Yup, I wouldn’t really worry so much about sabotage when the systems we have built barely holds up to mother nature. Over this weekend severe ice storms left 1/4 of my country without electricity. Some places are now going on 5 days without power without much promise for any proper fixes coming soon. The 220kV and other high voltage power lines that are sitting on the ground are probably not going be repaired for at least three or four months leaving many towns running exclusively from trailer mounted diesel generators with limited capacity. They’re can’t even count the damage because more ice is knocking down what they’ve managed to put back up.
The lesson seems to be that you can’t make the primary infrastructure bulletproof (no pun intended) so backup is essential!
Gilbert probably has the truth of it. An attack on the grid to disrupt power to millions for many days would be hugely complex and might cause economic issues but nothing like the terror of destroying buildings full of people. An attack on the grid to disrupt power to a very specific location for several hours would be much easier. So if I wanted to, say, cut power to a bank or a store so that the alarm won’t go off until after I’m gone, attacking the grid might be the answer. Remember, the whole point of Terrorism is to cause Terror, power out would be more of Annoyingism than terrorism.
[quote=“morejello, post:42, topic:21955, full:true”]Gilbert probably has the truth of it. An attack on the grid to disrupt power to millions for many days would be hugely complex and might cause economic issues but nothing like the terror of destroying buildings full of people.[/quote]Blowing up buildings is spectacular, but causes a fairly limited body count. While disrupting the grid is less spectacular, it probably would cause as high or higher of a bodycount, just spread over a large area.
Of course, you’re also assuming that the attack on the power grid is the only thing that would happen; no power = no communication = limited response + confusion resulting from any other terrorist actions that happen in the same timeframe.
You want to cause maximum terror? Knock out power then blow up a few buildings. The average person seeing a building come down in their town will panic. With no way for them to get news of how widespread the attack is, the whole city will devolve into a mass-panic free for all.
I would be less worried about the potential effects than the fact that it’s been dismissed as “vandals”. “Yeah, just a bunch of punk kids, came along and cut off the communications and shot for 19 minutes and knocked out 17 transformers. Damn kids. Probably too much sugar and Grand Theft Auto.”
There is ample evidence that accurate sniping of non-random targets was involved. Random shots would cause fires and a lot more danger. That sounds to me like an inside job, to the extent that the sniper knew what he was shooting for.
Ever since I was a child, upon passing power substations or even high-tension power lines, I start/continue composing in my head the terrorist-fiction novel involving sleeper cells of copper-javelin-throwers, speculating on where the sweet spot would be between weight/thickness/distance/precision targeting/conductivity/length of time before the javelins melt.
So what about this case makes it look like a professional job? The fact the shooter(s) used bullets instead of Nerf arrows? It takes no great deal of professionalism of any kind to handle a rifle at short or medium range. This could just as easily been the work of a drunken farmer pissed off because he thinks they didn’t pay him enough to build power lines across his land.
Catastrophe me ass. The main effect would be money lost by companies. Maybe one or two people would die if hospitals lost power but that would be about the worst. Trapped in elevators? Big frigging deal. 99.999% of all problems caused by losing power are handled by sitting down and waiting for the power to come back on. If that’s a catastophe in your opinion, then you desperately need to grow, buy, borrow, or steal a new spine because the one you have now is WAY too soft.
This is NOT the work of someone who wants to be a real honest to God terrorist. Those people are interested in mass casualities so they can see news broadcasts with buckets of blood all over the screen. Causing traffic jams by cutting power to signal lights, they could not possibly care less about. This was the work of the aforesaid drunken farmer, or a hobbyist.
As for protecting electrical substations, it’s called brick walls, people. Cheap and easy to make and can be built by unskilled labor. The very best marksman can’t hit what he can’t see. And if this happens again and the guy uses something powerful enough to whomp through a brick wall, THEN you have something to worry about.
Hmmm. I vaguely recall G. Gordon Liddy cooking up a plan to take down the West Coast through a combination of shooting out transformers, bombing aqueducts, and blowing up a few vital freeway overpasses, such as in the Grapevine. All of this could be done in rural areas with little scrutiny.
That would have been in the 1980s, and I probably have most of my facts wrong. In any case, this type of attack probably isn’t a new idea. For example, I’m glad hijackers haven’t decided to see if a 747 can be used to bust the Lake Shasta Dam.
Anyway, the solution is a bit of new security and, as noted, a LOT of decentralization. In particular, California could thrive on rooftop solar, and to date, most of the public utilities in the state have actively opposed it. Their apparent reason is that their corporate culture is geared towards buying power from a few big suppliers and supplying it to a lot of (mostly small) customers. Many small customers sounds alien to them, and I think they’ll have to be dragged by their heels to join in.
I was working at the University of Michigan Hospital when the big 2003 outage hit… Only 1 of several emergency generators worked immediately when the outage started – they were able to get more going after a bit, but that was a bit of a shocker.
Yes, that is possible (you’d still need the coolers outside or you’d need a cooling water system, so it’d be more complicated.) But the thing is, we’ve got lots of these all over the place - here’s one exploding during Sandy… The other major vulnerability on these systems is breakers (typically SF6 at these voltages). All of these things we like having outside because of the very large energies involved… if you’re unlucky enough to be in the interior space where one of these goes off, it will be a very bad day. We had a breaker explode in our yard and we can still find places years later where porcelain hit things at bullet like speeds dozens of meters away. But there’s nothing about them that inherently couldn’t be hardened… but as Maggie was saying another way of dealing with this is better resilience through microgrids and local storage, which solves other problems also (like system complexity and fragility, as well as renewable energy integration.)
It does seem like you could at least make it a building, instead of an open-air high-energy-physics demo. Wasn’t there a thing a couple weeks ago abou substations inside facade homes/warehouses/office buildings? Even the simplest external housing would require saboteurs to actually break into the building and risk alarms and security cams, instead of just potting away at the delicate bits from a quarter-mile off.
That’s a bit disingenuous. Blackout losses don’t get spread evenly across every US citizen, they get piled up in the area that has the blackout and crush local businesses.
