Disasters that strike over a large area- such as large power blackouts-are especially hard to tackle since they preclude simply utilizing the resources of nearby unaffected areas. The number of such outages has been steadily rising in the US for decades, due to accidents and natural causes, but the possibility of relevant terrorist attacks must be considered too. Such events have cascading effects in a modern, technologically inter-connected state- transport, telecoms, water, and other infrastructure networks are soon affected by loss of power. These problems, and their solutions are multi-faceted and involve a number of agencies and institutions. Not only must electrical infrastructure be made more resilient so as to reduce the likelihood of large-scale failure, but procedures must be developed to make affected systems run again as soon as possible.