y’know, the only vehicles i’ve ever actually seen fly off of those ramps have been tanker trucks. that should make a nice little conflagration.

shhhh. they don’t want us to know that. oh, and no need to worry about physical plant security. once we pull out of iraq, some [cough cough] security companies will be looking for work.

Most of the utility stuff I’ve seen deals with monitoring more than control, Hipparchia, and major machines are still made with the analog safety switches when shipped.

They never scare business. They never push business. They certainly aren’t going to suggest that business spend any money just to keep the nation safer, unless the tax credits are twice the cost of the changes.

Before we worry about ‘Net security, they should do something about physical security at chemical and nuclear sites.

When I was living in SoCal a guy fell off his boat, or something, and swam ashore at the San Onofre nuclear power plant. He couldn’t find anyone for hours to help him.

scada systems are vulnerable, largely because they came along before anybody worried about internet security [companies do spend more on security than coffee] but it looks like a fairly simple fix [firewallz? whuzzat?] the problem is in the huge number of systems that need fixing.

they’ve already been working on it for awhile, like you say, why now? what’s about to come up that they need to scare us about? i suppose it’s possible that utilites are dragging their feet a bit, and the government is trying to scare them into moving faster on this.

utilities do have all kinds of backups and redundancies, and one turbine blowing up isn’t likely to start a whole cascade of turbines and such blowing up, but when de-regulation happened a lot of them started cutting corners here and there, so maybe they’re a bit weaker than we think they are.

the ones i worry about are the nuclear plants and the chemical plants and refineries, things that would make a big boom if something got out of contol.

We had a major wildfire nearly knock us back to Ludditeville.

We are between a cluster in Mobile and the St. Joe cluster to the East. That’s why the military pulled all of the fiber in for communications, the existing system can’t handle what’s needed.

The fiber trunk is laid in the I-10 right-of-way with branches for various military facilities coming down from the North.

The main electrical trunk follows US-98 along the coast line, so it gets blown down.

The bases have feeds both from the US-98 lines and other lines from Alabama.

This is a messed up area of the US as far as utilities because we are built out. The military reservation surrounds the civilian area, and there is no more growth possible, so the utilities don’t upgrade.

The use of microwave is restricted by the military and their test ranges which extend out into the Gulf. Broadcast television signals are regularly interrupted by aircraft flying through the signal making cable or satellite a requirement.