I heard a woman on the radio today (speaking for some utility) say that there is software in the system designed to keep it from overloading and from cascading. They were puzzled as to why the software didn't work. My guess is that it was crippled in some way. Otherwise, I'd like to hear another reasonable explanation.
Sorry I haven't had a chance to respond, hectic day. Since vulnerability is no secret now, here is the latest update from the Professor at Dartmouth...
We saw a spike in routing instability at 4:11 PM, the exact moment of the power failure. Our global instability index (GII) peaked around 80 (normal values are between 5 and 50, high-water mark was 240 during the slammer worm)
http://people.ists.dartmouth.edu/~dmcgrath/gii/8.14.03/gii.8.14.png More significantly, we saw global network reachability drop to about 97.3%, indicating that more than 2.5% of the the Internet was (and continues to be) unreachable. As expected, most of the unreachable networks are in the NY area.
http://people.ists.dartmouth.edu/~dmcgrath/gri/gri.8.14.png As far as the causes are concerned, nobody knows anything or is willing to say anything at this point. But to me that is not the primary problem. Whether it was terrorism or a lightning strike or a Canadian geese flock decided to commit seppuku on a transformer, the problem as I see it is this:
We are dependent, highly dependent, on a very complex infrastructure of our making (water, electricity, banking, our modern cities) that exhibit hundreds of neuralgic points, making these system non failsafe, non recoverable. Nature would have never have a system evolve like that - would have been too unstable to survive for long. Ours however were consciously designed with other criteria than survivability in mind. Whether it is accidents or planned attacks - as far as I am concerned, terrorism just
exposed what was always a shameful secret of modern society: Our high tech way of life is setting up many accidents waiting to happen, without taking appropriate (in my opinion) precautions. We have been exceedingly lucky in terms of nuclear power, for instance (a half dozen near misses since 1945 in the US alone, the Ukrainians and Byelorussians were not so lucky - two major
accidents (1986, 1958)), but statistically speaking, our luck cannot run forever (especially not with the grid, since our power system is old and decrepit and no major investments have been made to upgrade them - incredible but true). We are due, terror or not, for major accidents/events like these.
