Way back in May 1981, the GAO published a report entitled “Federal Electrical Emergency Preparedness Is Inadequate,” warning that the nation’s electric power systems were “very vulnerable to disruptions from acts of war, sabotage, or terrorism,” and that the “Federal Government is not now prepared to handle a long-term national or regional disruption in electric power.”

Since that time there have been hundreds of effective sabotage attacks on on non critical nodes, killing power to tens of thousands of households at a time. These terror attacks continue at approximately 1.5 per week.

Outside grid security experts and engineers have argued for years that the industry needs to improve physical security standards for critical assets in the country’s electrical grid, motivated in part by a federal study which showed that physical sabotage attacks against only a small number of critical nodes in the grid would be sufficient to cause a prolonged and devastating nationwide blackout, meaning a long-term absence of lighting, internet, functioning gas stations, trucking, refrigeration, grocery store deliveries, drinking water, or water in toilets. How long? Months to years, depending on which nodes are hit by cyber or physical attack.

Yet over the past nine years, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has declined to order a fundamental overhaul of an obviously ineffective physical security standard despite numerous formal complaints and petitions. Below: one perfectly placed bullet round killed power to 44,000 in North Carolina.