Chairman GLENN. I would think this would be key in an exercise of this size. I think the first thing you do is to call out the Guard, the Army, and everybody else that had emergency generators, and field kitchens and maintenance-of-order people, if you want to term them that. Was DOD a key player in this?

Mr. JONES. DOD was a key player. The State governments who were present in the game indicated that they would employ the Guard, that Governors would call out the Guard to assist in the emergency.

Chairman GLENN. Was it realistic to assume that things would be out for 2 to 3 weeks, that there could be a plausible terrorist attack that would do such a complete job that you could not have people repairing equipment, putting in new transformers, doing the things that had to be done in under 2 weeks?

Mr. JONES. Once again, the scenario was believed to be a credible scenario and was developed to focus the attention of the participants on national issues. In other words, we had to have a scenario that would drive the discussion of national issues, national impact, as well as the regional and local impact. As to the type of threat, the vulnerability, those are matters of-assuming you do something at a particular level, you get certain kinds of results. The game per se and in the development of the game, we were not really focusing on vulnerabilty, whether that sort of thing is possible in any particular area.

In essence, it was developed to drive the game.

Chairman GLENN. Did you identify particular problems, conflicting jurisdictional issues and identify shortcomings in laws, plans, and policies, in particular? I am interested in what we do at this end of the avenue up here. Are there any laws, authorities, overlaps, ambiguities, and so forth, that we should take action on here? And if there are, I would like to know about them because this Committee would be very much involved. We are sort of the Committe that involves-our mandate is to deal with any organizational aspects of Government; another is the efficiencies of Government. We are into issues of overlap and so on all the time.

Are there areas that you can suggest to us where we need to take action up here to help be better prepared for such a situation? Mr. JONES. The results of the game at this point did not pop up any particular areas where we would be in a position to pursue your offer of assistance, which we greatly appreciate. One of the principal benefits of such a game is to bring in people, many of whom would actually be involved were something like this to really occur, and to present an opportunity for them to focus on the authorities that they currently have, to see what those authorities

means.

The approach that we take is: What is the situation, and what are the problems, and what should the Government be doing in response to those kinds of problems? That sort of approach then brings you to the question of what do our authorities give us in the way of latitudes? What do we do at this point?

Chairman GLENN. Were there coordination problems and were you able to work them out? Or are they still waiting for clarification?

Mr. JONES. The participants here identified issues, areas of concern, and had a good sense that there would be priority problems that would come up between departments and agencies and between the different levels. Obviously, when you begin to do something, many of the actions are interrelated-transportation, fuel, many of these sorts of things—and it is necessary to have a way to sort those out. So people were very much aware of the coordination issues.

Their game position was that they were an advisory group to deal with national policies. They were not a group that would be involved in the direction of the response on scene.

Chairman GLENN. What did you do for law enforcement? That is an extended period of time. Was law enforcement mainly something you turned over to the military in that situation?

Mr. JONES. No, Mr. Chairman. We looked in the first instance to the localities to see whether they had a need for any additional aid. Then, of course, any such aid would be a function of the appropriate State authority making such a request. In this particular game, the city did not feel that at that point in the scenario such a request was appropriate. They felt they could handle things on their own. They did request some additional security support for the diplomatic community in the city.

Chairman GLENN. My time is up, but when you start thinking through a scenario like this, I rather doubt that local law enforcement authorities could handle something like that. I think you would probably be dependent on the military, and for a number of reasons. You say, well, okay, the police have radios. Well, all right, but they can't recharge them. What do you do with your patrol cars? Well, you still have them active except you can't put gasoline in them. You can't run the gas pump to pump gas into them. So they have one tank to operate on for 2 weeks. You start thinking through everything where we depend on electrical power, and it gets sort of mind-boggling.

The one outfit that is prepared to move with their own sources of energy and communications and be self-sufficient is the military, and I would think in a situation like that you would just have to move the military in and let them be in charge of the area as far as law enforcement goes and work with the local police, of course. Help them out and do everything you can with them. But I would think you would need more than what the local police are going to be able to handle.

Senator Lieberman.

Senator LIEBERMAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I agree.

Let me begin with a simple question. Based on the exercise that you carried out, do you think we are ready to confront this kind of emergency?

Mr. JONES. Well, obviously, wherever you do an exercise or a game of this sort, you identify issues. You identify areas and problems that need to be sorted out.

We believe the plans and preparedness that I referred to for the full spectrum of emergencies are responsive to the kinds of consequences that we have talked about here. I would cite again our plan for Federal response to a catastrophic earthquake.

The question "Is it enough?" is a function of the threat, the act, the progress of the response, and the facts of a particular case. We believe that what we are doing now is improving and strengthening the Nation's capability at the Federal as well as the State levels to respond to this range of emergencies.

Senator LIEBERMAN. Okay. It sounds to me like you are saying that we are readier than we were before and that this exercise helped, but that you can't give a conclusive answer because we don't know exactly what the nature of the threat might be at a given moment.

Mr. JONES. We would agree with the terminology in Senator Glenn's opening statement of not necessarily-is, in short, what I am saying.

Senator LIEBERMAN. Okay. Let me ask you something I asked the folks earlier from OTA: Did you do an estimate of the financial impact of a blackout of this length of time?

Mr. JONES. No. The answer is we did not do a cost estimate for purposes of this game. Essentially what we are talking about here is opportunity lost costs. One, in order to come up with such an estimate, would have to extrapolate and make a great many assumptions as to when the stock market would open, when would business return to normal, and the difficulty and the speculative nature of such a process did not lead us to attempt it at this point. Senator LIEBERMAN. Last year, when we held a similar hearing, folks were in from Seattle and talked about the blackout there in 1988. I remember them saying that they were impressed by how critical mobile phones were in communicating during that blackout. Did you deal with that factor at all, communications and the role that mobile phones might play?

Mr. JONES. There was some discussion of mobile phones. At the game, clearly telecommunications occupied a high priority among the participants. The restoration of those telecommunications is vital to the response. The discussion in the wake of the earthquake in the San Francisco region was that mobile phones were very, very helpful. Of course, you do run into such problems as saturation and overloading even with those systems.

Senator LIEBERMAN. Does it make sense for the Federal Government to have a supply of mobile phones available to move into an area in an emergency case of this kind?

Mr. JONES. Clearly, the Federal Government has a great many communications resources. In the first instance, the responders have to look to the equipment and systems which we have to deal with the response. As to restoration of the public switch network and mobile cellular and those sorts of things, those are areas that go to the industry. They are areas that have to be dealt with in the total restoration.

In a situation like this, the infrastructure has not been impacted. The power to operate it has been impacted. So obviously the participants looked to the restoration of the power as a principal thing that had to be done?

Chairman GLENN. Joe, will you yield just for a question?

Senator LIEBERMAN. Yes.

Chairman GLENN. The scenario you set up was 2 to 3 weeks complete power outage, right?

Mr. JONES. That is correct.

Chairman GLENN. Well, then, your mobiles wouldn't do you any good. How do you recharge them? Or how about your central station? It operates off electricity. It can't operate off batteries for more than a few hours.

Mr. JONES. It does. There are standby batteries.

Chairman GLENN. You wouldn't have any communications.

Mr. JONES. We can assume generators for the discussion, so that the limiting factor becomes fuel and the limiting factor becomes the ability to recharge the mobile phones.

Chairman GLENN. I don't believe the people running a phone system or a cellular phone system, are set up to operate on batteries for any length of time, are they? Do they have emergency power sources?

Mr. JONES. Batteries do not give you-you are talking about the system itself

Chairman GLENN. Or do they have emergency generators set up to maintain communications if there is a major power outage?

Mr. JONES. As a general principle, there are emergency generators. The specifics of any particular utility or locale would, of course, I think, differ.

Senator LIEBERMAN. Interesting. I am interested in one of your conclusions, which is that the public affairs pressures will be enormous. We tend to underestimate the time these activities will take. There will be a need for a structure. Would you develop that a little bit here, just talk a little more about that?

Mr. JONES. The desire of victims and people all across the country to know what is going on and to understand what steps are being taken would be enormous in this kind of a situation. We can look back to large-scale disasters and catastrophes, and we find that coverage is immediate, it is thorough. We have worked to develop the means to be able to communicate the situation and what is being done to everyone who is interested in an effective way, in a coordinated, comprehensive and timely fashion, so that all the different levels of Government, the agencies, are able to provide information which is consistent, which is correct.

Senator LIEBERMAN. Do you think you are ready to do that?

Mr. JONES. Well, once again, total readiness is a function of a situation and what actually happens.

Senator LIEBERMAN. Sure. Understood.

Mr. JONES. But we are working on that. We have the Interagency Committee for Public Affairs in Emergencies. This has been activated on any number of occasions and in preparedness activities and in exercises. The experience with that has been quite good.

Senator LIEBERMAN. Does the average radio station, for instance, have enough emergency backup generating capacity to remain on the air for any period of time after an electric blackout? I am just wondering about it. I know the normal instinct of all of us would be to turn to a transistor radio. But would anything be on the air after a day or two?

Mr. JONES. Well, there are radio stations which have that kind of capacity. Once again, we would have to look at the fuel question because, in general, particularly in urban areas, there are limitations on the size of the fuel supply that can be stored there. So fuel

supply becomes a limiting factor, assuming that the generator is there and up and going. Those issues were discussed in some depth

at the game.

Senator LIEBERMAN. A final question. There is a comment here that there is a need for a congressional cell within a national coordinating group. What did you mean by that?

Mr. JONES. In these kinds of situations, the Congress is always interested. Members from the affected districts or States have a need to know what is being done. They will normally want to be able to communicate with their constituents and the like. And while we have over many years provided congressional liaison, this is simply a highlighting of the need to, based on the size of this kind of catastrophe, a need to make sure that that is done and that those information services can be provided.

Senator LIEBERMAN. Thank you, Mr. Jones.
Chairman GLENN. Thank you very much.

FEMA in the past has taken their lumps after some of the disasters. We are all aware of things in the paper and comments people have made and so on after some of the disasters. I have had the opportunity recently, back home in Ohio, to visit the area where a tornado moved through and also the Shadyside disaster. I know the main effort I have seen on behalf of FEMA out there has been the disaster assistance centers where they moved in very rapidly to help people. And I have been in there and talked to the people and talked to your FEMA people out there, and they are very experienced, competent and capable. I want to compliment you at least in that area on how FEMA is operating because they have done an excellent job.

Mr. JONES. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman GLENN. They are really on top of things.

Mr. JONES. We deeply appreciate that.

Chairman GLENN. We appreciated it much because the people were hurting. Thank you.

Mr. JONES. Thank you, sir.

Chairman GLENN. Our next witness is Mr. John Easton, Jr., Assistant Secretary for International Affairs and Energy Emergencies, Department of Energy.

Mr. Easton, welcome, and we look forward to your statement.

TESTIMONY OF JOHN J. EASTON, JR., ASSISTANT SECRETARY FOR INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS AND ENERGY EMERGENCIES, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY 1

Mr. EASTON. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much.

I am pleased today to be here to discuss two subjects: one, the status of work to address the electric system's vulnerabilities; and, secondly, the Department of Energy's reaction to the OTA report which was released today. Since some matters related to vulnerabilities of electric power systems are sensitive, I will try to provide the information you would like while accommodating these sensitivities.

1 See p. 70 for Mr. Easton's prepared statement.