Image credit: ABC7 News, KGOTV San Francisco
“This wasn’t some haphazard type attack from four or five guys drinking beer one night. Looks like it was a planned attack,”
Someone dropped into an underground vault and cut phone cables, interrupting service to most of Gilroy. Then, the snipers opened fire on the substation, shooting for 19 minutes. More than 100 fingerprint-free shell casings were found at the scene. They knocked out 17 transformers that supply power to Silicon Valley. When police arrived, they were gone…
This news had been kept quiet since the incident last April, but now is being leaked out from several media outlets… ABC7 NEWS in San Francisco reported yesterday that the attack was downplayed as vandalism during the time immediately following the attack at the Metcalf substation just south of San Jose, California.
The Wall Street Journal just reported “This was an event that was well thought out, well planned and they targeted certain components,” said Mark Johnson, retired vice president of transmission for PG&E.
The attack began just before 1 a.m. on April 16 last year (2013), when someone slipped into an underground vault and cut fiber cables, which knocked out local 911 service, cell phone service, and landline service to the substation.
Within half an hour, snipers opened fire on the Metcalf electrical substation firing more than 100 rounds – shooting for 19 minutes as they surgically knocked out 17 giant transformers that funnel power to Silicon Valley.
It took utility workers 27 days to make repairs and bring the substation back to life.
It is an incident of which few Americans are aware.
But one former federal regulator is calling it a terrorist act that, if it were widely replicated across the country, could take down the U.S. electric grid and black out much of the country.
The attack was “the most significant incident of domestic terrorism involving the grid that has ever occurred” in the U.S., said Jon Wellinghoff, who was chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission at the time.
-The Wall Street Journal, Feb-4 2014
“These were not amateurs taking potshots,” Mark Johnson said during a conference on grid security held in Philadelphia last year. “My personal view is that this was a dress rehearsal” for future attacks.
“There are ways that a very few number of actors with very rudimentary equipment could take down large portions of our grid,” said Jon Wellinghoff, reported by ForeignPolicy.com
Most people will agree that we are dependent upon the electrical power grid more than any other system in the modern world. Generations of us have grown up with this dependence and most would not survive (literally) without it. This is not only a reason for better security, protection, and hardening of our grid systems, but it is a reason to be better prepared for survival without it.
There are so many soft targets in the US that I am surprised this does not happen more often. Read any library book on the crumbling infrastructure and the list of potential targets becomes obvious. It is at times like these that I am both glad and equally sad that I am too old to make any difference. My time is past but I am curious how the next generations will react. C’est la Vie.
THE SOFTIST TARGETS IN OUR COUNTRY ARE THE UNINFORMED AND WHO THEY VOTE FOR. GET ME?
My personal view is that the US is on the road to some sort of civil conflict, whether it will be called civil war or revolution is to be seen.
We are ruled by an aristocracy of politicians and the corporations, special interest groups, and wealthy individuals who essentially bribe the politicians and bureaucrats to rig economic activity that favors them at the expense of the general public. This is how the distribution of wealth became so skewed with the few owning most of the wealth and the average person barely making it. Free markets produce a normal distribution of wealth, but we don’t have free markets; we have government controlled, managed, manipulated markets. This is a fascists economy.
The revolution point is reached when enough people realize that fighting back will be less painful than submitting. Bending over and grabbing your ankles gets old very quickly.
What will bring the pain beyond the rebellion threshold is continued economic decline, shrinking economic output, and further undercutting the lives of average people. This economic shrinkage is being driven by a number of factors. Government regulation of the economy is an immediate problem. All the granted privileges like the banking monopoly, the drug/medical monopoly, the Wall Street manipulation and bailouts, including many of the other privilege laws are highly destructive to economic growth. But even more fundamentally, is the exponential increase in the amount of energy that must be expended to acquire more energy and other resources. It is no coincidence that the break in the housing bubble in 2008 was preceded by record high gasoline cost and record high debt levels.
As the future unfolds, survival will be a major issue as many, many people won’t be able to afford even the basics like food and shelter, much less higher education, advanced medical care and luxuries. But those in power will seek to maintain their privileged positions, so they will use government power to take and even greater share of the smaller economy, leaving the rest of us holding the bag.
When the violence starts, it will be characterized by assassinations, bombings, small scale raids, independent actions by groups unknown to one another, and sabotage like described in this thread. Political differences will be settled by neighbor against neighbor violence, just like occurred in border states back in the 1861 Civil War. The electric grid and generation system, railroads, trucking, and other economic activities that support the established structure will be targets, in an effort by rebels to cripple those in power. The government can’t be everywhere, and its draconian measures to quell the rebellion will just drive more people into the rebel camp, and even some socialists are repulsed by the tyranny.
I am not advocating civil violence; I simply am sharing my views of what is inevitable in a society that suffers a painful form of slavery, and an impending disaster inherent when an bloated population depends on finite, dwindling resources for survival. Technology is knowledge applied to resources and if one part of this equation is missing, technology will not be able to save us.
The next two decades look to me to be monumental. The future is evident in the math that describes the growth in the cost to acquire energy, the math that describes the growth of debt, and the math that describes population growth.
By jove, I think he has got it.
Nice post. The only thing you may have missed is the Black Swan. I’m still thinking Fukushima. The data and subsequent alarm levels are increasing daily.
With only a tweak or two you could read this at any Occupy! General Assembly meeting and get an ovation. As is, it would work fine at any Tea Party meeting.
Wow! You explained it exactly to that is happening! Go to the head of the class! 😉
As to dwindling resources.. It’s not that they are dwindling, but more along the lines of being made artificially scarce (therefore driving the price up).
With the amount of bankers who show up dead, it makes one wonder if they know what’s getting ready to happen or is it someone that is pissed off that they’re helping them tie ropes around their necks or jumping off buildings.
Wow. This is stunning. Not just the attack, but the fact that it went vastly under-reported at the time. Good post Ken.
thanks Ken. First I read about it was in the WSJ. All those high power tension lines across the US. Imagine what a handful of bad guys could do with a supply of dynamite (numerous examples reported on missing dynamite), a good car, and a map of the power grid. I have seen lines that are built on a single pedestal and they require guy lines to keep them up. Most of these lines cross main highways and byways. One stick, plant it at the base, 10 minutes of time, and they would be gone and the tower comes down. Major weak link in the system.
Can this be a false flag event? I read about this months ago. The way I read it then that the populace really never lost power, meaning that it could have been worse. I suggest the plan went off without a hitch. You know, proper placed shots would have shut the facility down! Follow the money trail. Who benefited from the attack?
A small drone aircraft capable of dropping carbon particles – much like a crop duster over a power switching yard can create more havoc than bullets.
This has actually been used in a real shooting war.
Anything the politicians talk about or do is blown out of proportion. Once it hits MSM, who knows how big it could be, the plot! The FBI said at the time ” we do not believe it is related to domestic or international terrorist”. The politicians want to save us from our selves. Its not that big a story for every body to go “Oh my God!”
Wow, I never caught this in the news anywhere. Thanks Ken.
I figure it is an inside job. Over 100 rounds fired, 17 hits was it, Took about 52 minutes to complete, Seems like armature amount of time and then no one polices for their Brass… Come on. I police my brass at my outdoor shooting range. jeez, amateurs.
yup, inside job just to push their agenda and to start grabbing the hunting rifles. imo of course.