Participants watch a Powerpoint presentation during an electromagnetic pulse attack exercise held at the Chicopee Public Safety building. (Don Treeger/The Republican)
CHICOPEE (Tribune News Service) — More than 40 police, firefighters, Air Force members from Westover Air Reserve Base and the people who run the region’s power grid gathered Tuesday in a basement conference room to think about the unthinkable.
Col. Gregory D. Buchanan, commander of the 439th Airlift Wing, Westover Air Reserve Base, presented the hypothetical to the group: Imagine waking up on a typical Tuesday in the future only to find out nothing works — the light switch by your bed, the traffic light down the street, no water from the tap.
Soon, it is learned that an adversary detonated a nuclear device high above the eastern seaboard, Buchanan continued. It’s high enough that it hasn’t destroyed cities. But it’s powerful enough to cause an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) knocking out power transformers and satellite communications. Damage cascades, disabling health care, food distribution.
An electromagnetic pulse is a burst of electromagnetic radiation either from a manmade expulsion or a natural event such as a sunspot. The pulse can cause damaging fluctuations of current and voltage in electronic equipment.
Simultaneously, Westover gets the call to start mobilizing. The base needs to ready its huge C-5M Super Galaxy aircraft to begin ferrying troops and supplies overseas to meet the threat.
“We need to get those eight C-5s in the air,” Buchanan said. “And I have no way of getting my 2,800 reservists to the base.”
Global adversaries — like China or Russia — know they cannot go toe-to-toe with American military force on the battlefield. But if they can slow America’s response, they can win.
“We call it contested deployment,” Buchanan said.
That was the scenario Tuesday at Chicopee Safety Complex for a morning-long tabletop exercise, a war game of sorts, with participants mulling the regional response to such an incident.
“I’m hoping that we learn about our vulnerabilities,” said Chicopee Police Chief Patrick Major. “Some of them we know about already. But we need to learn ways to address them.”
The exercise is not just useful in case of an EMP attack, an event that could paralyze a region for as long as 18 months, but for other events both natural and caused by humans, such as a cyberattack, or a natural disaster that causes widespread power outages.
“If you can deal with the big problem,” Buchanan said. “You can learn how to deal with the smaller events.”
It’s already happening, he said, pointing to Russian cyberattacks against Ukraine and attacks by Russia, China and Iran against U.S. water systems.
Hospitals have fallen victim to cyberattack, airlines crippled by software glitches.
The exercise is not just about Chicopee, Mayor John Vieau said, but about the safety of the region and the nation.
Community resilience is a point of emphasis for the whole Air Force and the Defense Department, Buchanan said.
The tabletop exercise in Chicopee follows a smaller-scale war game with Joint Base San Antonio and civil authorities in Texas that was held a few months ago.
Officials from the Pentagon, Homeland Security and other federal agencies were in attendance at Chicopee’s tabletop game Tuesday or monitoring online. The Chicopee exercise might be a model for exercises elsewhere, Buchanan said.
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