America’s Vulnerable Power Grid ( A Dash of Info)

And we're just gonna jump right into this, okay? On the morning of April 16th, 2013, something happened at Metcalf Electrical Substation near San Jose, California, that would quietly become one of the most important warnings about how America's power grid is weak.

Shortly after 1:00 AM, a group of attackers opened fire on the Pacific Gas and Electric Company's Metcalf station.

Armed with rifles, the attackers fired more than 100 rounds of electrical equipment.

Jesus.

They were targeting transformers and other critical components.

The attack was not a terrorist attack in the traditional sense, and remarkably, no one was killed or injured.

But the damage was so significant, 17 transformers were damaged, and the substation was forced to shut down while electricity was rerouted through other parts of the grid.

Now, what made the Metcalf attack so significant wasn't simply the amount of damage that was done.

It was what the attack revealed.

The electrical grid that powers our homes, businesses, hospitals, communication systems, and virtually every part of modern life is not some invisible, untouchable force.

It is made up of physical equipment spread across thousands of locations, and some of those locations can be susceptible to deliberate attacks.

The attackers didn't need to bring down an entire power plant or destroy a major city.

They simply found a weak spot of the infrastructure and attacked it.

And that raised a much bigger question.

What if someone didn't attack one substation? What if an attack or a natural event was capable of disrupting electrical infrastructure across a much larger area? What would happen if the systems we depend on every day suddenly couldn't depend on electricity?

Now, those questions were at the heart of a much larger investigation by the United States government.

Congress established the commission to assess the threat to the United States from electromagnetic pulse attack, commonly known as the EMP Commission.

Its job was to examine what could happen if the United States experienced a powerful electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, and how weak America's critical infrastructure really might be.

The EMP Commission's findings raised concerns about more than just whether the lights would go out.

Electricity is the foundation upon which modern society operates.

Without reliable power, communications, water systems, fuel distribution, transportation, banking, food distribution, hospitals, they can all be affected.

The concern was that a major disruption could potentially create a chain reaction where one failure leads to another and then another.

Not to mention police, fire, schools, j- just to name a few.

The Metcalf attack and the EMP Commission were dealing with very different scenarios.

Metcalf was a relatively small physical attack on one electrical facility, and EMP represents a potentially much broader threat.