Timeline July 23, 2009
TVA too sick to be cured?
July 23, 2009
When a member of the household becomes sick, it affects every other member. And everyone supports that member until the illness has been cured. But sometimes the sick one becomes uncooperative, mean-spirited and fights at every turn attempts to speed up the recovery.
TVA is sick, sick for a very long while and until the last few days has fought against every attempt to ameliorate its problems. TVA fights back with legal ploys and minatory actions, while appealing every ruling against it believing it will save money or will defer future payments. “Doing the right thing” is not in TVA’s lexicon.
The child was born of selfish parents in 1933 after incubating for 10 years in the cauldron of government power. Senator George Norris (Neb) and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, parents of different political parties, came as one in the development of the concept of federalizing the electricity industry.
Their cover was “flood control” although other extant federal agencies were fully operational in that area most notably the Corps of Engineers.
The new kid on the block, TVA, would change the established organization of the federal government for 76 years. Unique in law, it was paid deference to most of its life by other federal agencies and many state agencies too.
Being different is one thing but being consistently bad is not tolerated by society. The Kingston disaster forced the peeling away, the uncovering of layers of bad management that had been going on from the very start. Because of no cohesive and clear lines of communication, different sections in TVA’s organization operate as entities unto themselves and according to the McKenna report did not function as a single unifying organization.
Current management, if they saw the problems at all, have been helpless in overcoming years of inertia, of backbiting among divisions and an inability to focus on specific management problems with an attempt to solving those problems. Note: The word “bonus” was nowhere to be found in the McKenna report. This has been a key criticism of the new part-time board structure that authorized huge salary and bonus increases for management.
The signals have been there for a long time and they pop up now and then and little notice usually is made of them. For instance, the GAO reported on TVA’s failure adequately to secure their computers and security systems from possible cyber attack and concomitant management and operational control systems. The GAO made 19 public recommendations and for security reasons 73 other ones obviously more serious. In GAO’s May 21, 2008 report: www.gao.gov
“TVA has not fully implemented appropriate security practices to secure the control systems and networks used to operate its critical infrastructures. Both its corporate network infrastructure and control systems networks and devices were vulnerable to disruption. The corporate network was interconnected with control systems networks GAO reviewed; thereby increasing the risk that security weaknesses on the corporate network could affect those control systems networks. On TVA’s corporate network, certain individual workstations lacked key software patches and had inadequate security settings, and numerous network infrastructure protocols and devices had limited or ineffective security configurations.”
GAO reports that of 19 public executive action recommendations made over a year ago none have been completed and all show “in process”. Many deficiencies in the security area are similar to the ones uncovered in the McKenna report. GAO concludes:
“TVA did not always address known significant deficiencies in its remedial action plans. The agency had developed a plan of action and milestones for its transmission control system; however, it did not do so for the control systems at the fossil, hydroelectric, or nuclear facilities. In addition, while the agency tracks weaknesses identified by the TVA Inspector General for its transmission control system, it did not include these weaknesses in its plan of action and milestones. Until the agency implements an effective remediation process for all control systems, it will not have assurance that the proper resources will be applied to known vulnerabilities or that those vulnerabilities will be properly mitigated.”
It’s not just the jeopardy TVA puts at stake on 9 million people in the TVA territory, it is the clear and possible danger to all Americans who connect to any American electricity grid.
If the words in the McKenna report sound familiar, they are. TVA’s problems are endemic; they cover the entire organization and are not exclusive to fossil plant operations.
TVA’s sickness cannot be cured by moving around boxes on an organization chart which already has been tried; the illness has metastasized and has gone too far. TVA has been triaged to the waiting room.
Ernest Norsworthy
emnorsworthy@earthlink.net
http://norsworthyopinion.com
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