BLACKOUT
MARC ELSBERG
MY RATING ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️▫️
PUBLISHER Sourcebooks Landmark
PUBLISHED June 6, 2017
A terrifying but gripping electric outage disaster, one that is hard to forget.
SUMMARY
The lights go out all across Europe. Hackers have infiltrated the interconnected electrical grid software through smart meters. The grid collapses. Fires are destroying substations and transmission towers are being blown up. Power generation units cannot be restarted. A nuclear unit in France is overheating. And that’s just in the first three days.
It’s February and it’s cold in Europe. Germany is hovering around zero degrees. As the outage continues there are major problems. There is no water. Gas station can’t pump fuel, food supplies are depleted, banks are out of cash, and hospital backup generators are shutting down. Stocks are plummeting and the European market is closed. People are becoming desperate. United States, Russia, China and Turkey are preparing to send aid. And then the U.S. goes black.
A former hacker in Milan Italy, Piero Manzano notices something abnormal about his smart meter. He notifies the authorities, who are wary of his background and they wonder if he might actually be the culprit. Manzano ultimately is forced to go on the run with American CNN reporter Lauren Shannon. Both are desperate to find out who is responsible for the attacks before things get any worse.
Having worked for thirty years in electric regulation, and seen the advent and evolution of SCADA systems and smart meters, this book fascinated me. MARC ELSBERG has taken a complex multifaceted scenario and woven a thought-provoking tale of our dependence on software and the electric grid for every day life. Typically, when we have an outage the electricity always comes back on, doesn’t it? But what if it didn’t.
The story involves a cyberattack of transmission and generation SCADA software and applies it to continental Europe, a huge geographic area. To bring a interconnected system of this magnitude back online requires an immense amount of cooperation and coordination. As BLACKOUT shows, cooperation and coordination is difficult at best, if not impossible in times of a crisis. And a cyberattack will be nothing like the recovery from a natural disaster. First you have to find the saboteur and what they did.
The geographic scope in BLACKOUT is immense, unlike anything ever experienced before. And hopefully we never will. The story shifts between Italy, Germany, Austria, Netherlands, and France. Each country experiences its own set of issues in responding to the power outage and its aftermath. Transitioning to the various locations adds to the complexity of the book and there are a multitude of characters to keep up with.
ELSBERG gives us a small taste of what would happen to our society, if our food supply, transportation system, communication network, healthcare system, financial markets and water and wastewater systems were interrupted. He also raises awareness of how all of these systems are all interdependent on one another. Despite the magnitude of the story, BLACKOUT is very readable. It’s a must read to truly understand the impact of a nationwide outage lasting more than three days.
Living in Florida, I have experienced many multiple day outages following hurricanes. We always stock up on groceries, water and batteries in advance. It is drilled into us to be prepared. In the aftermath, we have always been fortunate to have neighboring cities or states help with our relief and disaster recovery efforts. But what if there is no warning and the lights just go out. How long could we actually survive without power. What if our neighbors couldn’t help? What if we were all in the same boat? What if the outage was nationwide?
MARC ELSBERG an Austrian author, researched this book by conducting interviews with intelligence, disaster, energy and computer security officials. His story has taken cues from previous large outage experiences in the U.S. and Europe. BLACKOUT was originally published in Germany in 2012 and has been translated into fifteen languages and sold a billion copies. It will be published in the United States for the first time in June, 2017.
Thanks to Netgalley, Sourcebooks and Marc Elsberg for an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
