They tried to take down the grid. And had they a better understanding of how it worked (which is not a secret) they would have done so.
Electricity and its benefits has been with us for so long that we tend to take it for granted. That is a mistake. What if the grid were to go down nationally for a week, for months? Imagine what life would be like. The economic damage would be incalculable and in more places than I care to think the social fabric could literally be rent apart.
Commonly discussed concerns about the safety of our electrical grid usually center on relatively high-tech attacks like an electromagnetic pulse from an ionospheric nuclear blast or hackers taking down the control systems of power-generating stations or the transmission infrastructure. But what about low-tech options that are much more available to terrorists or foreign enemy governments? These would be actual physical attacks on our electrical infrastructure.
Consider the Metcalf Incident. This involved a sophisticated sniper attack on a Pacific Gas & Electric Company’s power station in Metcalf, California in the early morning hours of last April 16. I hadn’t heard about it until I read a column by Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal, nearly a year after the event.
The description of the Metcalf attack is chilling. The attackers apparently first slipped into an underground vault and expertly severed six AT&T fiber optic telecommunication lines in a way that would make repair difficult. The lid over this vault was so heavy that it would take at least two people to lift it. Then, a half hour later, the snipers began firing at the power station, destroying 17 giant transformers and six circuit breakers.
At the end of the attack, in the words of reporter Rebecca Smith, who put the story together through interviews, PG&E filings, and police video: “A minute before the police arrived, ‘the shooters disappeared into the night.” As simple as that.
The Metcalf power station was down for 27 days and the cost of the damage was estimated to be $15.4 million. Electrical power to Silicon Valley was not disrupted only because officials rerouted power there from other sources.
In the scheme of things in the world today, that’s no big deal, right? That seems to be the official response to the attack. As Rebecca Smith put it: “…quoting an FBI spokesman in San Francisco saying the bureau doesn’t think a terrorist organization launched the attack. Investigators, he said, ‘are continuing to sort through the evidence.’ PG&E, in a news release, called it the work of vandals.”
Sure, vandals… . Can I call bullhockey on this? Another attempt to keep the public in the dark- risking us actually ending up in the dark for a while. What happens if the grid goes down. Ask the people in the Sandy hurricane what happened within hours and days of their event. And the power needed for support was only miles away. Try to imagine if it was a hundred miles away? Or two hundred?
Here’s the deal. Domestic terrorists can be the jihadis sneaking across our border with the other illegals and then forming up into groups. Or they can be Greenpeace nitwits! It doesn’t matter who put the lights out, just that they did.
The way around the fact we can reroute power is to get someone who knows how it is rerouted and destroy the alternate sites as well. It isn’t rocket science and the fact it hasn’t been done means they haven’t decided to do it yet. But they may be probing and learning.
And that should be taken seriously.
For more level-headed thinking, Rich Lordan, an executive at Electric Power Research Institute, asserts that “The depth and breadth of the attack is unprecedented.” The motivation, he said, “appears to be preparation for an act of war.”
Noonan adds, “It’s hard to look at the facts and see the Metcalf incident as anything but a deliberate attack by a coordinated, professional group with something deeper on their minds than the joys of vandalism.”
Those of us who are of a charitable bent might say that the official responses to the Metcalf attack were just for public consumption and that behind the scenes the government is working like mad to secure our electrical power stations and infrastructure. I for one hope and pray that our intelligence agencies are not as stupid as the FBI official statement makes them seem to be. But are they doing enough? And will political correctness inhibit their efforts to safeguard the grid?
Noonan ends her column with an answer to those questions: “You always want to think your government is on it. You want to think that they see what you see. But really, they’re never on it. They always have to be pushed.”
The vulnerabilities of the nation’s electrical net have been downplayed since the 9/11 attacks, though hundreds of references exist calling attention to them. Despite good intentions, Peggy Noonan is a latecomer to this debate. It has been ten months since the Metcalf incident. Have the wheels of government begun to turn? The record is not promising. Over the threat to infrastructure security, the shadows of the Twin Towers loom stark as night.
Good question. Good question indeed.
