From an opinion piece in the NY Times on Nov. 15: Could Paris Happen Here?
The short answer is not likely.

Updates: comments from readers are not so optimistic!

Nov. 17th, from the Washington Post: Is the United States safe from a Paris-style Islamic State attack?

Just when you think you know about the full array of threats/hazards in your area, along comes a new one.  Seems to me that emergency managers should have full employment for years to come!

The Cyberthreat Under the Street. Here are some details:

Within the last year there have been 16 so-called fiber cuts in the San Francisco Bay Area. According to the F.B.I., someone or some group has been going through manholes to sever fiber optic cables that supply telecommunications to large sections of the region, which is home to technology companies, academic institutions and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, overseer of the nation’s nuclear weapons.
Following each incident (usually occurring late at night and involving two or three separate fiber cuts) residents couldn’t make land or mobile calls, not even to 911, or send texts or emails. Hospital records in some instances were inaccessible. Credit cards and A.T.M.s didn’t work. And forget about Googling, watching Netflix or remotely turning on a coffee maker. (For security reasons, Lawrence Livermore declined to say how the cuts affected its operations.)

In keeping with my tradition of providing some of the lighter news items over the weekend, here is a compelling and amusing article (16 pp)from the New Yorker magazine titled: Life Is Rescues. Looking for trouble with a national team of emergency-response volunteers.

Iceland is a nation of 300,000 people and 10,000 of them are willing to volunteer to respond to emergencies. No national funding is provided for their support.  All of the equipment and food come from donation.  Fascinating story, I think.

New report from NOAA finds human-caused climate change increased the severity of many extreme events in 2014.

One quote from the NOAA article:

In this year’s report, 32 groups of scientists from around the world investigate 28 individual extreme events in 2014 and break out various factors that led to the extreme events, including the degree to which natural variability and human-induced climate change played a role. When human influence for an event cannot be conclusively identified with the scientific tools available today, this means that if there is a human contribution, it cannot be distinguished from natural climate variability.

Here is a take on the same report from the NY Times.

Guest Blogger today is Dr. Peter Vincent Pry.

Update: See article by Pry and Woolsey in National Review; Nov. 9.

While I am no fan of Ted Koppel, whose career has been built on political bias supporting liberals and leftwing causes, he is right about the vulnerability of the electric grid, and the failure of government and industry to protect the grid. Conservatives, scientists, and intelligence professionals have been warning about the vulnerability of the electric grid for years, long before Koppel came along.

The first and most influential study on the catastrophic vulnerability of the national electric grid was by the Congressional EMP Commission, that issued reports in 2004 and 2008. The EMP Commission was chaired by Dr. William Graham (who served previously as President Reagan’s Science Advisor and as the chief of NASA).

Dr. Graham, I, and many others have for years been writing articles and books warning about electric grid vulnerability to terrorist attacks by cyber, sabotage, and electromagnetic pulse (EMP) by nuclear and non-nuclear weapons, and from natural EMP from a once-a-century geomagnetic superstorm. Personally, I have already written three books on this topic–Electric Armageddon (2012), Apocalypse Unknown (2013), and soon to be published Blackout Wars (2015).

Unfortunately, because of media bias against conservatives and those of us who worked in the CIA and have national security backgrounds, the mainstream media has largely ignored our work, or even dismissed us as “right-wing crazies.” Just a few months ago, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC and her blogsters were ridiculing Ted Cruz, Governor Huckabee, Ben Carson, and Rick Santorum for warning about the vulnerability of the U.S. electric grid to attack by terrorists or rogue states using EMP weapons.

Now that liberal darling Ted Koppel has a book saying the same thing Dr. Graham and Ted Cruz have been warning about, suddenly the cyber, EMP and other threats to the electric grid have, virtually overnight, become “intellectually respectable” to talk about on the mainstream media! Dr. Graham has been available for interviews by the mainstream media since 2004–but they have never once talked to him.

See also:

• Heading Toward an EMP Catastrophe
• Cyber Hype

__________________

Dr. Peter Vincent Pry is Executive Director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security and the U.S. Nuclear Strategy Forum, both advisory boards to the U.S. Congress, and served in the Congressional EMP Commission, the Strategic Posture Commission, the House Armed Services Committee, and the CIA. His forthcoming book is Blackout Wars.

The Diva is looking for some information and citations, if possible.

A friend of mine, not in the emergency management field, has been pressing me for specifics and reassurance that the arguments Ted Koppel has been making re cyber attacks taking down the electric grid in the east for 2 months to 2 years are not as drastic as he states.

I have been trying to assure her that the emergency management community in this country has plans and the situation would not be a dire as Koppel indicates.  I have tried to find some articles that include rebuttals by the electric industry or others, but I cannot locate any.  As a media figure, Koppel has received a huge amount of publicity. Where are the counter arguments and pushback?

Update:  Here is one article I found that tries to give some balance to the arguments.
In the dark over power grid security.  It appears that key federal agencies are not willing to talk to the media about the topic.

Fellow blogger Eric Holdeman think Koppel got the facts right about the threat and the risks.  See his blog on the topic here. Eric is a former county emergency manager.