North Carolina county has power shut down after attackers shoot transformers...

 

Linemen working on a power pole. Fox News.

A North Carolina county has had their power shut down after attackers have shot transformers. Fox News. The attack occurred in Moore County and targeted two separate transformers, leaving 40,000 people without power. Both substations were damaged by gunfire. The county is now under curfew due to the lack of power and it may take several days to restore power. It will take longer to restore power than during a storm because of the damage to the transformers, which will have to be replaced. 

My Comment:

It's an open secret that America's power grid is extremely vulnerable to this style of attack, and I am honestly surprised that this story is getting the coverage it is. There have been other similar attacks like this recently, but only rarely do they get coverage. 

In short, it's pretty trivial for anyone with a rifle to take down power this way. All you need is a rifle and aim good enough to hit the part of the transformer that has lubricating oil in it. If you do and the oil drains out the transformer seizes up and is destroyed. And you can't really repair the transformer after that, it has to be replaced, which, given our countries current extreme logistical problems, can take quite some time. 

A sustained campaign like this could shut down entire states. This attack hit two transformers and shut down power for 40,000 people. And it happened in a underpopulated rural area so if this had happened in a major city hundreds of thousands of people could be out of power. 

And we aren't even sure if this attack is over! The attacker(s) could have more attacks planned and it could continue indefinably until they get caught. Sure you can put surveillance on transformers but there are so many of them across the country that you can't really protect them all. It's possible that whoever is responsible for this attack could conduct more. 

Responsibility for this attack is the big question. The usual suspects on Twitter seem to think that this is somehow related to a drag queen story hour event that was going to happen in this county before the attack happened but there is pretty much zero evidence for that. I doubt it myself as there are other better ways to shut down an event like that than cutting power to an entire county. 

It really could be anyone at this point so I am not going to speculate too much on who could be responsible. I will say that they do seem to be professional. These attacks are fairly easy to pull off but I wouldn't expect it to be some random person to do this. Most random nutjobs aren't capable of this kind of long term planning and simply shoot up a bunch of people. Taking out the power like this makes me think that this was a person thinking strategically. 

I do wonder if this is some kind of terror cell. If it is then things could get ugly because this isn't the kind of terrorist we are used to seeing. Most of the time publicity is the main point of terrorism, but as of this writing nobody has taken credit for this attack. This will make the attackers a lot harder to find and if it holds it shows that the attacker(s) are a lot smarter than average. They could do immense damage before they are caught. 

I've actually been expecting a campaign against our infrastructure for awhile now. Like I said, it's an open secret how vulnerable our nation's transformers are and though there have been a few attacks, there hasn't really been too much at this scale. Given how terrible things are in this country and how many enemies we have both foreign and domestic, it's very possible that there could be more attacks like this now that the cat is out of the bag.