The attack on the electricity substation in Moore County, North Carolina this past Saturday evening is precisely what I’ve been warning about for years. Conventional arms were used to blast away at transformers and other equipment at the site resulting in a blackout that persists three days later for thousands of North Carolinians.
If you take the probability and likelihood of a disastrous event and multiply it by the impact it would have you get what I call the “Disaster Index”. It’s a measure of just how bad a disaster could be. In arithmetic terms DI=I x P. So while the impact, and forgive the pun, of a meteor hitting the earth amounts to the highest imaginable I (an extinction event most likely), the probability or likelihood of such an event is PDS (pretty damn small). The Disaster Index is thus extremely small.
On the other hand, the impact of a Katrina-like hurricane is both high AND likely, thus the DI is many times greater than the meteor strike.
I have long stated that the event with the highest DI is not an EMP, Coronal Mass Ejection, Reversal of the Earth’s magnetic poles…all potentially catastrophic in terms of impact but, unlikely. Rather, it is a terrorist attack on the nine electrical grid substations in the country that, were they to fail or be knocked out simultaneously, would plunge the entire nation into darkness for upwards of three months. The knock-on effects of such an outage would create a chaos and “Walking Dead” scenario only Hollywood could dream up.
The attack in Moore County is being investigated as “vandalism”. Irrespective of whether the attack was that, or a deliberate vulnerability “test”, you can bet the many terror cells already existing in the United States took a very special interest in it.
Study after study have warned of the vulnerability of our power grid. Blackouts have already occurred that should have been wake-up calls that this kind of disaster could happen. But no, our government would rather…you fill in the rest.
God help us!