Looks as though things are getting interesting:
The attack one week ago on two substations in Moore County, N.C., resulted in the loss of power to 45,000 people and raised questions about the security of America’s power grid.
And when further attacks in North Carolina, South Carolina, Washington, and Oregon were revealed, those questions have now become urgent. Are the attacks — all involving gunfire targeting substations — unrelated pranks, or are they connected to a plot of some kind?
As outlandish as the idea of some kind of coordinated attack on our electrical grid being underway sounds, federal authorities are not dismissing anything or any theory at this point. They can’t afford to. The electric infrastructure our country depends on is critical — especially moving into the winter months when so many homes use electric heat.
Here’s what I find interesting. If we assume that these attacks are not committed by the Random Asshole Set — teenage boys, for example — and I think it’s safe to they’re they’re not, given the geographic locations of each attack, it behooves us to try to figure out who are behind them. Here are my thoughts.
Radical Muslims. Our perennial bugbears, they are, although I think it’s unlikely they’re intent on bringing the electrical grid down; their preferred target is people, not stuff. Again, nothing is impossible and they might have changed their modus to punish The Great Satan by ending video gaming, porn movie gazing and Sunday morning Christian broadcasts, but I think it’s a remote chance, at best.
Leftist / Gummint provocateurs [some overlap]. I would believe this if, say, the FBI were announcing that “right-wing hate groups / White supremacists” are “persons of interest” in their investigations. But I don’t think even the NY Times will buy that story. Most persuasively, there are no RWHG / WS groups capable of organizing such widely-dispersed and well-planned acts of sabotage, simply because actual membership of such groups is scattered over thousands of basements across the U.S.A., and I think too many of these people, feeble as they are, would be willing to risk being set up by Fibbie plants in their ranks. Those birds ain’t gonna fly again soon.
Eco-terrorists. Yeah, as a next step to gluing yourselves to roads and paintings, this would be a logical exercise for these nutcases. The part that makes this so credible is that the Radical Greens have a wide, international membership — so you could bring in a group from Germany, the U.K. and all over Europe, give them the plan and the explosives, have them execute the plan and fly them out of the nearest major international airport while the pieces are still falling out of the sky. The Carolina attacks, for example, took place not far from Charlotte-Douglas, and the Washington- and Portland ones are close-ish to both Portland PDX and SeaTac airports. Thus there are no local suspects because there are no local perpetrators.
It’s all early days, of course, and no doubt greater minds than mine are considering the same variables; just none at the FBI, because they’re too busy trying to fit some chumps in the Christian Urban Brotherhood Society — CUBS — in Biloxi MS into the frame.
My Readers are welcome to add their addled thoughts, wild-ass theories and so on in Comments.
Eco-terrorists for the win. Collapsing the grid by forcing everyone into electric cars is too slow, thus the move to kinetic action. No need for foreigners though. There are plenty of the barbarians inside the gates, even in South Carolina and they don’t need to flee to Germany. Any big city will do.
I work in manufacturing, dealing with millions of lbs of highly hazardous (think flammable plus explosive) chemicals daily. We are near water, so we fall under maritime security and we all get to train on MarSec on a regular basis. I’ve had to go thru several federal background checks just to keep my job. I can tell you straight up that industrial security against any sort of committed terrorist group is a joke.
We can keep the occasional lost drunk out of the plant, but anything more dangerous and we gotta call the sheriff and wait for a response. So yeah, it’s all vulnerable.
I wanna say left-wing nut jobs, but the enviro-weenies angle does also look viable. And I fully expect the FBI to weigh in with right-wing terrorists and a false flag event in the near future.
It was done by the FBI in the search of a clue on how to keep their funding. ATF provided transport.
As a fan of Tom Clancy conspiracy action novels, my vote goes to “Foreign Gov’t Bad Actors” sponsored by the usual suspects of the day. So let’s go with somebody attempting to create the conditions needed for a widespread cascading power grid failure. So who’s mad at the US at the moment — as usual, there is a long list. My money is on people who have been shipped large pallets of cash by our own gov’t. What better than to use our own funds to destroy us, or at least punish the Great Satan. They have now demonstrated how easy it is to take out an mutiple substations – a proof of concept. All they need now is a High Load day and more important targets.
In theory, ( or during a Texas snow storm ) under the right set of failures, a small failure can lead to catastrophic cascading shutdowns across a much larger portion of the power grid. Takeout the right set of substations controlling key 345KV lines when they are heavily loaded, forcing the load to be rerouted over other already stressed lines which causes those lines to shed load by shutting down . Rinse and repeat until the entire sections of the country ( or Texas ) is shut down, or operators manage to get ahead of the cascade and isolate the impacted areas.
The power grid has been hardened over the last 50 years since the great Northeast Blackout.and the computer systems that continuously monitor and work to prevent cascades have been vastly improved in the ability to simulate and predict immanent cascades, so the chances have been reduced, but not eliminated. it’s still vulnerable to failure.
Which major outage affecting several states was caused by a single pigeon roosting in a relay box or something?
Remember Mad Max 2 where the oil rig was defended by flamethrowers? Just saying…
Flamethrowers are a short range weapon, no good against rifles.
I put my money on Eco terrorists. They have a strong history of burning down residential developments, spiking trees being cut down, etc. They are wide spread and I’m sure few of them have a criminal record, yet. After they do their dirty work, they go back to pouring coffee at their local Starbucks.
JQ
Likewise – ELF and their other play-mates have been a bit too silent of late. Weird, since they’ve been silent since 2012, and the Fibbies put $50k bounties for info\conviction calls on the group.
Its just typical to call out “Right Wing Hate Groups” as the cause, with little evidence, and nothing but a tail-wag\wishful thinking.
The NC LEO presser was non-descript saying “Investigation is ongoing, with our Fed Partners”, but zero other details. The Fibbies only say ‘signs of terrorism’, and mum otherwise.
Time will only tell. Hope they have good time\life on the trail-cams and other surveillance tech monitoring…
Who says the different actors are connected? Read on the internet that sumdood took out power to an area with a deer rifle, think oooh good idea, go forth and do likewise.
I think it would be instructive to see who was affected by the outages.
Mark D
More important than who did this: note how easy it is to kill the power for a targeted urban area. Should the society’s current divisions go kinetic, and said action become a consideration, similar acts may be undertaken to isolate and pressure the opposition, or to serve tactical goals. Frankly, the operators of these facilities should be paying attention too, for the same reasons.
And let me not be misunderstood: these acts were crimes, and should be prosecuted. But it is also proof of concept, and should be noted for future reference, should same become necessary.
Let’s pray it is not necessary. But let’s also be prepared.
BTW – Hello, supposedly non-existent NSA/CIA/FBI/relevant alphabet agency surveillance!! Yes, this is theorizing, not planning. No, I have no plans to take any action, either eminently or otherwise, nor have I developed any plans to do so either alone or with any others. More important, I don’t live anywhere near any of the potential targets of such a theoretical action. Butt out.
Could it be the Chicoms? They’re currently in an expansionist phase, with their navy the largest in the world; presumably their other armed forces also expanding. It’s well known that they intend to take Taiwan at the earliest feasible opportunity. They also view the US as their only true competition/opposition. I think it’s possible that they have teams testing the US power grid, seeing how easily it might be taken down/be repaired. I think it’s quite possible that targeted attacks on the power grid, combined with EMP bombs detonated in the atmosphere above the US, would result in the US destroyed as a threat to Chinese hegemony.
you could be right. Imagine if the ChiComs did this on a wider scale in the United states and other disruptions, we’d be preoccupied with that while they were free to invade Taiwan or someplace else.
we are far better off if we can minimize the ChiComs have on our country, economy and infrastructure. We need to become self sufficient with manufacturing and expand out Navy to counter the ChiComs. This is a long term solution and will take a lot of time to correct after decades of exporting our manufacturing to other countries and ceding the Panama Canal back to Panama who then turned control over to the ChiComs.
JQ
A lot of current and retired Green Beanies supposedly live in that area. Could somebody be making a point?
The fed/false flag option reminds me of a discussion I had with someone once.
Him: “You don’t think the moon landing was faked do you?”
Me: “No, but you’re missing the real question. Do I think I have a government CORRUPT enough to try to fake the moon landing.”
I draw your attention to the magician’s other hand…
Who is never mentioned?
Coincidentally, who is the oldest civilization?
Who has more population than food, utilities, room?
Hint:
* rhymes with ‘curry’, ‘Ganges’, ‘yoga’.