MOST PEOPLE IGNORE THE electrical grid, until it stops working. When that happens, the disruption can be total, but most often is a matter of inconvenience—the lights go out, the internet goes down, there is no place to recharge a cell phone.
But what if power did not return for days, weeks or months? And what if such a lengthy blackout engulfed not just a neighborhood or a county but a wide swath of the nation? The consequences, experts say, would be devastating. Many people would have no water to drink, no gas for their cars, no heat for their homes. They wouldn’t be able to cash a paycheck, use a credit card or call an ambulance. Food, vital medicines and other essentials would grow scarce because trucks would be unable to refuel. Virtually every aspect of life would come to a halt. Casualties could run into the millions.
The possibility of widespread and prolonged outages may seem to many people like the stuff of science fiction, but security experts now believe that the chance of such a disaster is higher than it’s ever been—and rising.
In the first eight months of 2022, the U.S. electrical grid was physically attacked 107 times, according to the U.S. General Accounting Office—the most in more than a decade. On December 3, shootings at two substations in Moore County, North Carolina, plunged more than 40,000 people into darkness. Reports have since emerged of other recent acts of sabotage, including a series of attacks against four sites in Pierce County, Washington, leaving around 14,000 people without power on Christmas Day.
These attacks, authorities believe, are coming from domestic extremists, who include specific instructions on how to inflict maximum damage to substations.
