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Thousands of state lawmakers and staff at a national conference in Chicago on issues facing states got an earful on the security of the electric grid, , and as Mike Vasilinda tells us, utilities admit they know less about the issue than they should.

The bright lights of big cities would be dimmed, along with the lights in your home for weeks or even months as a result of cyber attacks or an act of war. The utilities, speaking to lawmakers, say they are fighting off attacks every day. Devon Streit runs the Arkansas Electrical Coop.

“And they only have to be right once. We have to be right every single time” Streit told lawmakers on behalf of the industry.

Electrical providers say an outage is more likely to last weeks than months if a major attack succeeds, but they admit they don’t know as much as they should, which is why they are funding extended research on EMP and cyber attacks.

“Electro-magnetic waves are fluky things. No odosne really understands how they work, and I’m an electrical engineer, and I’ll just tell you that right now” quipped Streit.

A  2013 attack on a substation in California got the utilities attention. Street says they now have a list of the most vulnerable sites in America. “Now that’s a confidential list, so I’m not going to tell you which ones they are” he said.

But former news anchor turned author Ted Koppel told the audience the attacks are much more likely and devastating than the utilities admit and no one is ready for the worst case scenario.

“This isn’t Ted Koppel saying it, this is Ted Koppel quoting the former head of the national security agency” says the Author.

South Florida lawmaker Richard Stark (D_Broward) called the session eye opening.

“Instead o being pro-active and planning, we tend to wait until there is a disaster” says Stark.

Koppel and others say a lengthy grid outage would strain food and fuel supplies as well as everything else that we take for granted.

Russia, China and the US all have the capabilities to take out the other’s grids, but not the will. But defense experts say North Korea or ISIL may lack the capability but not the will, and may someday have the capability to cause major electrical outages.