone had entered a very telling passage in their journal.

America without power is a country that is vulnerable.

Text – Check out Ground Zero Radio with Clyde Lewis Live Nightly @ http://www.groundzeromedia.org