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Comment: |
Stephen Bowman writes about America's power grids his book, When the Eagle Screams: America's Vulnerability to Terrorism. This was cited in a very interesting 1995 master's thesis, "National Security in the Information Age."
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"The United States power system is divided into four electrical grids supplying Texas, the eastern states, the midwestern states and the northwestern states. They are all interconnected in Nebraska. A unique aspect of the electrical grids, as with communication grids, is that most built-in computerized security is designed to anticipate no more than two disruptions concurrently. In other words, if a primary line went down, the grid would ideally shut off power to a specific section while it rerouted electricity around that problem area. If it ran into two such problems however, the grid is designed to shut down altogether" (Bowman, p. 125).
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