The Burning Wire

dropped into his chair. His granola bar and Greek athlete cup fell to the floor.
    And then another domino fell. A third red dot, like a bull’s-eye on a target, began to throb, and in its aloof manner the SCADA computer reported:
    Critical failure.
MH-17 offline.
    “No, not another one!” somebody whispered.
    And, as before, no other substation stepped up tohelp satisfy the voracious demands of New Yorkers for energy. Two substations were doing the work of five. The temperature of the electric wires into and out of those stations was growing, and the voltage level bars on the big screen were well into the yellow.
    MH-12 offline. NJ-18 offline.
MH-17 offline. RR to affected
service areas from MH-10, MH-13.
    The supervisor snapped, “Get more supply into those areas. I don’t care how you do it. Anywhere.”
    A woman at a nearby control booth sat up fast. “I’ve got forty K I’m running through feeder lines down from the Bronx.”
    Somebody else was able to bring some juice down from Connecticut.
    The voltage indicator bars continued to rise but more slowly now.
    Maybe they had this under control. “More!”
    But then the woman stealing power from the Bronx said in a choking voice, “Wait, the transmission’s reduced itself to twenty thousand. I don’t know why.”
    This was happening throughout the region. As soon as a tech was able to bring in a bit more current to relieve the pressure, the supply from another location dried up.
    And all of this drama was unfolding at breathtaking speeds.
    700 million miles an hour . . .
    And then yet another red circle, another bullet wound.
    Critical failure.
MH-13 offline.
    This was the equivalent of a huge reservoir of water trying to shoot through a single tiny spigot, like the kind that squirts cold water out of a refrigerator door. The voltage surging into MH-10, located in an old building on West Fifty-seventh Street in the Clinton neighborhood of Manhattan, was four or five times normal load and growing. The circuit breakers would pop at any moment, averting an explosion and a fire, but returning a good portion of Midtown to colonial times.
    And then: “Oh, Jesus, Lord!” somebody cried.
    The supervisor didn’t know who it was; everybody was staring at their screens, heads down, transfixed. “What?” he raged. “I don’t want to keep hearing that kind of thing. Tell me!”
    “The breaker settings in Manhattan-Ten! Look! The breakers!”
    Oh, no. No. . . .
    The circuit breakers in MH-10 had been reset. They would now allow through their portal ten times the safe load.
    If the Algonquin control center couldn’t reduce the pressure of the voltage assaulting the substation soon, the lines and switchgear inside the place would allow through a lethally high flood of electricity. The substation would explode. But before that happened the juice would race through the distribution feeder lines into belowground transformer boxes throughout the blocks south of Lincoln Center and into the spot networks in office buildings and big high-rises. Some breakers would cut the circuit but some older transformers and service panels would just melt into a lump of conductive metal and let the current continue on its way, setting fires and exploding in arc flashes that could burn to death anybody near an appliance or wall outlet.
    For the first time the supervisor thought: Terrorists. It’s a terror attack. He shouted, “Call Homeland Security and the NYPD. And reset them, goddamn it. Reset the breakers.”
    “They’re not responding. I’m locked out of MH-Ten.”
    “How can you be fucking locked out?”
    “I don’t—”
    “Is anybody inside? Jesus, if they are, get them out now!” Substations were unmanned, but workers occasionally went inside for routine maintenance and repairs.
    “Sure, okay.”
    The indicator bars were now into the red.
    “Sir, should we shed load?”
    Grinding his teeth, the supervisor was considering this. Also known as a rolling blackout, shedding load was an extreme measure in the power business. “Load” was the amount of juice that customers were using. Shedding was a manual, controlled shutdown of certain parts of the grid to prevent a larger crash of the system.
    It was a power company’s last resort in the battle to keep the grid up and would have disastrous consequences in the densely populated portion of Manhattan that was at risk. The damage to computers alone would be in the tens of millions, and it was possible that