Energy: vital, but vulnerable: the recent massive power outage caused people to stop, look and take stock of our critical energy infrastructure.

• Author: Brown, Matthew

Turn on the water. Answer the phone. Surf the Internet. Heat your house. Flip on the lights. Every one of these activities depends on energy in ways that most people--including the 50 million American and Canadian citizens plunged into darkness in mid-August--never realize. Water systems use electric pumps, telecommunication systems use electricity as their lifeblood. Oil powers the nation's transportation system. It even takes energy to extract and process energy resources; some oil refineries run up big electric bills.

Power plants and oil refineries also depend on other parts of our critical infrastructure. Run a power plant, and it uses water--up to a couple of thousand gallons a minute. Transmitting power by wire uses the Internet and telecommunications systems.

Our culture has come to depend on the system of tightly interconnected critical infrastructure that has worked so well for years that we don't stop to think about how much we depend on it. And we seldom consider how vulnerable that system is to disruption. Yet our energy system and by extension the nation's way of life is at risk. States will play a big role in protecting it.

ARE WE PAYING ATTENTION?

Terrorists targeted the World Trade Center as a symbol of American financial power. There is a serious concern that they could be eyeing other institutions that contribute to the nation's economy. Access to reliable and affordable energy, no matter what form--natural gas, oil or electricity--is key to America's economic health. Small disruptions can cause big problems and cost lots of money.

Energy production, storage and transportation facilities are big businesses, and are dispersed widely across the country. America has 158,000 miles of primary electric transmission lines, 5,000 power plants (totaling 800,000 megawatts), 2 million miles of oil pipelines, 1.3 million miles of gas pipelines, 2,000 petroleum terminals, a million gas and oil wells, and 150 oil refineries.

August's largest ever electricity blackout demonstrated with impressive clarity just what can happen when small and isolated problems in the power system cascade.

The nation's power delivery system is a massive network of interconnected power transmission lines spread out like a complex spider web. If one line goes down, power must flow over others. Yet they can carry only so much power. If the lines get overloaded, they sag and eventually fail.

Because they are so tightly connected, an overloaded line in one place can make the system come cascading down somewhere else. A power outage in Ohio spread east and north in only nine seconds and affected close to 50 million people this summer. The apparent result of years of underinvestment in power lines, the blackout demonstrated not only the speed at which such an event can occur, but also its effect on people's lives.

High-rise buildings lost their ability to pump water to the upper stories, airline operation facilities lost power, computers went dead, and an electricity-dependent lifestyle ground to a halt. Thousands of Manhattan commuters walked home over the Williamsburg and Brooklyn bridges.

Seven nuclear power plants in New York and New Jersey and two in the Midwest shut down automatically. (While they generate a great deal of power that flows into the electric grid, they depend on power from other plants to run their internal systems.)

But this wasn't the first outage. A sagging power line in Montana brought much of the western power grid down in 1996 for 10 hours. And although the recent black out is being blamed in part on human error, most experts agree that the many years of neglect of the power grid are mainly responsible.

And the neglect may continue. The Federal Energy Regulatory...