The first briefing owes people a map. How many customers. Which critical sites are on backup. Whether water pressure is expected to hold. Whether there is a reason to think the cause is weather, equipment, or a person. Motive can wait an hour. Geography cannot.

A county story told as a national story manufactures fear. People who still have lights are invited to believe the country has gone dark. A national story told as a fluke manufactures complacency. People who are actually in the dark are told the event is small and somewhere else. Size is the correction for both, and it is what the first briefing owes.

Customers are one count. Critical sites on backup are another. A hospital or a water plant running on a generator is not the same fact as a number of household meters out. Whether water pressure is expected to hold is a third fact. A briefing that offers one of these and skips the others has not given anyone a map they can use.

FERC’s own reviews distinguish a station that can cascade from equipment that cannot. Spokespeople should be at least that precise. “The grid was attacked” is not a size.

A station that can cascade is a claim about how far a failure can travel. Equipment that cannot is a claim in the other direction. The grid, said with no boundary, is neither claim. It does not tell a person whether the event includes their county, their water, or a single yard. Spokespeople who stop at the moral word have not yet said the size officials already know how to say.

Motive is not forbidden. It is second. The hour in which geography can be said is also the hour in which a villain can be refused. The comparison this desk will use is whatever is already public: the utility’s account of who is out and, when one exists, the weather warning. If those are sharper than the podium, the podium is the item.

We will keep score on this. When a statement is vaguer than the known facts, the vagueness is the story.