first i have read about this. how many muslims entering the usa are in fact trained to do the damage. when it happens it will not be isolated to california.

No, Metcalf is real. I was provided/read the specific incident reports at the time. I wasn't sure if it was declassified now. Other than being problematic to fill up at a gas station with anything other than cash, or trying to use a credit card, the rest of the impact can be pretty easily mitigated and wouldn't take more than a few hours to fix anyway. We have inter-organizational mutual aid agreements just like police & fire. For example, we (federal power grid) have a lot of stockpile of temporary wooden power poles because we use them during substation maintenance, and we have a lot of land for the maintenance crews to store them on that isn't as easy if you are a for-profit organization. Any time we have had storms and PGE, Roseville Electric, Norcal Power, etc.. needs them, we give their maintenance people temporary badges that get them through the gates/guns/guards and they come in with trucks and load-up and just reimburse us later when their procurement arrives. We're kind of a free bank for transformers, insulators, power poles, etc. The work itself is easy, having all the necessary parts in short notice can be difficult (an insulator or a transformer might be $500,000). We only self-sustain with our power generation & sale, so we can afford to keep surplus on hand for disaster recovery, and it's kind of our job anyway. We even sent our crews, trucks, high-reach buckets, etc. that work on the 100-foot high steel superstructures to New Jersey for Hurricane Sandy relief.

No comment... other than I work in cyber defense for federal hydro power...

I was thinking Metcalf actually when I started reading the article, and it is indeed being treated as such. Our (federal) power substations have been significantly beefed-up in physical and cyber security since that incident. We now have cameras, motion and heat sensors, electrified fences, etc. The thousands of miles of inter-state grid generation we carry also has dark fiber underneath the right-of-ways that we lease to telecom carriers....

Understanding that, I do actually have a 10,000 watt solar plant on top of my house, and I can isolate my house from the PG&E grid... and I can also use the generator in my travel trailer to supply my house with power by way of a separate connection I made with the power/water/sewer monument riser I built for it on the parking pad. 5 kw isn't a lot, but it keeps the lights on at night and the 26 foot high-clearance travel trailer and my Z71 Crew Cab is really the ultimate bug-out bag anyway. I did that more for wild fires, earthquakes, tsunami, and everything else we worry about in CA, and the fact that our pitiful grid infrastructure for residential is so bad that we get black outs after an inch or two of rain. I live in an area where wild fire is probably a medium-level risk and it's not out of the question to think we might have to pack up and move fast. We use the travel trailer a lot anyway, I can pretty much throw some bananas in it and turn the spigot on to fill the clear water tank quickly, and I'd be out of there in maybe a half-hour if I had to.

The reality is though, we don't really see calamitous societal break-down from a power outage, and we have sensors every five hundred feet on the power grid and every kilometer or so on telecom backbones... we would know pretty much immediately where the problem is, and we actually do have a lot of stuff on-hand to do short-notice repairs. Of course you get some thugs looking to loot or whatever, but California has more gun-owners and registered firearms than any other state, including Texas, and several-times more than Arizona. It would be pretty dumb to do a Ferguson type thing here in a conservative neighborhood.

Metcalf was a wakeup call though, it was actually someone with significant concealment, night vision targeting, IR scope, and a 50 caliber Barret rifle. For the time, that was pretty sophisticated... now anyone with a TrackingPoint rifle could easily duplicate that with novice firearm skills. http://tracking-point.com/

I am skeptical about the power station report. I am not an expert on the power grid, but this seems a bit fantastical. For this to happen there would have to be power surges that damaged the other parts of the grid. Engineers have worked on these problems for years, see http://www.edisontechcenter.org/Light....

This looks more like sensationalism looking for money than real engineering. It reminds me of a book about an EMP pulse written by a history teacher. The book went wild and was even touted here in the gulch, but the more I looked at the science, the more it was clear the teacher did not understand anything about the science of an EMP pulse. He also wrote a book about muslim terrorists with the same apocalyptic ending. It was not only full of implausible scenarios, it was poorly written. More of a fiction documentary than a novel.

The real fact is that the United States populace in general is not prepared for even a temporary outage - let alone something long-term. The typical emergency lasts 3-4 days - thus the popular 72-hour kits in emergency preparedness stores. My advice: if you don't have them (plus 1 gallon of water per person per day), don't wait. You don't have to spend $200 for a kit, however - there are plenty of resources to put together your own. But get them - and make it a priority.

If you want to be prepared for a more long-term disruption, there are also options there, but they usually require either a significant amount of time to collect the necessary supplies at reasonable prices or you pay a price premium for the pre-packaged stuff you can have shipped right to your door.

Other options to take a look at:

- Become a member of your local Community Emergency Response Team (CERT). Many larger communities have this training once per year and some will provide all the materials free of charge. Training includes basic first aid as well as basic building search techniques (rescue is left to first responders) including hazard identification. Usually a 1-2 day class with exercises.

- Become an amateur radio operator (ham). The US considers hams "national resources" - especially those who participate in ARES/RACES.

- Civil Air Patrol. You don't have to be a pilot to participate. You can be a communications engineer (see amateur radio above) or even a spotter.

- Weather Spotter. It only takes a short 2-3 hr class on severe weather phenomena to do this. You don't have to chase storms (they actually encourage you NOT to) - all you have to do is report what you see (and they train you on how to estimate wind velocity, precipitation, etc. and how to identify cloud formations as being potentially dangerous (tornadoes, etc.). All around good information.

As for the fiber optic cables, I think the NSA is a bigger and more present danger.

and the massive gamma-ray-burst danger -- if we are in the sights
of one of those, we're cooked!!! -- j
.