When tensions got white-hot between the United States and Iran over the assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, it was widely believed the U.S. electric utilities would bear the brunt of Iranian reprisals. The nation’s electric industry leaders spent anxious hours wondering where, when and how bad?

It did not happen, but the alarm was well-founded. It followed mounting concerns flagged last December by the National Infrastructure Advisory Council and followed by an equally alarming report this month from Dragos, a leading cybersecurity consultancy that issues a threat assessment annually.

The Dragos report predicts a possible multi-pronged attack, striking at vulnerabilities in the utilities including those in the supply chain. Dragos identifies threats from attacker groups Magnallium and Xenotime. These have, according to Dragos, migrated from attacking oil and gas installations to electric utilities. It does not name countries.

Dragos states that the complete energy infrastructure is under attack and that the attacks are getting more sophisticated. A group identified by Dragos last year, Parasite, has been focusing on remote connectivity and virtual private networks as points of entry.

It is easy to read these warnings, and another by the Congressional Research Service, as announcing inevitable gloom. But a lot of people in and out of government are now centered on the cybersecurity problem. These include the departments, of Energy, Defense, Homeland Security and the intelligence agencies that prepare the counterattack capability.

As attacks get more sophisticated and penetrating, so too do the defenses and the ability of the targets to “lock out” invaders. Defenses can also include hardening systems that are not involved in electricity production and distribution — communications, for example.

Morgan O’Brien is a legend in the telecommunications industry. He was the co-founder of Nextel, the company that gave the world cellphones. He now works in the utility space: His mission is to harden communications by providing private broadband networks that are independent of everything — including the internet — and will survive most disasters, natural and man-made.

O’Brien is president and CEO of Anterix, which offers secure broadband via the 900 MHz spectrum that it has acquired. He told me, “People do not have to use imagination to understand what may happen to them in the event of a wide-scale power outage. Who can forget watching the collapse of civilization within a day or two of Hurricane Katrina?”

The good news, according to O’Brien, “is that progressive utilities and regulators are preparing for the worst by redesigning the architecture of the electric grid to pinpoint grid failures and in near real-time reroute power to isolate the failure, thus curtailing cascading power shutdowns.”

The magic number for O’Brien is 1.4 seconds. That is how long he says it would take the electric utility to learn of a failure using one of his company’s private networks. So, if a power line fails, in almost real time the utility will know. Remediation or isolation can begin.

Most security is directed at protecting and isolating industrial controller systems, the computer-driven programmable devices that are at the heart of all industrial installations including utilities. But there are other vulnerabilities, not all to do with cyberattack.

The New York Times reported graphically last October on the failure of communications at Pacific Gas and Electric, the giant San Francisco-based utility beset by wildfires. Everything went wrong and the company lost its ability to tell its customers, including nursing homes and other essential users, when it was cutting off the power. Even the state emergency services could not reach the utility control room, while, to quote the Times, “chaos unspooled outside.”

How vulnerable is the grid? While no one will quantify the threat, everyone I have talked to says it is there and very real. Fixing and it keeping it ahead is part of the new need for an ever-evolving  infrastructure.

But as O’Brien says, “For sure, the grid is under attack daily by bad cyber-activists and is routinely hammered by weather phenomena. The doomsday scenario is plenty scary, but I’ll put my money on American technology and determination to keep the lights on.”

The enemy is out there in a hostile world, but the battlements are manned by old and new forces.

The mayors of the two greatest cities in the world, New York and London, combined on Jan. 6 to endorse folly. New York’s Bill de Blasio and London’s Sadiq Khan issued a combined call for all cities to follow their example and divest pension funds in fossil fuel companies.

The plan is to force an end the burning of fossil fuels by pulling their pension funds out of fossil fuel company investments. In another context, this was known as a starve-the-beast strategy.

In reality it was cheap politics: an example of what the British like to refer to as “signaling virtue.”

Putting pressure on the oil and gas companies who are the targets of their worships somehow is meant to force them to do what? To pack up, shutdown and “say ‘uncle’!”, leaving us without gasoline for cars, diesel for trucks or natural gas for electric generation, to say nothing of heating our homes and making meals?

The big woolly idea behind this and much of the Green New Deal, on which the mayors based their pronouncements, is that by punishing the oil and gas companies, they speed the arrival of carbon-free electricity and transportation. Their worships should work on congestion, affordable housing, homelessness and the other innumerable ills that plague cities, not the least New York and London.

As for de Blasio, he could do something efficacious for cleaning the air. He could fight to save the Indian Point nuclear plant up the Hudson River, which has provided more than 20 percent of New York City’s electric power for decades with nary a smidgen of carbon being produced. Now it is to close and not a squeak from the clean-air mayor. Also, he could have spoken for other regional nuclear plants that have been closed in an untimely fashion.

Like many supporters of the Green New Deal, the two mayors are correctly worried about global warming. Their low-lying cities with tidal rivers are likely to suffer irreversible flooding within the decade. But they are closed-minded about the measures that can be taken to reverse global warming. They want clean electricity, but only if it is made in ways that are approved by the left of their parties — the Democrats for de Blasio and Labor for Khan. They want only politically correct, clean air.

The mayors want electricity that is produced from the wind or the sun. In their dreams, to misquote Annie Oakley in the musical, they have the sun in the morning and the wind at night. If only. The wind blows irregularly and the sun, well we know when that shines.

Politicians are out of their depths and dangerous when they prescribe a solution not a destination. If a government, say that of the City of New York, declares it wants more and more of the electricity generated in the city to be carbon-free, it should stick to that goal. It should not tell the market – and the industry — which kinds of carbon-free electricity meet the goal.

The goal should be the aim, not the plays that will get the ball there.

Nuclear plants in the United States are failing because after deregulation of the electric utility industry in the 1990s, a market was established in which the lowest-priced electricity was always to be favored – neither social value nor consideration for the fact that this would favor a carbon fuel, natural gas, over highly regulated nuclear plants was considered.

The mayors did not mention — as those who decide that the fossil companies are to blame are wont to do — that there are technologies on the horizon to capture carbon before it gets into the air. This is known as carbon capture use and storage (CCUS).

Oddly a rah-rah, American Petroleum Institute event, which API does every January in Washington, staged after the mayors’ announcement, under the rubric of “America’s Energy Future,” didn’t play up carbon capture use and storage, although oil companies are leaders in the field. Instead, API dwelled on the virtues of oil and gas in everything thing from job growth to entrepreneurship to quality of life.

Science brought us the fracking boom, cheap solar cells, efficient windmills and it should be given a chance to solve the carbon problem, both with clean nuclear and with much cleaner fossil. The rest is posturing, even as we have just finished the hottest decade on history.

The worshipful mayors of New York and London should be panicked about saving their cities, not signaling their liberal credentials.

What does it matter if a U.S. ambassador runs afoul of the administration in a piddling African country where the inhabitants suffer chronic poverty and bad government?

It so happens it matters a lot.

Here is the story: One of our most experienced ambassadors, Daniel Lewis Foote, with a distinguished diplomatic career, often in hot spots like Afghanistan, Iraq and Haiti, criticized the administration and the justice system of Zambia, a landlocked country in Southern Africa, for sentencing a gay couple to prison for 15 years for having sex. Zambians, who are committed Christians with a fundamentalist slant, were approving. Foote said he was horrified.

The president of Zambia, Edgar Lungu, joined the fray. Homosexuality, he told a British interviewer, was unbiblical and unchristian. Foote, who felt he had been badly treated as a diplomat since his arrival in 2017, was having difficulty in meeting with Lungu despite the $500 million a year the United States gives Zambia in debt-free assistance.

Then Foote, who also had been seething, apparently, over blatant corruption by Lungu and his family, published on the internet a strong indictment of the Lungu administration.

That was too much for the Zambians.

The government made the dispute with the United States public and stirred up the people. Lungu said Foote had to go and, amazingly, the State Department agreed without struggle and Foote was ordered back to Washington.

In his statement, Foote had laid out the situation clearly, “My job as U.S. ambassador is to promote the interests, values and ideals of the United States. Zambia is one of the largest per capita recipients of assistance in the world, at $500 million each year. In these countries where we contribute resources, this includes partnering in areas of mutual interest and holding the recipient government accountable for its responsibilities under this partnership.”

Lungu’s response to Foote’s statement was clear, too, “We do not want him here.”

And the State Department conveniently obliged, even while regretting that the government in Lusaka, Zambia’s capital, had effectively declared Foote “persona non grata.”

The effect across Africa and in other small nations may be to embolden them to silence ambassadors. Lungu has kicked sand in the eyes of the mighty United States and we have run. American values will not be on the table.

Tibor Nagy, the assistant secretary of state for Africa, tweeted lamely, “Dismayed by the Zambian government’s decision requiring our Ambassador Daniel Foote’s departure from the country.”

Yes, there is room for dismay; and it is dismay with the way this issue has been handled in Washington. A stellar career ambassador appointed by President Donald Trump has been pushed out of his post by a government that has been dependent on foreign aid both in cash and advice. Foote also pointed out in his statement that the “American people have provided more than $4 billion in HIV/AIDS support in the last 15 years. Working closely with the Ministry of Health, we currently have well over 1 million Zambians on life-changing antiretroviral medicine, touching close to half of the families in the country.”

If things had gotten too sticky for Foote to continue in Lusaka, he could have been reassigned and a new ambassador appointed. One way or another, he should not have been put in the position of leaving at the behest of Lungu, who is trying to drive Zambia back toward the kind of authoritarian government that has bedeviled it since independence from Britain in 1964.

During the height of the Cold War, Zambia had some strategic importance to the United States as a major producer of copper. Since then the economic fortunes of Zambia have risen and fallen with the copper price and attempts to diversify the economy have faltered. Tourism, dependent largely on the Victoria Falls and recreation on the world’s largest water impoundment, the Kariba Dam, called Lake Kariba, is faltering because of persistent drought leading to historical low flows in the Zambezi River.

Over the years Zambia has done better than, say, neighbor Zimbabwe, where bad government has destroyed the once-prosperous country and reduced it to a kind of subsistence existence without so much as a national currency. Zambia has never been as rich as Zimbabwe was at its independence in 1980, but it has managed somehow to survive.

In his statement, Foote saluted the warmth and friendliness of the Zambian people. In my experience, he is right. I lived in Zambia for a while many years ago and the people were tops. As a very young journalist, I interviewed Zambia’s first president, Kenneth Kaunda, when he was a young independence leader. He is now 95.

Kaunda, too, was to have his problems with diplomats. He curbed the press, but he loved press conferences and he ordered the diplomatic corps to show up and ask friendly questions. That did not go too well either.

In engineering there are credible and incredible failures. Nuclear power plants were designed against what was believed to be a “maximum credible accident.” Then came Fukushima, incredible.

In early December, a report from the National Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIAC) raised the possibility that a huge electric failure, the result of a concerted cyberattack or other event, could knock out electric supply in large swathes of the country for an extended period, weeks even months. A failure with consequences which would have been beyond thinkable before the computer age.

The report, which comes from an advisory council whose mission is to inform the president, has a weight that a think-tank study, for example, would not have. Here, it is the voice of the energy establishment speaking.

I found in reading this report and talking to people in the industry and in academia, it is easy to predict the end of social order as we know it.

It is a painful mind game to try to think how long families could survive without electricity. First off, you would be hot or cold, every appliance in the home would not work. Even if you have a generator, in short order the fuel, natural gas or gasoline, would be gone. How much non-perishable food do you have? I suspect most families would be going hungry after a few days. I would. Cell phones would run down and stay down, and the networks would collapse.

We would be reduced to living like animals without the skills that are inherent to animals. In bad scenarios, families with guns would outlast families without – for a few days.

Survivalists would be proven right as they hung on, maybe for a few months, hunting for fresh food, hoping for clean water, and living off the non-perishable food they have stockpiled. Rumor would dominate as communications failed.

Electric utilities live in a world in which their realities are changing. Wildfires in California and Australia have pointed to a new liability for the companies: accidental ignition through falling lines, likely to get more serious as weather gets more aberrant and droughts become the normal in a time of climate change. That, together with cyberattack, puts them in a place of vulnerability they never anticipated.

Utilities are proud of their expertise – and justifiably so — in responding to short-term outages, even major ones. They rush crews to the scene, and with military zeal get the lines up and the power flowing.

Then came Puerto Rico after hurricanes Irma and Maria, which gave an inkling of what happens when the grid fails: total devastation and maybe as many as 2,975 lives lost.

The NIAC report cites Puerto Rico and emphasizes cascading, blackouts as the grid begins to fail. As it is, utilities fend off daily cyberattacks, and every executive I have interviewed has emphasized that cyberattack is “what keeps me awake at night” – as Jacqueline Sargent, general manager and CEO of Austin Energy, told me recently.

The utility industry, often keen to be reassuring, was part of the preparation of the NIAC report. Scott Aaronson, point man in the industry’s trade organization the Edison Electric Institute, was  involved in the report and has been raising the alarm in interviews since its release.

A new seriousness in the federal government, particularly in the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Energy and the Pentagon, shows that the threat is real and credible. The White House has said nothing.

Changes not dictated by cyberattack defense, but which might aid it, are on the way. Small entities known as microgrids are cropping up. Think of the old utility model with central power stations as a city. The new one is a series of microgrids, more like villages, loosely connected and isolatable, and depending on local generation from solar and wind.

Also, the technology of defense against cyberattack is growing; there is a large cyber-defense industry. It is an escalating battle in which the defenses improve as the threat multiplies, a kind of cold war with weaponized computers.

In the new year, the invisible enemy will be engaged more than ever. But who knows what is enough? In the NIAC report, insiders have sounded the alarm about their own defenses. That is serious, credible.

 

 

---

Photo: Lower Manhattan following Power Outage as a result of Hurricane Sandy.

This just in: the Grinch didn’t steal Christmas. Europe executed the heist.

It was surely filched by the cold-weather dwellers of Europe, and the theft was completed by the Victorians who loved all the paraphernalia of the festival – frost, snow, holly, mistletoe, festooned trees, Christmas puddings, wassail, mulled wine, mince pies (which had a combination of meat and fruit), sugarplums, fruitcake, cakes shaped like yule logs and, of course, pervasive red in everything, from poinsettias to front door bows.

All this was lovely fun in the time of Victoria Regina, and it gave us what is now the indisputable seasonal story. Where would we be without “A Christmas Carol” with Scrooge, Bob Cratchit, Tiny Tim and those fabulous characters which sprang from Charles Dickens’ rich imagination, when the spirit of Christmas gripped the great writer?

All this is wonderful and totally joyous. But what has it to do with the original Christmas in Bethlehem, where a woman gave birth to a baby in a barn stall? We can be sure that family didn’t need to be gathering fuel like Good King Wenceslas, who took pity on a poor fellow, “When the snow lay round about/Deep and crisp and even.”

Sorry, dear people, before you sip another eggnog, think about this: How did Christmas, celebrated around the world, get a snowy complexion? In the Southern Hemisphere, when it’s summer in the season of joy, nary a flake of snow falls. And why does the world fake snow when nature doesn’t provide?

My mother was a purest, a conservative about Christmas. We lived in a semitropical climate, where snow is unknown except by reputation. We were snow-deprived, sun-drenched.

When decorating for Christmas, Mum refused to use cotton wool, shaving cream, or anything else that is commonly used to suggest snow. She was all-in for Christmas but hung straw around the house to remind us of Christ’s manger and local ferns, which she believed grew along the River Jordan at the time of the Nativity. Mum had never been to the Holy Land, so I didn’t know why she thought that green stuff which grew in Central Africa also grew along a legendary river in the Middle East.

Truth is, I’ve examined the banks of the Jordan and I’ve never seen any of the ferns which Mum swore were authentic to Christ’s birth.

The wonderful thing about Christmas is that it’s universal. Everyone loves Christmas and complete with ersatz snow, tinsel, ribbons, artificial holly berries, Santa Claus (Mum wasn’t too keen on that interloper), it’s celebrated with gusto from its beloved place of origin in the contested West Bank (of the Jordan) to the farthest reaches of the world, where it isn’t expressly forbidden by local religious preference.

Another thing about a conservative Christmas as practiced by my mother: She didn’t let my brother and me start our Christmas revelry until Christmas Eve. Then it was as though a cannon had been fired and Christmas lasted 12 days, as in the carol.

The last of the 12 days was grand affair, which we loved as kids just a smidgen less than Christmas Day. The cause of this second celebration was a ceremony called a “snapdragon.” Dried fruit – mostly yellow and brown raisins — was soaked in brandy and ignited. As the flame wasn’t very hot, we children thrust our hands into the fire to grab the fruit. One year, I tried making this on television. I spilled the burning brandy and nearly burned down the studio, according to the fire marshal. “No more,” he said. I’m sure his name was Ebenezer.

Drat, nobody stole Christmas. It’s where it has always been, safe in our hearts. It’s joy, laced with thrill, overflowing with love and tempered by a thought for the lonely, the sick, the hungry, the homeless, the incarcerated, and those wounded in all the ways people get wounded through the year.

A very merry Christmas to you.

 

PARIS — There are those who believe when Britain finally shakes off its European bondage it will prosper as never before. This prosperity will be so compelling that the remaining 27 countries that comprise the European Union will follow suit in pursuit of riches. The end of European integration.

This is a view easier to find in Washington than it is in Paris or in London. There is a sense here of Europe Rising not Europe Disintegrating. Britain will still, despite the contrived case against membership, look to selling to and buying from Europe. After all, the EU will still be there: a huge market just a little over 20 miles across the English Channel.

Europe is beset with sluggish growth. The euro — the currency used by 19 of Europe’s nations — has been a mixed blessing, unable to serve hurting states by devaluing to increase exports. Yet it is the symbol of Europe, particularly to a new generation that has known nothing else and looks more to a united Europe than, perhaps, their parents.

These are problems but not insuperable. From what I heard here at the annual congress of the Association of European Journalists (AEJ), Europeans feel that they really need each other, not least because they are constantly under a sophisticated and relentless attack of fake news and disinformation from Russia. Russia is a huge problem in Europe with fake information and even fake events, like the planting of disrupters pretending to be reporters or staged events suggesting a fascist penetration that does not exist. Daily, Russia endangers the truth in Europe.

The AEJ is, to my mind, as good a place as any to take the temperature of Europe. It is made up of working journalists, not stars or polemicists, but day-to-day reporters from across Europe, from Bulgaria to Spain and from Finland to Ireland. Collectively, they provide unique insight on the mood of Europe.

Rather than Britain’s departure (which nobody in Europe wants), here at the AEJ congress Brexit is regarded as the kind of misfortune that brings people together and leads on to triumph. Rather than Europe’s tragedy, here it is seen as Britain’s tragedy. And rather than Brexit being a precursor to the breakup of the EU, here it is seen as a precursor to the breakup of the United Kingdom.

Otmar Lahodynsky, president of the AEJ, says that England has discovered nationalism, as have Scotland and Wales — suggesting the inevitable breakup of the United Kingdom as it has been constituted since the Act of Union in 1707.

For Europe, the continuing problem is immigration.

While there are rich and poor nations, those in poverty will try to live in those with prosperity and migrate illegally. Not only has this been one of the drivers of Brexit, but it is also a massive problem for Europe, both the internal movement of people from countries like Poland to France, Holland and Germany, and from countries outside, especially Africa where people board unseaworthy vessels and risk drowning trying to reach Europe.

Add climate change to worries about Russia and immigration.

Europeans, much more than Americans, are palpably stricken about climate change and concomitant sea level rise. This adds to immigration pressure and free-floating anxiety about the future — an anxiety that is unifying, particularly for the young.

In London, once my home and now a bitterly divided place, there is agreement that new trade deals will not be written at the speed of a French train. People point out ruefully that it took Britain seven years to conclude a trade deal with Canada — and Britain and Canada l-o-v-e each other as mother and daughter. Who wants a deal with, say, the Czech Republic, with such passion? Not a tempting future.

LONDON — I have a secret. I can’t verify it, but I can share it. It’s this: I think Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II likes President Donald Trump.

Honestly, I’ve been studying video of them together and despite what the press here thinks, I believe she likes him. She’s amused by him. Poor woman, she deserves some amusement; she deserves some international figure who isn’t fazed by the honor of meeting the world’s most important monarch.

Consider what a relief it must be for the queen to see someone as unlearned in matters of protocol as Trump. Legions of heads of state and heads of government have leaned low over her hand while their wives have curtsied, often clumsily despite hours of practice. What a trial all this must be to a woman of 93, who has been subject to this since her ascent as queen in 1952.

Elizabeth must be the hardest-working woman on earth. She’s met thousands of stiff, boring men, day after day. She’s been sung to by countless legions of well-scrubbed schoolchildren and has endured thousands of hours of native dancing, from the Maoris of New Zealand to the Ndebele of Zimbabwe.

The mere knowledge that you’re to go to Buckingham Palace produces a kind of paralysis in most. The honor of the thing with the ghastly small talk they feel they must be ready to speak can only make for a tedium that defies imagination. From great generals like America’s Dwight Eisenhower to mass murders like Romania’s Nicolae Ceausescu, each has taken the royal paw and whispered idiocies about the weather in London that day.

No one — except possibly Trump — meets the queen without hours of preparation. How to shake hands, how to check that the great moment hasn’t caused you to break out in an embarrassing sweat. Those clothes! Is it to be rented morning wear (Who owns that?) or something less formal. Has your wife ordered correctly? Nothing off-the-peg or too high-fashion — except for Melania who, on this trip, appeared to be working as an haute couture model.

There’s evidence that the queen, after a long life of boredom, finds some relief in two American exceptions: Meghan Markle, the wife of her grandson, Prince Harry, and Trump.

Would the queen, one wonders, have opened Buckingham Palace to NATO for a reception if she hadn’t liked Trump who, for good or otherwise, was the man of the hour: the mad cousin, if you will, expected to metaphorically blow on his soup and say awful things, but still the most important member of the family.

I think the gauche American president was a little reward the hard-working Windsor (the family name, in case you’ve forgotten) who was dealing with yet another family crisis: An American woman has accused the queen’s son, Prince Andrew, of having sex with her when she was just 17 years old.

The rest of the NATO summit was all downhill. Trump left early when the media published and broadcast pictures of others at the summit chortling about him, including his host, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the queen’s daughter Princess Anne and – Oh, the villainy! — Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who regaled a small group with gestures, showing how Trump’s aides were open-mouthed at what their boss had said at his press conference.

Anne was already in bad favor with her mother for not joining the receiving line at the palace along with the her more dutiful brother, Prince Charles, and his wife Camilla.

Those who made merry of Trump’s antics might beware. He’s a counterpuncher (which means vindictive) and someone already critical of NATO. A chortle at Buckingham Palace might irreparably harm the defense alliance.

Maybe the queen will have reason to regret her hospitality and warmth toward the boredom-breaking American president. Her majesty won’t then be amused any longer.

The British call it sleeping rough. We call it for what it is: homelessness.

It starts the day when all the support systems — fragile as they often are — fail. When there is no home to go to; no bed to sleep in, no meal to eat, no toilet to use, no place to wash even a face — just the hard, cold and often wet streets that offer no succor. The hospitality of a concrete sidewalk is scant.

That is what faces 4 million luckless children each year in the United States, according to Renee Trincanello, chief executive officer of Covenant House Florida, which operates shelters in Ft. Lauderdale and Orlando. Once they hit the streets, they are vulnerable to every horror that can happen to a child, including sex trafficking. “They also are used by drug dealers to inculcate a habit,” Trincanello told me.

In the United States, homelessness is at a crisis point. Cities are clogged with the homeless from coast to coast. If you travel a lot, as I do, you are aware of how homelessness is at its most conspicuous where there is prosperity — a byproduct of high rents in cities like San Francisco, Austin, New York and Boston.

Very close to the Capitol in Washington, around Union Station, the homeless sleep on the sidewalks, sometimes with the barest needs met by charities — needs like a sleeping bag, if they have been identified and are lucky. Train stations are a mecca for the homeless because they have public toilets and offer warmth. But Union Station has removed most of its seating to keep out the homeless.

To draw attention to the misery and extreme danger of children sleeping in the streets, and to raise money, Covenant House branches in the United States, Canada and Latin America organize sleep outs. Once a year, executives like my friend Jan Vrins, managing director and leader of Navigant’s global energy practice, takes a sleeping bag, puts it on top of a cardboard box and gets a hard night’s rest on a parking lot pavement.

Vrins says, “It isn’t fun to sleep in a concrete parking lot on a carton box with a sleeping bag. But the time we spend with these youths before we sleep out is wonderful. First, we have dinner with them and have sessions where they share their stories.” Afterward, the children are safely tucked up in the shelter and the adults repair to the parking lot.

In every case, Vrins says, something has happened to them. “Their families have broken up, sometimes because of addiction; there have been storms, as in Puerto Rico, and they end up in the shelters. So, climate change is leading to more kids on the street,” he says.

Vrins says that he was introduced to Covenant House by an executive from Florida Power & Light. “That was 11 years ago, and I got hooked,” he says. Now he is Covenant House Florida’s vice chairman.

Trincanello, who is married with two daughters, has spent her career with Covenant House. She told me that her father wanted her to be a lawyer, so she pushed back and became a social worker.

If you sign up to sleep out with Covenant House, whether it is in chilly Toronto or as, as Vrins notes, more benign Florida, you will join some of the cream of America’s executive talent from Accenture and Black Rock, to Cisco, KPMG and other companies. In fact, prominent companies field “teams.”

Vrins, who is married with two sons, heads the Navigant team. Each sleeper is expected to raise $1,000 for Covenant House. This year, he laid down on the concrete in Ft. Lauderdale on Nov. 26. He says 130 people slept out there and raised $270,000.

A native of the Netherlands, Vrins is one of those gregarious people who puts his arms around you with his smile. He speaks with passion and love of the homeless children in their crises. Trincanello, who I have not met, has a voice as warm as a winter hearth. I can imagine it melting fear in a scared child. Together they do work which is not a molecule short of noble.

Vrins says of sleeping out: “When you wake up in the morning, you feel blessed. When homeless kids must look for the next place to spend the night, you feel blessed.”