People might go crazy soon, the troops might be sent in
NERC formed in the wake of the catastrophic November 9, 1965 blackout that knocked-out power to 30 million people in the Northeastern United States and Ontario, Canada for as long as thirteen hours. Runway landing lights went dark, people were trapped in elevators, traffic snarled at busy intersections that were suddenly left without signals. Decades before buzzwords like "critical infrastructure" and "cyberterrorism" would enter the vernacular, President Lyndon Johnson viewed the blackout as a national security matter and set the FBI and the Pentagon to investigate. Utility engineers eventually traced the genesis of the cascading outage to the failure of a single relay in a transmission line.
Today, the "Great Northeast Blackout" influences the most popular cyberterror fears. The inevitable hacker-induced blackout goes with the hacker-induced 911 outage as a central doctrine for executive, congressional and industry believers who say that cyberterrorism is a serious and immediate threat to the Western World. National Security Council Terrorism Coordinator Richard Clarke put it this way to the New York Times: "You black out a city, people die. Black out lots of cities, lots of people die. It's as bad as being attacked by bombs."