Federal panel warns of national blackout in EMP attack.
It said that the grid is a “prime target” of terrorists and that Americans are not ready for living without electricity, transportation, fuel, money, and healthcare.
“People no longer keep enough essentials within their homes, reducing their ability to sustain themselves during an extended, prolonged outage. We need to improve individual preparedness,” said the report.
“There needs to be more individual accountability for preparedness,” adds the report, Surviving a Catastrophic Power Outage.
Secrets earlier this week pointed out some of the issues raised in the report:
Given the growing frequency and severity of disasters and other risks, there needs to be an increase in individual accountability, enterprise, and community investment in resilient infrastructure.
There is a misconception that events occur infrequently.
There needs to be more individual accountability for preparedness.
Resilience at the state and local level will be critical to enable people to shelter in place and facilitate faster recovery. Any event that requires a mass evacuation will use up critical resources, clog transportation pathways, and reduce the workforce necessary for infrastructure recovery.
Electricity, fuel, clean drinking water, wastewater services, food/refrigeration, emergency medical services, communications capabilities, and some access to financial services have been identified as critical lifeline services that would be needed to sustain local communities and prevent mass migration.
As I’ve been writing for years, we should be hardening our systems. And I don’t want to live in One Second After, or even in Lightning Fall.
h/t GR