They Still Haven’t Found Whoever Shot the Power Grids in North Carolina, an Analysis

First we go back to Sunday, December 4th, when the plants were first blown out.

Fox 13:

About 40,000 people were without power in North Carolina on Monday after law enforcement said two power substations were found riddled with bullet holes.

Federal authorities were looking for the suspects who did it.

The shooting prompts some questions: How protected is our power system? What are local power companies doing to protect our power?

”Every one of our substations is protected with barriers to keep people out,” he said. “We also use surveillance and setbacks to protect the infrastructure there, but we may have to take a different approach because there is only so much you can do against a high-powered rifle.”

This article claims that the power station was “riddled with bullet holes.” That would imply that there were many bullets fired, possibly indiscriminately, at the power station. That does not appear to have been the case.

Reuters:

Dec 5 (Reuters) – The orchestrator of gunfire attacks on power stations in North Carolina that left nearly an entire county without electricity for a second straight day knew “exactly” how to disable the stations, sheriff Ronnie Fields said on Monday.

Utility workers investigating the outages found gates broken and evidence of gunfire damage to equipment at two substations in Moore County, an area popular with tourists and known for golf resorts including Pinehurst, which has hosted the U.S. Open and Ryder Cup tournaments.

Authorities are keeping details of the investigation close to the vest, saying only that the damage was done by firearms. However, Fields on Monday indicated that whoever orchestrated the attacks knew how to take out the substations.

The saboteur “knew exactly what they were doing to cause the damage and cause the outage that they did,” Fields said.

When I first heard of this story I saw people claiming the saboteur was protesting a drag groomer hour event that was happening locally, and this was their way of doing it. The problem is that there was no way of corroborating this story. It could be true, but I can’t say for sure.

But I also thought that it was one single transformer that was attacked, possibly by someone hosing down the area with bullets while in a drunken stupor. We now know this not to be the case. This was a clear and obvious sabotage of power in this local area, and two seperate substations were hit with just a few bullets each ten minutes apart. That may have involved more than one person, but I can’t say for certain because the uncensored media is so poorly run that they give you no sense of time and distance.

MSN:

The power grid is vulnerable, Morgan said, partially because of its accessibility: Many of the nation’s 55,000 substations are blocked only by chain-link fences, and the equipment is easily accessible once within the fencing. In the case of Moore County, police have yet to clarify how the unidentified person or persons responsible for the attack were able to simultaneously sabotage two substations ten minutes apart. 

Another complication is the physical materials necessary to keep power substations up and running. In Moore County, it took about five days to get the power turned back on because equipment needed to be replaced. There isn’t a lot of the necessary equipment available to spare, Morgan explained. 

“We’ve made a lot of progress in recent years in stockpiling transformers, but the very high-voltage transformers that make up the backbone of the grid are extremely expensive, (and) rare,” Morgan said. “Many of them not made in this country, (and) backlogs to order them are very long.” 

They literally don’t even make the necessary components in the country anymore. This is how serious the Democracy Class is in terms of protecting the country. They outsource critical infrastructure.

Many attacks have been done on power grids, mostly by Russia, in the current Russia-Ukraine war. So I’m not saying that attacks on power grids are unserious LARPs that have no bearing on reality except in the psyche of the eternally microseconds away from revolution QAnon Patriotard. However, I’ve always thought that if you’re doing direct illegal actions with guns you’ll probably get more bang for your buck by shooting the person you don’t like. 

Having said that it’s still interesting to know that it took five days for them to bring the power back on. I haven’t quoted every article out there, but there are a ton of pieces that have people making very plausible arguments that the power grid is essentially entirely unguarded and indefensible, and it makes a lot of sense. But again, short of serious military action, like a civil war, I’m not sure how this matters. Again, if you’re willing to do crimes, assassinations are a much more direct route. Even in the case of a serious war the power grid going down, while hell for the civilian population, is not that big of a deal for the military. Taking out the road system would probably be more productive, although how easy that would be depends on a lot of factors, such as how redundant the road network is and what defenses the other military has for these roads.

Ultimately I’m scratching my head at all of this. Someone clearly did this for a reason, and it might have been someone rightfully angered by groomer shit happening in their town. In that case, I appreciate the enthusiasm, but it’s not clear what this accomplished. Then again, people are sick and tired of having no advocates and representatives in government, so I don’t blame anyone for lashing out in such a way.