Section
Unrest
14 briefs from the last two weeks.
Monday, October 19
Attacks on substations are now a pattern in the public record
FERC and NERC have spent the years since Metcalf, and especially after 2022, talking about physical incidents as a reliability problem.
Sunday, October 18
The 1977 New York blackout was a social failure on top of an electrical one
Lightning and protective relays started it. Looting and a collapse of confidence finished the memory.
Saturday, October 17
Rumor is the accelerant once the phones thin out
In a wide outage, the first scarce good after water is a shared account of what happened.
Friday, October 16
The physical-security standard covers the yards that can cascade, not every fence
CIP-014 was built to find stations whose loss could split or collapse an interconnection. It was not a promise to armor the distribution system.
Thursday, October 15
A dark city is not a riot waiting to happen
Most outages produce inconvenience, neighborliness, and bad traffic. Predicting chaos is how panic gets a head start.
Wednesday, October 14
Mutual aid is the old technology that still scales
The utilities roll trucks across state lines after storms. Blocks can do a smaller version without a press conference.
Tuesday, October 13
Protest is not the same thing as an attack on infrastructure
A public that cannot tell a march from sabotage will bless the wrong response to both.
Monday, October 12
Order in a blackout is mostly local and mostly unglamorous
Traffic, welfare checks, and a visible person with a radio do more than a rumor about troops.
Sunday, October 11
A false cause spreads faster than a repair crew
Outages attract villains. The repair still takes the time the equipment takes.
Saturday, October 10
Closed stores and dead card readers are when tempers change
The dangerous hour is not always the first. It is the hour when food, cash, and information have all run short.
Friday, October 9
Agencies have said some domestic actors talk about the grid. That is not a how-to.
The public fact is targeting interest and a rise in physical incidents. The public need is prevention and proportion, not tactics.
Thursday, October 8
The block is the unit of unrest, for better or worse
Cities do not tip all at once. Corners do. The corner you can influence is small.
Wednesday, October 7
Officials should say the outage’s size before they say its moral
A county story told as a national story manufactures fear. A national story told as a fluke manufactures complacency.
Tuesday, October 6
When the lights return, the argument does not
Restoration ends the emergency and starts the fight over what was neglected.