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Unknown Assailants Fire On, Destroy Transformers at California Power Substation

14 points by joshwa 13y ago

dredmorbius 13y ago
Key takeaway: the replacement time for transformers is very nontrivial: The country's roughly 2,000 very large transformers are expensive to build, often costing millions of dollars each, and hard to replace. Each is custom made and weighs up to 500,000 pounds, and "I can only build 10 units a month," said Dennis Blake, general manager of Pennsylvania Transformer in Pittsburgh, one of seven U.S. manufacturers. The utility industry keeps some spares on hand. Attacks at a number of sites could cripple electricity distribution infrastructure across large areas of the US for months, and force utilities to prioritize repairs among widely disparate locations: if Washington, NYC, San Jose, and Minneapolis are all wiped out, are you going to protect the government, banking and financial sector, high tech, or a large population who will freeze or roast without power?
- lsaferite 13y ago
  At the risk of ending up on a list somewhere, taking out a few key employees at the 7 places making replacements in conjunction with taking out key transformers and you suddenly have a crisis on your hands. That worries me a whole lot more than some idiot on a plane.
  - dredmorbius 13y ago
    Suppose you've got an enemy who can slip sight-unseen through airport security, pass through fences and walls as if they don't exist, infiltrate homes and offices by way of schoolchildren, target its victims on transit and in theaters, and kill between 2 and 30% of the population. That's the scenario for a widespread pandemic disease outbreak on the scale of the Spanish Flu. H5N1 mortality rate reported by WHO is 60% (though this could be a result of only seeing more virulent cases -- it might be as low as 30% -- which is to say, vastly higher than any global pandemic of the past century: http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/overestimating_avian_flu/ http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/overestimating_avian...). Which raises the question: what is civilization's bus number? How many people in critical positions could be taken, whether by terrorists (homegrown or otherwise) or disease, without having strongly negative effects? No need to limit your speculation to human agents.
    - lsaferite 13y ago
      I was more addressing the country level directed attack with my post. I try not to think about global pandemics, otherwise I'd have to live in the middle of nowhere in a sealed structure to feel safe. If we have an extinction level event, it'll likely be a global pandemic or significant climate shift. In either case we are totally fscked.
mjfl 13y ago
This is kind of a big deal, if this becomes a trend...

14 points by joshwa 13y ago

Key takeaway: the replacement time for transformers is very nontrivial: The country's roughly 2,000 very large transformers are expensive to build, often costing millions of dollars each, and hard to replace. Each is custom made and weighs up to 500,000 pounds, and "I can only build 10 units a month," said Dennis Blake, general manager of Pennsylvania Transformer in Pittsburgh, one of seven U.S. manufacturers. The utility industry keeps some spares on hand. Attacks at a number of sites could cripple electricity distribution infrastructure across large areas of the US for months, and force utilities to prioritize repairs among widely disparate locations: if Washington, NYC, San Jose, and Minneapolis are all wiped out, are you going to protect the government, banking and financial sector, high tech, or a large population who will freeze or roast without power?

lsaferite 13y ago
At the risk of ending up on a list somewhere, taking out a few key employees at the 7 places making replacements in conjunction with taking out key transformers and you suddenly have a crisis on your hands. That worries me a whole lot more than some idiot on a plane.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  Suppose you've got an enemy who can slip sight-unseen through airport security, pass through fences and walls as if they don't exist, infiltrate homes and offices by way of schoolchildren, target its victims on transit and in theaters, and kill between 2 and 30% of the population. That's the scenario for a widespread pandemic disease outbreak on the scale of the Spanish Flu. H5N1 mortality rate reported by WHO is 60% (though this could be a result of only seeing more virulent cases -- it might be as low as 30% -- which is to say, vastly higher than any global pandemic of the past century: http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/overestimating_avian_flu/ http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/overestimating_avian...). Which raises the question: what is civilization's bus number? How many people in critical positions could be taken, whether by terrorists (homegrown or otherwise) or disease, without having strongly negative effects? No need to limit your speculation to human agents.
  - lsaferite 13y ago
    I was more addressing the country level directed attack with my post. I try not to think about global pandemics, otherwise I'd have to live in the middle of nowhere in a sealed structure to feel safe. If we have an extinction level event, it'll likely be a global pandemic or significant climate shift. In either case we are totally fscked.

mjfl 13y ago

This is kind of a big deal, if this becomes a trend...