Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Florida Power Outage: Not an Attack
But a Reasonable Preview

About 4.4 million people (WSVN) (U.S. Usage - 4,400,000) people are without, or have been without, power in southern Florida.

Miami-Dade Schools are locked down, parents told not to pick up their kids - traffic is a mess, with no traffic lights and twits blowing through intersections.

Just to make things interesting, there's severe weather in the area, including a tornado watch (seems that the tornado warning ended a little while ago).

No, this probably isn't a terrorist attack. That's what Homeland Security is saying. Odds are that we'll learn that a substation had problems, and that the outage spread.

So, why post this in "Another War-on Terror Blog?"

Hackers shut down power in several cities recently, all of them outside America. It's not at all unlikely that terrorists will try to do the same thing in the United States. And, they might succeed.

What's happening in Florida right now is a pretty good preview of what could happen:
  • No traffic signals
  • Snarled traffic and vehicular accidents
  • schools locked down
  • Commuter trains stop running
  • Weather warnings and other emergency information can't be broadcast - and received
  • With luck, backup systems at airports and hospitals work
Latest information, from Florida Power and Light: Two Turkey Point nuclear reactors "tripped offline" for unknown reasons, and so did two oil-fueled generators.

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Blogroll

Note! Although I believe that these websites and blogs are useful resources for understanding the War on Terror, I do not necessarily agree with their opinions. 1 1 Given a recent misunderstanding of the phrase "useful resources," a clarification: I do not limit my reading to resources which support my views, or even to those which appear to be accurate. Reading opinions contrary to what I believed has been very useful at times: sometimes verifying my previous assumptions, sometimes encouraging me to change them.

Even resources which, in my opinion, are simply inaccurate are sometimes useful: these can give valuable insights into why some people or groups believe what they do.

In short, It is my opinion that some of the resources in this blogroll are neither accurate, nor unbiased. I do, however, believe that they are useful in understanding the War on Terror, the many versions of Islam, terrorism, and related topics.