Nov 14, 2012
Posted by Chris Beck
More than a week after Hurricane Sandy ravaged
the East coast, residents along with local,
state, and federal officials, and electricity,
water, and other critical infrastructure
sectors are still struggling to recover and
rebuild from the devastation. As an
American, I worry about my fellow citizens in
the storm-ravaged areas. I applaud the
heroic efforts to rebuild lives and communities
and hope they will be successful and be
completed as quickly as possible.
As
CNP's new fellow for Homeland Security and
Resilience, it is important to me to examine
the effects of the storm and to ask whether our
national policies regarding natural disasters
and other catastrophic scenarios are
appropriate and of substantial rigor.
This post is not intended to "Monday morning
quarterback" the preparedness or response to
this storm, but to highlight some lessons that
can be learned and policies that should be
examined and strengthened going forward to
increase our resilience against future
events.
A resilient society is one that
is resistant to the negative impacts and can
quickly recover from disasters. They
cannot be prevented, but there are ways that we
can better prepare for the next
occurrence. Two key ideas that I will
discuss are the need to reduce single points of
failure that can lead to cascading failures of
several of our needed infrastructures, and the
need to develop more realistic "worst case"
disaster planning scenarios.
Electricity
is our foundational critical
infrastructure. All of the other
infrastructures, including water, sewage,
telecommunications, finance, transportation,
etc. all rely on electrical power to remain
operational. Over 3 million people lost
power due to the storm; some still are without
power as of the time of this writing. If
the power outages are widespread enough - as
they were in this case - other critical
infrastructures such as water are affected
because those facilities rely on electrical
pumps. Such cascading effects quickly
multiply, so loss of power quickly multiplies
into loss of water, gas, communications, food,
and other life- and society-sustaining
infrastructures.
It is essentially
impossible to de-couple our various
infrastructures so that they are not affected
by power outages. That being the case, it
is of critical importance that we harden our
electrical grids to better deal with natural
disasters (as well as accidents and malicious
attacks). One particular scenario that is
the focus of my current work is the eventual
occurrence of a massive geomagnetic disturbance
(GMD) caused by violent solar activity and its
interaction with the Earth's magnetic
field. Such an event, if it happened
today, could knock out power on national,
continental, or even global scales. There
is an urgent need to physically harden our
electrical system to better withstand this
threat, as well as storms like Sandy and other
natural disasters.
Providing for a more
resilient electrical grid will require better
vegetation management, and more robust wind,
water, ice, seismic and electromagnetic
withstand capabilities for the electrical
infrastructure. To be sure we make
the proper investments, a rational,
cost-effective analysis can be done if we plan
with an eye towards more severe weather and
other threats.
This brings me to the second topic:
planning based upon realistic worst-case
disaster scenarios. In the specific case
of the Sandy super-storm, historical
meteorological data did not provide the
projections necessary to properly prepare us
for the storm. The confluence of events
that resulted in an East-Coast hurricane
colliding with another storm from the north is
not a historically usual occurrence. It
can be described as a High Impact,
Low-Frequency (HILF) event. With a warming
climate, more severe weather will continue to
occur, and planning scenarios that take into
account more violent storms and other HILF
events than we have encountered in the past are
necessary.
Last month, the
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC)
voted unanimously to improve the reliability of
the electric grid by issuing two Notices of
Proposed Rulemaking (NOPR). The first is
a revised vegetation management standard, and
the second is for development of new standards
to address the impacts of GMD on the electric
grid. The North American Electric
Reliability Corporation (NERC), the Electric
Reliability Organization (ERO) that develops
and enforces the standards, last year convened
a GMD Task Force (on which I am proud to serve)
to study the issue, and has years-long
experience with vegetation management.
The development of robust standards in both of
these areas is one example of the type of
forward-looking preparation that can make our
grid more resilient to these
disasters.
While the new standards were
not ready for this storm, there will be others,
and some will certainly be severe. Severe
terrestrial and solar weather are both direct
threats to the electric grid that we rely upon
for the existence of our society. A
robust standard, developed with more rigorous
worst-case disaster planning will help us
better weather the next disaster.
The views expressed in this blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for National Policy.
Printable Version
SUBSCRIBE TO THIS AUTHOR