Results
Reported Events
Journal of Critical Infrastructure Policy
Twenty categories of outage-related events are reported in Table 2 . When organized by three broad topics , the counts include : nature / weather events ( 1,311 events , 46 %), human events ( 714 , 25 %), and system operations or failure events ( 800 , 28 %). The most prevalent nature / weather events were severe weather and various types of storms ( winter , wind , and thunderstorm ). Few events were reported for wildfires and lightening during the study period . Among human events , vandalism represented the most common type of occurrence , and suspected cyberattack was the least reported event . This paper treats cyber event as a suspected cyberattack .
Table 2 . Reported Events Connected to Power Outages
Sabotage events or deliberate harm to the electrical grid are rarely reported as such . The data suggests that most of these events are reported as vandalism ( 20.3 %) instead of physical attack ( 2.1 %). An event is treated as vandalism when it does not constitute a physical attack or theft .
204