Archive for the 'Disaster Preparedness' Category

News and perspectives from Australia.

The fires cut road access, which meant towns ran out of fuel and fell low on food. Power to towns was cut and mobile phone services stopped working. So too did the ATMs and EFTPOS services the economy needs to keep running.

[ … ]

These shortages are no surprise. In Australia, as in most developed countries, food and fuel distribution systems run on a “just in time” model. This approach, originally developed by Japanese car manufacturer Toyota, involves organising supply networks so materials are ordered and received when they are needed.

Such systems remove the need to store excess goods in warehouses, and are undoubtedly efficient. But they are also extremely fragile because there is no redundancy in the system—no Plan B.

We import 90% of our oil—a figure expected to rise to 100% by 2030. Much of that fuel passes through the Straits of Hormuz and then through the Indonesian archipelago. We have few alternative routes.

Nor do we maintain sufficient back-up reserves of fuel. Australia is the only International Energy Agency (IEA) member that does not meet the obligation to keep 90 days of fuel supplies in reserve.

As East Gippsland and Mallacoota have shown, many other connected systems, such as food distribution networks, are critically dependent on this fragile fuel supply.

A systems engineering approach; redundancy; interconnectedness; single- and common-failure modes; Management Oversight and Risk Tree analysis.  These are all tools one could use to design and plan for societal failures.  Even an electrical engineering concept like “sneak circuits” or “relay races” would also be useful.

When is the last time you just sat and thought about your own vulnerabilities and dependencies on the society designed by your betters and rulers?  And did anything about it?

David Codrea gives us the background, and then embeds a video.  I won’t bother to embed the same video since you can go to Oath Keepers or WRSA to get it.

For the record, I don’t know if the voice you hear is the legitimate author of this discussion or not.  It might be someone reading the entry at Reddit.

If you want to see the full transcript, here it is.  I have a lot of thoughts on this, but for this time, I think it’s better to leave this open for commenters to hash out what this means and fill in the blanks.

Forbes, via Matt Bracken.

More than 10,000 people in Arkansas were dumped into a blackout Sunday following an attack on that state’s electric grid, the FBI said today, the third such attack in recent weeks. In August, a major transmission line in the region, around Cabot, Ark., was deliberately cut.

The FBI said that two power poles had been intentionally cut in Lonoke County on Sunday, resulting in the outage.

“Though we remain confident that we will identify the person or persons responsible for these incidents,” the FBI said in a press release, “we are enlisting the public’s help to be our eyes and ears. We take threats to our power grid very seriously.”

The FBI said it would pay a $25,000 reward for information about the attacks.

And for good reason. The FBI suspects these attacks are linked with a third incident in September.

According to the FBI:

In the early morning hours of September 29, 2013, officials with Entergy Arkansas reported a fire at its Keo substation located on Arkansas Highway 165 between Scott and England in Lonoke County. Fortunately, there were no injuries and no reported power outages. Investigation has determined that the fire, which consumed the control house at the substation, was intentionally set. The person or persons responsible for this incident inscribed a message on a metal control panel outside the substation which reads, ‘YOU SHOULD HAVE EXPECTED U.S.’

In August, a person or group of people attached a cable to the framework of a 100-foot electric transmission tower and placed the cable across the railroad track in an apparent attempt to use a moving train to pull down the tower.

While the electric power industry has expressed concerns about cybersecurity, the recent spate of attacks in Arkansas suggests that the electric power grid is equally if not more vulnerable to physical acts of sabotage.

Folks, I don’t want to belabor the point because we’ve discussed this in painful detail before.  But do you understand the vulnerability of everything around you – the fake Keynesian money scheme layered on top of a massive entitlement state, the markets, the mobility, television, cell phones and connectivity, and the electrical grid?  Do you understand that it could all disappear tomorrow and not return for a very long time?

Prior:

Survival Preparations: The Electrical Grid Is Still Vulnerable

Electrical Grid Attack

Surviving The Apocalypse: Thinking Strategically Rather Than Tactically

A Terrorist Attack That America Cannot Absorb

CBS Los Angeles:

Fire officials were on hand to remind the public of what a similar quake could mean for Southern California.

“A lot of people don’t realize that we are earthquake prone in California, but we also could get a tsunami,” Los Angeles County Fire Asst. Chief David Stone said. “We just haven’t had one in a long time.”

Residents were urged to prepare for a number of disaster scenarios, including how to cope for being at least “two weeks on your own”.

You mean that the police won’t protect the people?  You mean people need to have medical supplies, food and water, and lights and batteries?  You mean that preparing for a disaster – natural or man-made – is wise move?  Oh, and by the way, California residents need to think about this while living in one of the most gun restrictive states in the country, maybe second now to New York or Illinois.

So who are you going to call when there is no power or police, and the inner city gangs are at your doorstep demanding your stuff, or your daughter?