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What happened with the substation attack in North Carolina?
- TeeMassive 4y agoIt looks like the authorities want to keep quiet about it to limit copycats.
- spiritplumber 4y ago[flagged]
- mensetmanusman 4y agoAnswer: we don’t know, but there is a $75k FBI reward if you know.
- lucb1e 4y agoNot quite what the video is about. The $75k is for finding the persons which facilitates finding the motive (which, to be fair, is what more people will be interested in), not the 'what happened' with technical content (which is more of an HN type of interest). The video answers the question in the title.
- JasonFruit 4y agoI'm much more interested in the motivations of the people involved.
- mrtesthah 4y agoWhite supremacists think they can incite a race war by accelerating social unrest. https://www.fpri.org/article/2020/04/the-growing-threat-posed-by-accelerationism-and-accelerationist-groups-worldwide/ https://www.fpri.org/article/2020/04/the-growing-threat-pose... https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/three-men-plead-guilty-conspiring-provide-material-support-plot-attack-power-grids-united https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/three-men-plead-guilty-conspi... Three Men Plead Guilty to Conspiring to Provide Material Support to a Plot to Attack Power Grids in the United States Domestic Terrorism Plot was in Furtherance of White Supremacist Ideology Sure, we don’t know about this particular attack, but we know that white supremacist groups have already been committing such crimes and have had longstanding, well-documented and widely-publicized plans to do so.
- splistud 4y ago[dead]
- jbigelow76 4y agoIt's bonkers (and infuriating) to me that domestic terrorists launched an attack on their own home soil and it wasn't front page news everywhere the next day.
- _-david-_ 4y agoWe don't know if they are domestic or not and we don't know the motives.
- redeux 4y ago[flagged]
- mistermann 4y ago> But we know that most terror attacks in the U.S. since 9/11 have been domestic terror attacks, and we know that 2/3 of attacks come from far-right extremists [1]. Saying something is true does not make it true, but it does make it seem true. This is not a trivial fact.
- mistermann 4y agoIt is also not a popular fact.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- electrondood 4y ago[flagged]
- EricE 4y ago[flagged]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- knowaveragejoe 4y agoIt's far-right accelerationism. There are those who think "the west has fallen" and the only thing to do now is hasten the collapse of that society so they can build a new one(where they think they'll be on top, for some reason). Google "boogaloo boys" for threads to pull on if you want to learn more.
- JasonFruit 4y agoThe boog guys I know are not far-right, nor are they accelerationists. They're mostly socially liberal young vets who are sick of constant wars, creeping tyranny, and the hypocrisy of powerful people, and who are willing to fight back if they're pushed, but most wouldn't start anything. There might be some people like you talk about, or they might be provocateurs, but in either case, they're a small minority.
- mc32 4y ago"Officials have stopped short of calling it an act of terrorism, presumably because we don’t know the motive of whoever perpetrated the act" There was another one elsewhere [Washington state [1]] and they found out the perps did it to facilitate knocking over some business of some sort. So, just because it quacks like a duck does not mean it either walks like a duck nor end ends up being a duck. There have also been attacks in Utah by so called environmentalists[2] in an attempt to blunt or "protest" the use of fossil fuels in producing electricity. But, you know, people like narratives which match their ideology a whole lot. [1]https://www.cbsnews.com/news/matthew-greenwood-jeremy-crahan-arrested-washington-substation-vandalism/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/matthew-greenwood-jeremy-crahan... [2]https://stopfossilfuels.org/electric-grid/shooting-transformers-disables-substations/ https://stopfossilfuels.org/electric-grid/shooting-transform...
- panarky 4y agoRegarding the sabotage in Washington State, it doesn't make a lot of sense to attack four substations simultaneously just to steal from the cash register of a small business. If I fancied myself to be an antigovernment militia leader who had read all the white supremacist literature from the last 40 years that repeatedly describes attacking critical infrastructure like pipelines, telecoms and electricity pylons and substations to create chaos and ignite the race war, I'd definitely teach my inexperienced acolytes to add a little petty theft to their sabotage to avoid a terrorism enhancement when they're caught probing the defenses and response times of utilities and law enforcement.
- kcatskcolbdi 4y agoImagine writing this unhinged mental fanfiction for every news article you read. Headline: Man Steals Car "Well, if I fancied myself a racewar enthusiast of course I would _say_ it was for money but it would obviously be in support of creating chaos and undermining the government institutions to allow for our brothers to rise against".
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Hellion 4y agoVery possibly, the FBI has some strong leads, and are building a case. This is something on the national scale with lots of federal internal attention - reports likely even having hit the potus desk. I doubt we’ll hear much about this again unless there’s an arrest.
- plsksosl 4y ago[flagged]
- hgsgm 4y agoWhat do you mean? Law enforcement doesn't comment on details of an investigation except when asking for help finding suspects. If they have suspects they have to investigate quietly until they have enough evidence for an arrest.
- LarryMullins 4y agoCriminal conspiracy is a real sort of thing that actually happens. There's nothing wrong with speculating about such circumstances. If anything, I think hypothesizing that it was a lone wolf attack is more zany, given similar attacks being carried out in other areas.
- AmericanChopper 4y agoReal conspiracies of all different types happen all the time. A conspiracy is just two or more people secretly doing something together. Any speculation about two or more people doing anything is a conspiracy theory. It would typically have to be “something bad”, but that’s really a matter of perspective.
- swores 4y agoJust to be pedantic, I disagree that: > "Any speculation about two or more people doing anything is a conspiracy theory." If I see two people known to be in a relationship (but who haven't talked to me about sex) and say to my friend "I bet they love sex!" then it's a theory about those two people sure, but there's no suggestion that those two people have a conspiracy to hide the existence of their sex, they just haven't told me about it. Or going a step further than a "taboo" subject, speculating about which supermarket the two people I see carrying a loaf of bread have just been to. (But you do make a good point reminding that a conspiracy is just a normal secret thing, not some crazy government-level only type of terminology.)
- Waterluvian 4y agoMy wild, unsubstantiated guess: This is being taken very seriously because the power grid, as Grady points out, is incredibly vulnerable and out in the open. I don’t think it’s because there’s some conspiracy by Russia or whatever.
- Spooky23 4y agoRussia isn’t engaging in some conspiracy, but they’ve certainly successfully run influence operations targeting the disaffected and vulnerable. There’s plenty of open source information about how active Russian agents were influential in organizations like the NRA. The United States is less stable than it was 30 years ago. The rot is starting in the periphery with the lack of opportunity or prosperity in rural America. That is the tinder that fuels modern nut job gun culture, q, militias and other fringe organizations that now have national prominence. Undermining infrastructure is an early goal of insurgencies. I’m sure we’ll have active areas that are unsafe to travel for outsiders in the next 10-15 years outside of government control.
- Waterluvian 4y agoThat’s true. Press your thumb ever so lightly on the social scale for enough decades and it adds up.
- mistermann 4y ago"Karma is a bitch" as the saying goes.
- briHass 4y agoPlenty of places in the US that aren't safe for outsiders. Any major city has dozens of such areas, especially at night.
- wineterror 4y ago[dead]
- CompleteWalker 4y agoSimilar shooting at a substation in a neighboring county happened a few days ago https://www.npr.org/2023/01/18/1149694402/another-north-carolina-power-substation-shot https://www.npr.org/2023/01/18/1149694402/another-north-caro...
- maxerickson 4y agoI wonder if it's just a crank. Like a guy that got fired from the power company vs some ideological motivation.
- themitigating 4y agoOr copycat. People are fired from power companies all the time but how often do they damage equipment? I don't actually know but you'd think we'd hear about these attacks more.
- Normal_gaussian 4y agoWhilst uncommon, employee attacks aren't unheard of in any industry - or particularly unusual. The phrase 'going postal' originates in a period of time where being a postal worker was particularly stressful, causing many such incidents against management; but such attacks are background noise in most industries.
- LarryMullins 4y agoIt's quite interesting that they also attacked a substation that looked important on a map, but wasn't actually vital. I think some of the early reporting about this incident suggested they "knew what they were doing", but the apparent misidentification of one of their targets perhaps suggests the perpetrators were making educated guesses, without detailed/insider knowledge of how the system worked.
- geepound 4y agoThey knew enough to shoot a part that is filled with fluid and hard to replace. They might have lacked the knowledge of "the grid" to make such an attack go beyond one county, but there was some degree of thought put into that attack. It's easier to attack than defend.
- WalterBright 4y ago> shoot a part that is filled with fluid and hard to replace One fairly simple defense is to set up an opaque wall around it, so if they are outside the perimeter fence they cannot see the target.
- zapdrive 4y agoA cheap drone with a pipe bomb solves that.
- LarryMullins 4y agoI think it probably doesn't take an electrical engineer to figure out that destroying the radiators would put the substation out of action at least temporarily, but it does show they put a bit of thought into it at least. It doesn't seem like a case of a dumbass using the substation for target practice on a whim, it all seems very deliberate and purposeful.
- anigbrowl 4y agoWhile we don't know, for now, the level of deliberation and knowledge is congruent with various instructional materials that circulate in darker corners of the net (I don't want to name specific publications/sources). You can find pretty detailed advice and discourse about how to plan and execute an attack on the infrastructure unit, ie the substation. Information about the larger structure of the grid, transmission direction, system redundancies/tolerances, failure cascades is a lot harder to come by. You could build up a picture by accumulating OSINT resources, mapping gaps, making physical observations etc., but synthesizing that into any sort of working model of the grid itself would require some pretty advanced engineering expertise and a lot of institutional knowledge even at the local level. Anyone with sufficient smarts, training, and know-how is a lot more likely to be invested in the integrity of the grid than its sabotage. Also, in purely economic terms it's not efficient for an antagonist to max out resources on trying to land a decisive masterstroke. It takes a lot of time, money, and moving parts to pull off such an attack. An ongoing rash of cheap micro-attacks, even poorly correlated, drives up costs in ratchet fashion, without any threat being sufficiently expensive to bring about massive change (eg burying major parts of the transmission infrastructure, switching to a different architecture, radically different security posture). The strategic goal is to raise the cost of 'normal' above the market's willingness to bear, and then exploit social/political failure modes.
- meindnoch 4y ago[flagged]
- panarky 4y agoWhen there are thousands of pages of evidence that white supremacists and antigovernment militias have been planning for decades to sabotage the electric grid by firing rifle rounds into transformers at substations, and then transformers start getting sabotaged with rifle rounds at multiple substations across the country, and your first thought is to excuse all of that as a "false flag" by law enforcement, with zero pages of evidence, you might consider whether deprogramming is right for you.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoUtterly unnecessary. It would be like probing a church to see if it's vulnerable to a shooting. They all are and it's obvious
- NavinF 4y agoLast para is pretty relevant: "But it’s important to put this event in context as well. Attacks on the power grid are relatively rare, and they fall pretty low on the list of threats, even behind cybersecurity and supply chain issues. The number one threat to the grid in nearly every place in the US? The weather. If you experience an outage of any length, it's many times more likely to be mother nature than a bad actor with a gun"
- jfengel 4y agoThey're rare because nobody is doing them. If some group decides that it's a thing to do, it will increase rapidly in frequency. I don't know what the limitations are, and maybe natural disasters will continue to dominate. But I wouldn't extrapolate just because it hadn't been the mechanism of choice so far.
- htag 4y ago> it will increase rapidly in frequency There's what, 1000-10000x the number of law enforcement personal, national guard, and active military than electrical substations? If these attacks were to rapidly increase over a few days we'd just post guards with guns and cameras at every substation while we pour a thick and tall wall of concrete around all the sensitive bits.
- ethanbond 4y agoAnd presumably all the other stuff that law enforcement normally does would just... carry on as normal?
- wpietri 4y agoPer Wikipedia there are 55,000 substations in the US. With 800k cops, that in theory gives you not 1:1000, but a 1:15 ratio with cops, so perhaps 5 cops on duty at once if they do nothing else. But a lot of substations are intentionally in wide-open spaces, so shooting them from a distance is very plausible, meaning the cops will have a hard time covering all the space. And that's assuming cops do nothing else. National guard reserves are only another 400k, which does not change the math a ton. Your build-a-wall plan is even less plausible. Assuming a half-acre per substation, that's over 6000 miles of walls. In non-flat areas, they might have to be quite tall. We're looking at billions of dollars here, but the hard part is likely the equipment and labor, and knock-on economic costs from supply chain disruption. This kind of chaos and expense sounds like a terrorist's wildest dream, honestly, a cure worse than the disease.
- thatguy0900 4y agoI think it's interesting Russia isn't doing more things like this in protest of Ukraine support, whether this was them or not. Realistically, two teams of 5 guys with good opsec training could probably take out any infrastructure they wanted, and do it repeatedly
- klooney 4y agoThere's been a lot of mysterious explosions in Russia since the Ukraine war started, so they'd have a reason to believe they were striking back and not striking first, I guess.
- flabbergasted 4y agoI'm guessing that even if the odds are minuscule, if they were caught, the consequences would be too disastrous for everybody, to make it worth it.
- rainsford 4y agoThe problem with this approach for Russia would be that even if the risk of detection was low, the consequences of being caught would be incredibly bad for them. Russian escalation to direct attacks on non-combatant countries would be all the justification necessary for an equivalent retaliatory response from countries with superior military capability. And Russian military presence in Ukraine provides the perfect opportunity for such a response that would be a disaster for Russia without involving the kind of attack on Russian territory itself that might further escalate things. Basically, the only reason Russia is able to continue their military adventure in Ukraine at all is because the US and NATO currently view directly destroying the Russian military forces there as an escalation that could eventually lead to a nuclear war. If instead Russia takes the first step and directly attacks a NATO country, it would considered a response rather than an escalation if the US/NATO then attacked Russian forces invading Ukraine. Russia knows they have zero chance of prevailing in this scenario, and presumably are smart enough not to invite it.
- acdha 4y agoI’d also question how low the odds of detection really are: I’m sure they could field a team but they’d need money, communications, etc. and it’d need rotation on a regular basis to avoid leaving the kind of data trail which the U.S. is good at following. Toss in the non-zero chance that they have someone or something compromised and that seems relatively unlikely to yield enough benefit before something inevitably goes wrong, especially since the stress of being in the field for that long is going to affect even elite agents. Imagine how well you’d do your job going to sleep each night wondering whether it’s the one where you’ll find out if the U.S. really stopped water-boarding prisoners, not to mention the nagging question of what happens to you and your family if the mission goes sour. This seems like the kind of thing you could maybe do once, right as you invade, but not on an ongoing basis.
- baby 4y agoThis just makes me think of chaos monkey. Without these we’re not prepared for a real attack one day.
- XorNot 4y agoThe chaos monkey doesn't simulate an attack, it simulates system failures. For substations these are rare, for computers these are common.
- Animats 4y agoThis has happened before, in 2013, near San Jose, CA.[1] Utilities were supposed to upgrade security by building concrete walls around major transformers. There aren't that many of them. Did that happen? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack
- jefftk 4y agoWhy do you say there aren't that many major transformers? This one covered 45k people, so I'd guess there are 5k-10k similar ones nationally. (And that ignores that there are likely lots of other points of infrastructure that are similarly vulnerable.)
- maxerickson 4y agoThere's probably capacity to build 10,000 of them all at the same time, so it isn't really that many, especially over a decade.
- nightpool 4y agoThere's actually a comment about this on the YouTube video—it seems like upgrades happened extensively throughout California, including concrete walls, armed patrols and automated gunshot locators, but not in other states.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago> The number one threat to the grid in nearly every place in the US? The weather. These folks disagree: https://cybersquirrel1.com https://cybersquirrel1.com
- MisterTea 4y agoI wonder if the perpetrators are thinking about the people they are blacking out. Because if they are trying to incite something it will most likely be their hanging. I highly doubt the populous are going to rally behind their cause when their heat and lights are out. Even worse if there are people who depend of refrigeration for diabetes medication or oxygen generators, etc.
- lucb1e 4y agoOne can say the same for literally any act of terrorism, I think?
- ivraatiems 4y agoIt's interesting to try to game out who might be motivated to commit to an attack like this, at the (small compared to the state or country) scale it was at. I think we can rule out any kind of state actor, even if they were acting through a proxy. The risk/reward just isn't there, and this is not a hard attack to plan, so there's no point in carrying out a "test". If the goal were to send a message, well, this just isn't going to cut it. The US military will crush you regardless of the status of a power substation in North Carolina. However, it could easily have been done by someone with a political agenda in favor of a state actor but not in any way endorsed by them, or by someone with a general political motive. Here's the catch with that: For such a person, there is no point to doing this unless you later claim responsibility and gain notoriety. If your goal is ideological, you'd use the chaos you created to try to spread your ideology. If your goal is to have your demands heard, well, you'd have to make those demands first. (Of course, it could be the attackers meant to do that but chickened out when they saw what an overwhelming response this provoked, or something). It's possible somebody did it by accident or because they are mentally unstable and their dog told them to, etc. Can never discount that. However, I think the most likely explanation is actually that this is a criminal act that was done with some only proximately related goal in mind - blackmailing an energy executive? Stealing something of value from somewhere in the area of attack? Distract authorities while conducting some other illicit behavior somewhere - like a break-in to some other piece of infrastructure - for whatever reason? Hopefully we find out someday. (And I mean, hopefully we stop this stuff from happening, but that is gonna take some doing.)
- mistermann 4y ago> If the goal were to send a message, well, this just isn't going to cut it. The US military will crush you regardless of the status of a power substation in North Carolina. Like they crushed Iraq for 9/11? Finding and crushing someone is easy, finding an actually guilty party that cannot be found is not so easy. Who knows what this is, but some people can see the strategic significance of it.
- acdha 4y agoLike crushing the Taliban for 9/11. The Iraq invasion wasn’t a question of not knowing, it was an intentional deception to start the war they were already planning. U.S. and allied intelligence agencies had plenty of people who knew better and even the Bush administration knew the link was spotty enough that they didn’t explicitly make it, instead relying on claims about WMD and human rights which weren’t as easily disproven.
- aaron695 4y ago[dead]
- shadowgovt 4y agoIn hindsight, I should have guessed they targeted the oil. An acquaintance of mine worked in glass applications for electrical systems. Truly fascinating stuff; they combine the materials science of glass with the chemistry of the oil to make for very high-current fuses. The oil acts as a very good thermal conductor, but at too high a current, it expands and puts pressure against the glass insulator it's contained in. Once the pressure is high enough, the glass explodes and rapidly mechanically separates the conductors. Tolerances have to be extremely tight on both the glass thickness and the oil consistency to get the desired effect, and there's no way to test except destructively, so the process has to be extremely repeatable. ... but of course, oil-filled components are vulnerable to a few bullets.
- mikewarot 4y agoThere's a tank above the transformer that provides pressure and expansion room, that handles temperature shifts and small amounts of leakage. The fins have a high surface area, and would surely flex outward enough to absorb any high frequency spike from a bullet.
- sammalloy 4y agoFBI warns of neo-Nazi plots as attacks on Northwest power grid spike https://www.opb.org/article/2023/01/19/surge-in-oregon-washington-substation-attacks-as-fbi-warns-neo-nazi-plots/?outputType=amp https://www.opb.org/article/2023/01/19/surge-in-oregon-washi... "As a string of attacks on electrical substations unfolded in Oregon and Washington in 2022, the FBI was warning utilities of white supremacists’ plots to take down the nation’s power grid" "The individuals of concern believe that an attack on electrical infrastructure will contribute to their ideological goal of causing societal collapse and a subsequent race war in the United States,” according to an FBI memo obtained by OPB and KUOW. —- This has been going on for some time. This is not a bunch of environmentalists as some people have oddly assumed in this thread. This is part of a long pattern of right-wing political violence in the US that is occurring throughout the country, not just in North Carolina. Virtually every week, there’s an arrest of a right wing political group, candidate, or activist who is waging a campaign of violence against the American public. Blaming so-called "environmentalists" for what is clearly a repeated pattern of right wing political violence is about as tone deaf as you can get. Read the news.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- kavefish 4y agoThe video inspired me to explore the open source grid map at atlas.eia.gov, but it sure looks like the online map was locked down. Despite the sidebar saying the map is visible to the public, the maps never load and I'm seeing access denied errors for map resources in the console. There could be multiple explanations for the map to stop loading, but the error messages sure give me the impression that it was to restrict access to this information, and that makes me a little sad even though I can understand why it might be tempting to restrict given the circumstances.
- wnevets 4y ago> It's quite interesting that they also attacked a substation that looked important on a map, but wasn't actually vital. Probably because they were looking at the same public data that was shown in the video.
- kitsunesoba 4y agoMotivations aside, this alongside the weather-induced trouble seen in Texas makes it seem like a really good idea to start putting into place some decentralization… the impact of a substation or other infrastructure being out is reduced considerably when a decent percentage of the buildings on the grid have solar panels and batteries to fall back on.
- EricE 4y agoThank goodness there is at least some movement in that direction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34457663 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34457663 If people really understood just how fragile the electric grid is they would soil themselves. If anything it's amazing that it works as well as it does - a real testament to all those that keep it up and operational. However, as you point out, continually running on the ragged edge is not a wise long term strategy.
- sargun 4y agoThis is a thought experiment. Let's say that someone (perhaps DoE) identified that the power grid was at risk of attack. Convincing a bunch of people (politicians) to spend a chunk of change to secure it would be betweeen difficult and impossible. In order to further their cause, they can stage these trivial looking attacks to attract funding to grid security. In computers, hiring pen testers is a common way to get security funded. An attack is a sure fire way to get something funded.
- fckgnad 4y agoNobody cares this much to risk everything just to get some extra security on some arbitrary thing. That's like shooting up a school to get more security around schools. Come on.
- landemva 4y agoFBI did it to The Branch Davidians when the FBI budget request was being considered. FBI wanted a big story to tell on The Hill, got repulsed, and resorted to gassing everyone and burning the evidence.
- SapporoChris 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_siege https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_siege DOJ concluded that the Branch Davidian's started the fires.
- voakbasda 4y agoWhy do you think that report can be trusted? I think it more likely that they were covering up the FBI’s guilt. Isn’t it a sad commentary on society that I am willing to believe the innocence of a bunch or wacko cultists than any claims of their guilt by the DoJ or FBI?
- judge2020 4y ago> Convincing a bunch of people (politicians) to spend a chunk of change to secure it would be betweeen difficult and impossible. I'm not convinced of this. They play a lot of games, but ensuring that power is reliable and fairly price-stable is not just important to all of the peasant middle class voters, but also to their big corporate donors, the farming blocks, etc.
- fckgnad 4y agoI bet part of this is a distraction. Someone needed the power out in order to do some random heist job in NC. So they kill power over a vast area. That way motive is virtually impossible to pinpoint. Likely it's some security thing like some vault that needs constant power. You kill power in some massive way such that the backup generators will run out before everything comes online. Then Boom! pull off your elaborate heist to the tune of (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1lWoA2tgxQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1lWoA2tgxQ) and walk away like nothing happened.
- imtyler 4y agoElectromagnetic locks are better suited for gateways that are open by default. I can't imagine why someone would create a vault dependent on electricity. That being said, I'm sure there are plenty of crimes that would go easier with no power. Perhaps taking down cameras.
- fckgnad 4y ago>I can't imagine why someone would create a vault dependent on electricity. Same reason why people create doorknobs and car locks that depend on electricity. Also this: https://www.protoolreviews.com/lockdown-logic-vault-door-create-your-own-vault/ https://www.protoolreviews.com/lockdown-logic-vault-door-cre... That being said I'm sure it's a bug. I'm sure whomever made this security thing accounted for power outages. But I'm sure some loop hole appears during that power outage that the builders didn't anticipate. Also yes, obviously it's some security thing that has to do with power not necessarily a vault door. That was just an example.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- freitzkriesler 4y agoNothing and expect these types of attack to continue. Our infrastructure was built when America was a homogenous, high trust society. Those days are long gone. The only way to defend against this are concrete barriers surrounding each and every substation .
- knowaveragejoe 4y agoFar right accelerationists, plain and simple.
- justinclift 4y agoAs a data point, that "overlay of Moore County’s transmission grid" on the EIA website may not be totally open access. Trying to load the page (https://atlas.eia.gov/apps/895faaf79d744f2ab3b72f8bd5778e68/explore https://atlas.eia.gov/apps/895faaf79d744f2ab3b72f8bd5778e68/...) from Australia just now, the user interface framework loads, but none of the maps/data/etc. Tried with both Firefox and Chromium, so it's not a browser dependency problem.
- ck2 4y agoI get the cold analysis but this was serious domestic terror which is alarming AF The annual TEN BILLION dollar TSA was created in response to a one-off foreign terror and they do their job horribly based on all the failed testing What's being spent on the power grid security? How many hours, forget days, are people willing to live without power?
- mikewarot 4y agoIt is my understanding that there was at least one death caused by the power outage. It is my further understanding that the nature of North Carolina law is such that this makes those who committed the crime guilty of either murder or manslaughter.
- mikewarot 4y agoI watched the video with great interest, then immediately downloaded a copy from YouTube when I first saw it, because I was sure it wasn't going to be around later in the day to show my friend. I assumed it would get struck by YouTube, but here we are. This lead me to realize that I'm now habituated to an environment where telling the truth seems like a forbidden act.
- 1letterunixname 4y agoI think someone watched 60 Minutes and went copycat. The 60 Minutes' report mentioned the first known incident occurred in Morgan Hill, CA. Same setup as Morgan Hill had: chain-linked fence instead of a high solid wall. I used to bicycle around that area when I was a kid.
- scotteric 4y agoEvery substation I've ever seen has just a chain link fence. They should at least add some privacy barrier so it's not so easy to aim at equipment.
- chiph 4y agoKnowing the area, I would put "Drunk rednecks" as the most likely cause. Followed by "So they'd have an excuse for not going to work or have to make a court date." Domestic terrorism or a "Die Hard" scenario is at the bottom of my list. It's a rural county - there's hardly any shock value to doing this (vs. a bigger city like Raleigh or Charlotte) that a terrorist would want.