Erik van der Vleuten’s contribution to the Material Civilization section of the online EHNE Digital Encyclopedia of European History was recently published here. Read more about this ambitious bi-lingual project (published in French and English) here.
The ‘European blackout’ of Saturday evening, 4 November 2006 was remarkable. In Northern Germany, close to the North Sea, a high-voltage transmission line had been purposefully shut down, and contingencies caused a second line to overload and shut down. As the electricity sought alternative pathways, more lines overloaded and switched off. Within 20 seconds the failure had cascaded to the Mediterranean. From Croatia to Portugal lights went out, and people were trapped in trains and elevators. Via the Spain-Morocco high-voltage cable the failure even hit Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia.
Critical infrastructure (CI)
The policy concept CI emerged in the mid-1990s. After hackers broke into the CIA, US Air Force, Department of Defense, and Citibank computer systems via the Internet, an American presidential Critical Infrastructure commission urged protection of infrastructure critical to the economy, society, and administration. The infrastructure-related terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 in the USA (using aircraft as weapons), Madrid 2004 (targeting commuter trains), and London 2005 (targeting subways and buses) added urgency. So did major technical failures such as the Italian blackout of 2003, and the Russia-Ukraine gas crisis and European blackout of 2006. The EU enacted its own CI policies to protect “the vital societal functions … READ MORE