Dave Ross: Think twice before turning your house over to the Internet

Every politician today is focused on terrorism. But lone wolf attacks are not what’s going to cripple the country.

What could cripple the country is an attack on the power grid, which is Dr. Michael Frankel’s specialty.

“The worst that could happen is that the electric power coming into your house is simply not going to be there,” Frankel says.

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Frankel is currently a physicist at John’s Hopkins, but until 2009 he was the executive director of the EMP Commission — a group of experts who were directed by Congress to study what would happen if this country was hit by an electromagnetic pulse.

An electromagnetic pulse is a sudden and powerful surge of radio waves that could be emitted by a high altitude nuke, or even by extreme solar storms, which happen every hundred years or so. The last one was the Solar Storm of 1859.

The problem is not only does the power go out after an EMP, taking computers and everything else with it; anything with a microchip in it might not turn back on.

“It takes a very small amount of voltage to flip the bits in all these control systems,” Frankel explains.

That’s annoying. Even your generator wouldn’t start. But what about your car?

“We tested cars,” Frankel continues. “Ten to fifteen percent of them had engine troubles. The odds are that perhaps that your car would start.”

However, if 10-15 percent of cars broke down on highways, the transportation system would be at great risk, according to Frankel.

He says the military took the commission’s finding to heart and has put protections in place. But most private companies have not. And since the EMP Commission shut down six years ago, all he can do is advise you to turn computers off at night because it’s tougher to damage them when they’re off. And think twice about turning over your house to digital control.