Surviving a Catastrophic Power Outage NAIC Executive Summary

Executive Summary

The nation has steadily improved its ability to respond to major disasters and the power outages that often result. But increasing threats—whether severe natural disasters, cyber-physical attacks, electromagnetic events, or some combination—present new challenges for protecting the national power grid and recovering quickly from a catastrophic power outage.

The President’s National Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIAC) was tasked to examine the nation’s ability to respond to and recover from a catastrophic power outage of a magnitude beyond modern experience, exceeding prior events in severity, scale, duration, and consequence. Simply put, how can the nation best prepare for and recover from a catastrophic power outage, regardless of the cause?

After interviews with dozens of senior leaders and experts and an extensive review of studies and statutes, we found that existing national plans, response resources, and coordination strategies would be outmatched by a catastrophic power outage. This profound risk requires a new national focus. Significant public and private action is needed to prepare for and recover from a catastrophic outage that could leave the large parts of the nation without power for weeks or months, and cause service failures in other sectors—including water and wastewater, communications, transportation, healthcare, and financial services—that are critical to public health and safety and our national and economic security.

What is a catastrophic power outage?

• Events beyond modern experience that exhaust or exceed mutual aid capabilities 
• Likely to be no notice or limited-notice events that could be complicated by a cyber-physical attack
• Long duration, lasting several weeks to months due to physical infrastructure damage
• Affects a broad geographic area, covering multiple states or regions and affecting tens of millions of people
• Causes severe cascading impacts that force critical sectors—drinking water and wastewater systems, communications, transportation, healthcare, and financialservices—to operate in a degraded state

Recommendations


The United States should respond to this problem in two overarching ways: 1) design a national approach to prepare for, respond to, and recover from catastrophic power outages that provides the federal guidance, resources, and incentives needed to take action across all levels of government and industry and down to communities and individuals; and 2) improve our understanding of how cascading failures across critical infrastructure will affect restoration and survival.

There are a number of ongoing initiatives in both the public and private sector that are in line with our recommendations. We urge the continued advancement of these initiatives in conjunction with our recommendations.

The NIAC was challenged to examine events that are beyond our nation’s experience, yet would impact nearly every jurisdiction, industry, and citizen. The solutions we identified will require strong public-private collaboration—as the NIAC has recommended previously—to address the scale and significance of catastrophic power outages.

Link to NIAC paper ( 94 pages) on Surviving a Catastrophic Power Outage


Link to National Infrastructure Advisory Council at dhs.gov