Unknown Assailants Fire On, Destroy Transformers at California Power Substation
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
The country's roughly 2,000 very large transformers are expensive to build, often costing millions of dollars each, and hard to replace. Each is custom made and weighs up to 500,000 pounds, and "I can only build 10 units a month," said Dennis Blake, general manager of Pennsylvania Transformer in Pittsburgh, one of seven U.S. manufacturers. The utility industry keeps some spares on hand.
Attacks at a number of sites could cripple electricity distribution infrastructure across large areas of the US for months, and force utilities to prioritize repairs among widely disparate locations: if Washington, NYC, San Jose, and Minneapolis are all wiped out, are you going to protect the government, banking and financial sector, high tech, or a large population who will freeze or roast without power?
That's the scenario for a widespread pandemic disease outbreak on the scale of the Spanish Flu. H5N1 mortality rate reported by WHO is 60% (though this could be a result of only seeing more virulent cases -- it might be as low as 30% -- which is to say, vastly higher than any global pandemic of the past century: http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/overestimating_avian...).
Which raises the question: what is civilization's bus number? How many people in critical positions could be taken, whether by terrorists (homegrown or otherwise) or disease, without having strongly negative effects?
No need to limit your speculation to human agents.
I try not to think about global pandemics, otherwise I'd have to live in the middle of nowhere in a sealed structure to feel safe.
If we have an extinction level event, it'll likely be a global pandemic or significant climate shift. In either case we are totally fscked.