Residential areas will be the last places to recover from a major attack on the nation’s electrical grid, a top Federal Emergency Management Agency official told lawmakers on Thursday.
“Residential areas are probably going to be the last ones to get that power,” FEMA administrator Craig Fugate said during a House Transportation and Infrastructure subcommittee hearing.
Federal fears about the dangers of an attack on the electrical grid increased in December, when Ukraine suffered widespread blackouts caused by malware traced back to Russia. But the danger remains theoretical for many communities.
A long-term electrical grid outage is difficult to bring about if the cyberattack is not buttressed with a “physical attack” on facilities, industry experts told Congress. They explained that cyberattacks against energy industry companies are more effective for stealing information.
“The damage on the information systems, that would be their business risks, but on the grid it’s very difficult,” North American Electric Reliability Corporation president Gerry W. Cauley told House lawmakers.
Pennsylvania Rep. Lou Barletta, who chaired the hearing, painted a dire portrait of what would happen if a “combined cyber and physical attack” takes place. “I know it’s an unlikely event; so was the chances of two planes running into the Twin Towers in New York,” he said. “In the first few days, there will be thousands of people stuck in elevators. After three or four days, hospitals and other critical infrastructure will need fuel for generators. After a week, clean water and waste disposal may have serious problems. And at some point, people may start to self-evacuate in large numbers.”
Fugate suggested that self-evacuation would be unlikely, given that people wouldn’t be able to know how widespread the power outage really was. But he agreed with the concern that local communities aren’t prepared to provide fuel for the backup generators over an extended time frame.
“A lot of communities do not plan for refueling in a crisis,” he said. “It’s key to keep the water systems and waste-water running… There’s not really a good way to manage that if those systems go off for long periods of time.”
