Headlines: NSA Director: China can damage US power grid (Admiral Michael Rogers Director NSA) (FoxNews.com).
According to reports not only can China cause the lights to go out, at least two other unnamed countries can as well. We can only speculate, but Russia comes to mind, as do some Middle Eastern countries. Countries where mutually assured destruction is welcomed.
The conventional wisdom used to be that if any kind of attack were launched, a counter attack would follow assuring that both countries would suffer greatly. However, certain countries may welcome such an attack so “mutually assured destruction” is not a deterrent any longer. This also assumes that the United States is capable of launching a counter cyber attack, can we, and would we is the question.
Obviously, any serious attack on the nation’s power grid by another country would be considered an act of war, so for the time being a complete grid failure is unlikely to be caused by a foreign nation, but targeted attacks could be used to probe our response. This means that hackers could shut down a water treatment plant in a small community and no one would know it until people started getting sick. It could be your community.
Unfortunately, too many people in this country depend on municipalities for their energy and water. Energy would include electricity and natural gas. A clean water supply is critical to every living thing and even a small disruption would be catastrophic.
Working toward independence from local municipalities is the goal of some, but it is a very difficult task. People in urban areas depend on their community for water, sewage, garbage pickup, electricity, gas for cooking and heating and the list goes on. Breaking the bonds for some, if not many is nearly impossible, but at some point, it may be broken for you, and if not ready, the results will be devastating.
Whether you are new to prepping or have been doing it for years, you know that building a stockpile of emergency supplies is critical. If you awoke tomorrow to blaring headlines stating the water supply in your city is contaminated would you be ready.
Before you could get out the door, the local grocery stores would be cleaned out of bottled water. What if several or a dozen cities were targeted. Relief agencies would be overwhelmed and not be able to respond quickly with water and all water sources would be suspect, so any water you consumed would have to be bottled water from a retail store, relief agency or water you had previously stockpiled.
People living in cities would be the hardest hit if the nation’s grids went down. The sheer volume of people in a panic would in and of itself cause a crisis.
There is more than one power grid, but once one went down the stress placed on the others may cause a failure, so in essence the domino theory would come into play. Power would be rationed to reduce the stress. Rolling blackouts would become the norm in short order to prevent all of the grids from failing. This means that hackers would only have to disrupt a small portion of the country’s electrical supply to cause nationwide upheaval.
It used to be that authorities and experts would tell you that you need 72-hours worth of emergency supplies on hand. A 90-day supply is probably not enough in today’s world but it is a good start. That should be your goal, getting 90 days worth of water, food, medicines and other supplies stockpiled, more of course if you can.
The average person today uses close to 100 gallons of water daily in the United States. Of course, you cannot expect to be able to have this amount available during a crisis, but you will still need a considerable amount. You will need water for hydration, bathing/home sanitation, laundry, flushing toilets if on a septic system, cooking and for treating the sick. The one gallon a day that survival experts recommend is just for hydration. You should have at least five gallons per person daily stockpiled. This is a considerable amount of water needed for 90 days.
China and other countries of course want world domination but they still need the consumers that live in the United States but if the SHTF China and others know, they could disable the response to a world crisis by the United States by shutting down a portion of the grid.
If Russia decided to take over Europe then they could in theory slow our response by shutting down a portion the grid, the same would apply to China who seems to want to gobble up other countries as well.
There is motive and the means to shut down the nation’s power grid so it is just a matter of when and not if it happens. It will happen at their choosing it appears, so we all have to be ready.
However, most people are not paying attention, will not prepare and then will not know what to do once something happens. Many will die in beginning if the grid collapses for an extended period. There is no getting around this fact.
It has also been reported that Russia may have a so-called satellite killer in space. This means in essence that the United States is a “sitting duck”. Communication systems could be destroyed or disrupted before an attack on the power grid happened.
FoxNews.com. (n.d.). Retrieved 2014, from http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/11/20/nsa-director-china-can-damage-us-power-grid/?intcmp=latestnews