GfKV newsletter #05 – Society for Crisis Preparedness

By Herbert Saurugg 7 August 2021 Updated on 12 September 2023

Vulnerable power supply: “Guat is ganga, nix is g’scheh’n!”

Further serious incidents on 17 May 2021 and 24 July 2021

On 24 July 2021 at 4:36 p.m., the European interconnected grid split, causing the second major disturbance in the last 7 months. But hardly anyone took notice of it, in line with the Austrian motto “Guat is ganga, nix is g’scheh’n!” (It went well, nothing happened!) – even though around 2 million people in France, Spain and Portugal were briefly without power due to automated load shedding. In Spain, the grid frequency fell as low as 48.66 hertz. The European transmission system operators once again did an excellent job! Nevertheless, there are still more open questions than answers. (Image source: srf.ch)

This should not have happened. The European transmission system operators are now investigating the incident. After all, this is already the second grid split this year (see 8 January 2021, German). Before that, there had only been three other grid splits in the European interconnected system in recent decades: in 2003 during the blackout in Italy, in 2006 during the most serious major disturbance to date across Europe, and in 2015 during the blackout in Turkey.

The Iberian Peninsula is not optimally connected to the Central European power supply system. Nevertheless, large amounts of energy repeatedly flow through these connection points. This was also the case on 24 July and, before that, on 8 January. Unfortunately, a wildfire broke out under one of these lines. At 4:35 p.m., a firefighting aircraft is likely to have dropped its water directly over an extra-high-voltage line, causing a short circuit. This evidently caused knock-on effects which, one minute later, led to an overload of the remaining interconnectors and to the grid split between France and the Iberian Peninsula.

Further information: Ignored warning signs: another major disturbance in the European power supply system (German) and details under Worrying events 2021 (German).

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On 17 May 2021 a serious incident occurred in Poland (German) that should not have happened. The world’s largest coal-fired power station was briefly disconnected from the European interconnected system due to a fault on an upstream busbar. Busbar faults can happen just like other faults. What was surprising, however, was that over 3 GW of power was suddenly missing from the grid as a result – which should not actually happen, since only 3 GW of reserve power is held at European level for such events. But: “Guat is ganga, nix is g’scheh’n!” – and it went unnoticed by most of the population. That the grid’s capacity to compensate for sudden power jumps was completely exhausted and that we once again narrowly escaped a total failure simply went under.

Crisis preparedness inadequate

Unfortunately, in recent weeks we have had to witness on several fronts that crisis preparedness is inadequate in many areas. The floods in Germany were particularly bitter, with more than 180 deaths so far and enormous material damage. According to the latest reports, over 40,000 cars were destroyed. Not that cars are particularly important, but it makes the scale more tangible.

The other material damage, especially to vital infrastructure (electricity, drinking water, wastewater, telecommunications, roads, railways, housing, etc.), is greater by orders of magnitude and cannot be restored so quickly either.

For all of us who are not directly affected, this is simply hard to imagine. The ongoing blame game is therefore not helpful in this context. The full damage could certainly not have been prevented. In any case, much could have been done better if the warnings had been taken seriously and appropriate preventive measures had been taken. It is particularly bitter that as early as the beginning of 2013, a risk analysis for the German Bundestag (German), which also dealt with a pandemic scenario, examined flood events in depth. Who drew any consequences from it?

Warnings that only come when the water is proverbially up to one’s neck are obsolete. Action must be taken before any concrete disaster is looming. Even before the immediate danger, there would still have been some time buffer available to reduce the overall damage. We obviously lack the sensitivity needed to interpret “weak signals” (German) correctly. This then leads to fatal events, even though we know how successful High Reliability Organizations (HROs) (German) deal with them. Our affluent society, however, no longer seems to see itself as an HRO, which then leads to evolutionary selection, to put it bluntly.

Nor does it help if we always look for the blame or responsibility elsewhere, as is unfortunately very often the case with blackout preparedness today. We all have a social responsibility here, and it starts in our own sphere: with personal preparedness and with organisational measures in our own organisation or company. Of course we must also hold the other levels to account. But first we should lead by example, where there is usually still a great deal to do. Please also raise the issue specifically in your circle, in your municipality or your company! The more people question the false assumptions and expectations, the sooner something will change.

And then (as so often) it is also about appropriate top-down safety communication. But this will only succeed if it meets a sensitised population. For warnings are worthless if they come too late or do not trigger the intended behaviour because we lack the necessary risk literacy (German).

On the other hand, we simply tend to block out negative things. This is once again shown by a survey on crisis preparedness in Austria: The majority of the Austrian population relies on the state rather than on personal preparedness (German). A large proportion of people seriously believe that even in supply problems lasting several weeks – for example following a blackout – they will primarily be supplied by the state. But who is “the state”? All of us! How could state institutions supply millions of people when the usual structures no longer work? Evidently many people are lulling themselves into a false sense of security so as not to have to deal with it further. This, too, can end fatally, especially if one thinks things through to the end, as Alexander Schatten (German) put it in his very powerful podcast episode “Mit »Reboot« oder Rebellion aus der Krise?” (Out of the crisis with a “reboot” or rebellion?, German) (an absolute listening recommendation!). A quote from it:

We have recklessly thrown away the ladder on which we climbed up to today’s social complexity. A collapse of our society would not only bring unimaginable suffering, but we would probably also no longer be able to restore vital infrastructures in the foreseeable future. The vision of rapid and radical reforms is also unrealistic and extremely dangerous for several reasons. Destroying something is relatively easy; rebuilding something that works, on the other hand, is immensely difficult and – if it affects large parts of society, the economy and politics – cannot be planned.

Alexander Schatten Podcast episode “Mit »Reboot« oder Rebellion aus der Krise?” (German)

This fits in perfectly with the article “Die nächste globale Katastrophe ist auf dem Weg – und wir sind nicht bereit” (The next global catastrophe is on its way – and we are not ready, German), well worth reading, by Niall Ferguson in the nzz.ch. Ferguson names five categories of political failure in disaster preparedness and damage mitigation:

Failure to learn from history.
Lack of imagination.
A tendency to fight the last war or the last crisis.
Underestimating a danger.
Postponing necessary preventive measures, or waiting for a certainty that never comes.

The findings of the investigation into the “Challenger” disaster in 1986 are also likely to seem familiar to many readers from current examples: middle-level bureaucrats at NASA had insisted on rating the risk of a catastrophic failure at 1 in 100,000, even though their own engineers estimated it at 1 in 100. A “phenomenon” that can often be observed in a similar form in blackout preparedness. The gap between the statements of official bodies or higher management levels and an assessment of unvarnished reality (for example regarding the capacity to act in the event of a blackout) is often serious. Self-serving claims are therefore not only found among the “others”, but often in one’s own ranks. Serious errors frequently occur when assessing restart times after a blackout, simply because complex interrelationships in logistics are massively underestimated.

In recent weeks in particular, we have seen crazy developments in supply chains: delivery times for standard control cabinets have risen from 2 days to 10 weeks. 100 standard screws could only be obtained via three suppliers. Further deliveries are not foreseeable, and so on. Just think how long it could take merely to restore basic supplies once there has been a total failure of production and supply chains across Europe. A vivid example from last year: during the first lockdown with border closures, mineral water could no longer be bottled because the caps for the bottles could no longer be delivered. Here again the recommendation of the podcast episode “Mit »Reboot« oder Rebellion aus der Krise?” (German).

Ferguson also gives important recommendations, which the Austrian Society for Crisis Preparedness also advocates:

We should stop trying to predict disasters or even assign probabilities to them. From earthquakes to wars to the collapse of financial systems: the outstanding historical collapses followed random developments. Hardly anyone in early summer 1914 expected that there could soon be a world war. In February 2020, too, many European decision-makers and those in positions of responsibility were still sure that the developments in China were none of our business. They also believed that we were well prepared, and nobody verified the false assumptions, which then culminated in hectic actionism in March. While the first lockdown was still warranted given the many uncertainties, little was learned from it for the following months. Above all, the public sector lacked the necessary adaptability. Even now it is mainly about restoring the old world and hardly about further development and adaptation in order to be better prepared for future crises. This is reflected, for example, in the current Austrian Recovery and Resilience Plan 2020–2026 (German). Crises of this kind – like a possible blackout – do not belong to the realm of risk, but to the “realm of uncertainty”. We would be well advised simply to admit this instead of deceiving ourselves with unattainable and misleading attempts at calculation. The risk-ethical considerations of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (German), which were developed using the example of the coronavirus pandemic, help here.
Disasters occur in far too many forms for us to be able to deal with them using the usual approaches to risk reduction. Business interruptions have been regarded as top risks for years (German), yet we stumbled unprepared into the current supply chain disruptions. We have long known about escalation processes caused by feedback: a delay in a feedback loop can make a system oscillate (German). See also the current example of the “pig jam” in the doctoral thesis “Auswirkungen eines großflächigen und langandauernden Stromausfalls auf Nutztiere in Stallhaltungen” (Effects of a large-scale, long-lasting power failure on livestock in stables, German), presented below.
The more interconnected societies become, the greater the risk of “contagion” (“domino or butterfly effect”, German). An interconnected society needs well-thought-out safeguards that can quickly reduce the connections (“connectivity”) of the network in a crisis without completely isolating and paralysing society. See the energy cell system (German) or the bulkhead system in ships, which isolates water ingress. In other words, exactly the opposite of what was done in the lockdowns. These in turn were “necessary” because the response came too late and developments had already got out of hand. Early detection is therefore a MUST in order to minimise damage. Here, too, a recommendation for the ROMI method® by Maximilian Mitera, which can be applied at many different levels.

Resilient societies have an intrinsic (= naturally present) immunity to an unchecked spreading disruption of cohesion. This must once again be brought to the awareness of all of us.

Kind regards and stay healthy! Herbert Saurugg, Gottfried Pausch and Franz Hein