NORTH CAROLINA — Mayor Carol Haney was confused when Moore County, N.C. suddenly went dark on Saturday night. It was a dark night on a holiday evening that had been brightened by a storm and no warning. It was a shooting attack against two electrical substations knocked off tens of thousand of people from the grid for the best part of a week.
Haney said, “This beautiful area of the world is sabotaged.” It could happen to anyone. This is the scaryest part for anyone — it could happen to anyone.
It might. It could. 55,000 electric substations in the United States are currently humming, transforming high voltage power lines into lower voltages that can be used by homes and businesses. Many of them are rigged for destruction by saboteurs.
Mike Mabee, who calls himself a “grid-security gadfly”, says that the electric grid is America’s Achilles heel. He combs through data from electric companies to find vulnerabilities.
He’s concerned about cyberattacks from China or Russia, like many others, but Mabee believes that the best way to harm Americans is with something much simpler, which is shooting up substations using widely available assault rifles.
Mabee says that a terrorist group, domestic or foreign, wants to cause damage to the United States’ electric grid.
This is not lost on domestic extremists groups or the government. In January , the Department of Homeland Security published a bulletin warning that domestic terrorists had “credible, precise plans to attack electricity infrastructure”; and that they considered the grid a “particularly attractive target.”
Substations are easy targets as the main components, which include huge voltage transformers and other major components, cool with circulating oil. High-powered rifle rounds are capable of piercing transformers and causing them to overheat. The larger transformers are approximately the same size as railroad boxcars.
M.Granger Morgan, a Carnegie Mellon University professor, says that they are difficult to replace.
Morgan says that there aren’t many of them in the country and there is a long backlog in getting new ones.
Backlogs can last up to 18 months and can have price tags that reach into the millions. The cost of replacing equipment is small compared to what it would take to bring down the grid.
2013 saw shooters attack a substation outside San Jose, California. Although initial media reports called it vandalism at the time by Jon Wellinghoff (the Chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission), they immediately identified it as something much more sinister.
Wellinghoff says, “So I sent a team there the next day to investigate.” We actually found the firing positions they had marked on ground. There were two shooters. It is not known how many people were actually part of the team that carried out this action. It was very sophisticated.
They cut fiber optic lines from the substation and fired more than 100 rounds through the chain link fence that protected the substation. They struck vulnerable parts of the transformers, and fled just seconds before police arrived. The bullet holes destroyed 17 out of 21 transformers and drained over 50,000 gallons worth of cooling oil. Wellinghoff claims that the attackers were close to taking Silicon Valley off its grid. This outage could have been several weeks in length.
It was an incredible attack. Wellinghoff believed it would lead to a reckoning about the way government regulates grid security. Because the duties fall between state and federal regulators, there is currently no single agency with this authority.
“We need someone in charge. It’s up to Congress for that person to be appointed. Wellinghoff says that they went to Congress to request additional authority but were not granted it. “The standards are written by the industry and submitted for approval. That’s exactly what happened here.
So, around 3,000 power companies and cooperatives in the United States made their own decisions about which substations required protection and what additional security was necessary. To stop bullets from hitting substations, they built concrete walls. However, Wellinghoff claims that security upgrades did not reach all of them.
Wellinghoff states, “And looking at these, most of them don’t seem to be very well secured.” “Many of them still have chains link fences, such as the one in North Carolina.”
These individual vulnerabilities all add up to one huge problem. Wellinghoff claims that a series of substation attacks, which are precisely targeted, could cause a chain of failures that would take down the majority of the U.S. grid.
The power companies claim they are aware of the situation. Duke Energy, which is responsible for the attack on North Carolina substations, said that the company continues to work to increase security and meet new threats. He said that the North Carolina attacks will be a learning experience for the entire industry.
Along with state and local authorities, the FBI is currently investigating. The FBI and state police have collected numerous spent shell casings from the spot. The FBI is requesting cell phone records, while state police are seeking search warrants.
They keep coming. Wednesday’s attackers targeted another Duke substation in South Carolina. They didn’t trigger a blackout.
Some of those who are most knowledgeable about the U-S electricity grid are now taking steps to get rid of it. Jon Wellinghoff and Mike Mabee both had solar panels, batteries and generators installed at their homes.
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