I just wanna say

That the vulnerability of transformer yards to high velocity kinetic damage has been discussed in some forums for many years. The North Carolina vandalism was not the first, nor even the first this year.…Why are the media telling us about this one and none of the others? My understanding is that vandalism like this happens quite often.

20 years ago folks were discussing just this sort of vandalism and it’s effects in online forums…..It was precisely discussions like that that made me leave those forums. I was always wondering who was a Fed, and I had no interest in making the lights go out…..But some folks did. I had better things to do and more important stuff to worry about.

The vulnerabilities were discussed online, and really, no-one was able to come up with a counter…..Let the cooling oil out via a bullet hole and they stop working. Pretty much that simple. If the utilities see the overheat and shut them down early, then the damage is small, if not then the damage is much worse. Either way the lights go out.

Apparently some of the folks that talked about that sort of thing in forums have decided to act. Or their kids maybe.

Either way, the vulnerabilities have been known and talked about for at least 20 years.

4 thoughts on “I just wanna say

  1. Yeah; I noticed this too. It’s like this kind of thing never happened before, and that no on knew anything of the vulnerabilities of our grid. Drag queen story hour gets more air time… until the lights go out…

    Out here in the Wild West, Edison has security guards stationed at every substation now. Not that they’re armed, or that they’d volunteer to stop a bullet to keep CNN on the air. No, they’re trying to keep all the bums and illegals Newsom and Brown dinner-belled into the state from stealing the copper from the system!!! Yeah; these intrepid culture enrichers are attempting to cut chunks of cable out of LIVE SUBSTATIONS!!! “Hot pick-up in aisle five, Bob…” …That’s one way to deport ’em…

  2. The utility companies have known about this risk for decades and could have done a lot to harden substations against such attacks. They also have known about the risks from an EMP event for decades and could have hardened the grid against such an event. They have done NEITHER. Because doing so would have impacted their profits.

  3. Ask an engineer in any specialty how to break his systems and you will get hours of discussion about the dozens of ways there are to break things. You want a quick outage? Do A or maybe K. Something that lasts longer? B, C, or D. Longer? More and more options… Our infrastructure is extremely fragile, it is only because nobody is actively drilling holes in the lifeboat that we don’t sink..

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