The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) should take on an active role in leading and urging the nation’s electrical utilities to do more to harden themselves against potentially devastating electromagnetic pulse (EMP) threats that could results in catastrophic damage to the nation’s critical infrastructures and loss of life, a panel of experts told a House committee on Thursday.
With overlapping regulatory authorities across the different states and federal government and the various utilities involved, and not having one agency in charge, it makes sense that DHS play a leadership role here given its role in infrastructure protection, Chris Beck, vice president of Policy and Strategic Initiatives with the Electric Infrastructure Security Council, told the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Protection, and Security Technologies.
A congressionally-mandated EMP Commission in 2008 provided 75 recommendations, most of which were aimed at DHS, to protect key assets of civilian and military infrastructures. The Defense Department largely concurred and acted on the recommendations affecting it and currently an “EMP awareness pervades [its] acquisition system and operational doctrine,” Michael Frankel, a senior scientist with Penn State Univ.’s Applied Research Laboratory and a former scientific researcher with the Navy, the defunct Defense Nuclear Agency, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense, told the panel.
DHS, on the other hand, has done little with regard to the EMP threat and “it has been hard to detect much of an active resonance at all issuing from the department,” Frankel said.
An EMP event, essentially a “super-energetic radio wave that can destroy, damage or cause the malfunction of electronic systems by overloading their circuits,” can occur naturally through a geo-magnetic storm, as the result of a nuclear bomb explosion, or in a more limited form via a radio frequency weapon, Peter Vincent Pry, who like Frankel was a member of the former EMP Commission and now serves as the executive director of a task force that maintains the work of the commission.
The last great geo-magnetic storm occurred in 1859 and Pry said experts in the EMP area believe the next great storm is “overdue.”
Pry said a key ingredient to the nation’s electric grid is the role played by Extra High-Voltage transformers, which take about 18 months to manufacture and are supplied by companies based in Germany and South Korea. He said losing a large number of these transformers would result in the United States suffering from a years-long blackout that would jeopardize the society and the country’s population.
Pry also said that the nation’s utilities will not act to harden themselves from potential EMP threats without greater awareness on the part of states and the federal government.