Attacks on the US Power Grid

[AG_PhamD]

For some reason this story isn’t getting much attention.

North Carolina substations attack a 'wake-up call' in latest nationwide infrastructure threat

A shooting that damaged power substations in North Carolina has been deemed an attack, as officials warn of threats to the nationwide infrastructure.

www.usatoday.com

Someone, or some people, intentionally shot up 2 power substations in Moore County, NC, disabling power for days to 12,000 homes and businesses during freezing cold weather. A state of emergency was declared and a curfew was established.

The FBI is treating this as the terrorism that it is. They believe it’s linked to far right extremists trying to start a civil war. They cite an online post from a month ago. One theory is that this outage was intended to cancel a controversial drag show that originally allowed children to attend (this was later changed but the show was ended early due to the outage).

If the latter is true, this would be taking homo/trans-phobia to a whole new level. I have some trouble believing this was truly the motive, but also wouldn’t be surprised considering my hospital network has received multiple bomb threats this year due to trans-related treatments and the false belief trans surgeries are performed on children.

Come to find out, this same area had another attack 3 weeks ago. Florida, Washington State, and Oregon have recently had attacks. In fact, as of 8/2022 there have been at least 70 attacks/acts of sabotage on the US power grid.

If this is political extremism (presumably right wing, but ecoterrorism is also a possibility), this is a serious issue and should be concerning.

(Large transformers in particular are extremely expensive, hand made equipment. Spares aren’t exactly readily available or in large quantities. 10+ years Boston had a transformer explosion and much of the city didn’t have power for 3-4 days because they had to ship in a replacement from another part of the country.)

 

[mollyc]

Yes, my parents live there. They lost power from Saturday evening through Wednesday mid-morning. They are in their mid-80s, but luckily have a generator and propane appliances so they weren't horribly put out. A major inconvenience, as their heat pump wouldn't kick on unless it got cold enough, so a lot of days their house was fairly chilly. Some of the stores also had generators so they were able to get some things, but none of the traffic lights worked so there were a lot of unnecessary car accidents also.

They have actually already sold their house, getting ready to move to graduated living in January, but are still in the house currently due to the terms of their sale agreement. In their new place they would not have been so lucky with a generator.

 

[Chew Toy McCoy]

This is probably just a test run by extremists (like 1/6), but regardless of anybody's political leanings I highly doubt any of those who lost power went "Nice one. Sign me up!" Stunts like this only serve to turn more people against you.

 

[Roller]

For some reason this story isn’t getting much attention.

North Carolina substations attack a 'wake-up call' in latest nationwide infrastructure threat

A shooting that damaged power substations in North Carolina has been deemed an attack, as officials warn of threats to the nationwide infrastructure.

www.usatoday.com

Someone, or some people, intentionally shot up 2 power substations in Moore County, NC, disabling power for days to 12,000 homes and businesses during freezing cold weather. A state of emergency was declared and a curfew was established.

The FBI is treating this as the terrorism that it is. They believe it’s linked to far right extremists trying to start a civil war. They cite an online post from a month ago. One theory is that this outage was intended to cancel a controversial drag show that originally allowed children to attend (this was later changed but the show was ended early due to the outage).

If the latter is true, this would be taking homo/trans-phobia to a whole new level. I have some trouble believing this was truly the motive, but also wouldn’t be surprised considering my hospital network has received multiple bomb threats this year due to trans-related treatments and the false belief trans surgeries are performed on children.

Come to find out, this same area had another attack 3 weeks ago. Florida, Washington State, and Oregon have recently had attacks. In fact, as of 8/2022 there have been at least 70 attacks/acts of sabotage on the US power grid.

If this is political extremism (presumably right wing, but ecoterrorism is also a possibility), this is a serious issue and should be concerning.

(Large transformers in particular are extremely expensive, hand made equipment. Spares aren’t exactly readily available or in large quantities. 10+ years Boston had a transformer explosion and much of the city didn’t have power for 3-4 days because they had to ship in a replacement from another part of the country.)

IIRC, Rachel Maddow did a piece on this the other day. She started off with an account of a similar incident near San Jose in 2013 that was never solved. But I agree — this is highly concerning, as are attacks on other vulnerable infrastructure and services.

 

[AG_PhamD]

Yes, my parents live there. They lost power from Saturday evening through Wednesday mid-morning. They are in their mid-80s, but luckily have a generator and propane appliances so they weren't horribly put out. A major inconvenience, as their heat pump wouldn't kick on unless it got cold enough, so a lot of days their house was fairly chilly. Some of the stores also had generators so they were able to get some things, but none of the traffic lights worked so there were a lot of unnecessary car accidents also.

They have actually already sold their house, getting ready to move to graduated living in January, but are still in the house currently due to the terms of their sale agreement. In their new place they would not have been so lucky with a generator.

Glad your parents made it through safely!

The impact of a power outage of even 24hrs can be immense, on people, businesses, and other types of infrastructure. If there’s extreme heat or cold, people dying is not unexpected. There’s also generally more hospitalizations due to people tripping n the dark, car accidents, inability to use electronically powered medical devices (ie nebulizers). Many house fires are caused by candles using outages.

Anyone who attempts to take out the power grid deserves the most severe of consequences regardless of their intent.

~10 years ago my parents Connecticut lost power for 13 days. There was a huge ice storm on Halloween while leaves were still on the trees, creating extensive damage to trees and power lines across the state. They’re fortunate to have a large diesel standby generator- so they were fine. After a few days however the gas stations ran out of gas and shortly thereafter diesel and my parents had to drive to NY to get more fuel. The grocery stores and restaurants lost all their food. The local pharmacy was unable to process prescriptions or credit cards as there was no internet. They had to guess copays and chase down money later. After 4 days they ran of fuel and had to shut down and probably lost $10k of refrigerated drugs. Not that many people could get around because so many trees were down.