Terror attack on San Jose power substation?
This is the first I’m hearing of this, i think, but according to Inside the Bay Area News, last April, snipers attacked a power substation in San Jose, CA;
While the FBI says there is no evidence that terrorists were involved, Jon Wellinghoff, former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, said the attack was “very well planned and well executed by very highly trained individuals,” a conclusion shared by a former top PG&E official. Wellinghoff added that “a coordinated attack could put this country in a world of hurt for a long time.”
Based on his review of the evidence and a tour of the Metcalf plant with some military experts, he said the assault was “the most significant incident of domestic terrorism involving the grid that has occurred” in North America.
But the FBI, which is the primary agency looking into the incident — doesn’t share his conviction.
“This wasn’t an incident where Billy-Bob and Joe decided, after a few brewskies, to come in and shoot up a substation,” he was quoted as saying. “This was an event that was well thought out, well planned and they targeted certain components.”
The article says that there were hundreds of shell casings unmarred by fingerprints and piles of rocks near the firing points which were apparently used as aiming stakes for the snipers. It also says that no one lost power during the early morning attack, now was anyone injured. But, at least the FBI doesn’t think it’s terror, like so many other incidents that they don’t think is terror, you know, like the Fort Hood workplace violence.
Category: Terror War
Hundreds of shell casings and no one was injured and no one lost power? Worst sniper, ever!! Even worse than the one in the shovel video!
William Derek Church must have been the lead Sniper with some of his classmates from his Ranger School.
I would agree worst sniper ever unless it was a dry run of some type to guage reaction time, news coverage, etc and was nothing more than a test.
I’m with #3. I think it was a test to check vulnerabilities and a ramp up to perhaps something more in the future.
Here’s a clue: It is the act which defines the crime. The criminal defines the motive.
Attacks on public utilities were long defined as acts of terror. But, in the current pc world, evidently it all depends upon who it is and their motive rather than the act itself.
$15.4 million to repair the damage? Wow, just wow.
@5 OWB – Remember when the Trans-Alaska pipeline got shot? As I recall, it was two native Alaskan brothers, a hunting rifle, a bottle of whiskey or two, and three teeth between the two of them. Think of it not as Terrorism, but as a physics experiment.
Yes, of course, GDC!
Still, Criminal Mischief? Willful Disregard of something or other?? Unless it was their intent (not the same as motive) to take out the pipeline. (I just don’t remember, honestly.)
I read bits and pieces about someone “shooting up” a substation, and separately about the phone line cuts, last April, but the reports were all “just vandalism, nothing to see here.” Which made my eyebrows rise a little at the time, but no one followed it up in the usual media.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/02/06/2013-sniper-attack-on-power-grid-still-concern-in-washington-and-for-utilities/?intcmp=latestnews
I’d be interested to know what kind of ammo they were using. Lower caliber stuff might get through the radiators of a transformer, but not entirely likely they’d go through the side of the transformer itself unless you started using some heavy-duty stuff.
And yeah, shoot up a transformer of any significant size, and $15 million is the low end of the range.
Security inside unmanned substations is a lot more robust than when I started this gig over 15 years ago. Bottom line, if it’s a significant (transmission) facility, an up-to-date system is more common than one might expect.
Then again, back in the day, most folks just ripped off some copper or a SCADA computer once in a while. Cutting the phone lines tells me they had a pretty good idea of what they wanted to do (blind the controlling substation or facility). This kind of ups the ante a bit.
I’m with #3 OWB & #10 NHSparky. These guys were testing response times, screw the rest of it thats collateral damage. Some time back around 2003-2004 time frame there attacks on power line transmission towers between Corning and Redding, CA. Don’t remember if the individuals were ever caught but, the nuts that secure the tower base to the pilings were backed way off. PG&E was lucky on that one and got them resecured before one of those wild ass Pacific wind storms came along that stretch of California gets.
Dress Rehearsal anyone?
I would not put it past the several nutjob environmental groups running up and down the west coast, either.
@12 Old Trooper, we’re thinking alike on this one. Stay tuned…more to come.
@13 streetsweeper, yea I agree. The same ones who drive spikes in trees for loggers or tree camp to keep them from cutting. You know for your hardcore liberals, they sure don’t mind those awful, scary black thingies when it suits them. Just not for you and me to defend ourselves.
@13–another very distinct possibility. I know how pissy people in Califunny got when you mentioned building power lines anywhere.
As with @13 I am assuming this is an ELF or similar environmental group.
I heard Hugh Hewitt talking about this last night. As usual he was blowing a gasket about “terrorism” and the supposedly fragile nature of our power infrastructure.
Actually, if anything this should show how robust and redundant our power grid is. Lots of people talk about how frail the veneer of civilization is, but in reality Western countries have an extremely strong and resilent infrastructure. That’s why we can bounce back in a matter of days from a natural disaster that would have a 3rd world country reeling for weeks if not months.
As for terrorist attacks, of course they’re possible. But the conundrum for the terrorists is this: A small attack isn’t really worth the time, effort and resources that would be expended. And the bigger the attack, the more difficult it is to plan, and the more people there are involved, and the more likely that some part of that planning will be monitored, intercepted or otherwise compromised and the whole operation thwarted.
So one or two hippies shooting up a transformer is certainly possible (and apparently that’s what happened.) A co-ordinated attack across multiple regions would require communications, equipment, training and other types of actions that would almost certainly be noticed by the authorities.
…And before anybody brings up the 9/11 attacks, let’s be honest about 9/11: It wasn’t a “brilliant” plan, it wasn’t a “gutsy” plan. It was, in street fighting terms, a sucker punch, plain and simple. The enemy saw a vulnerability, something we weren’t defending against, and they hit us there.
Here’s the thing about sucker punches, though: You can sucker punch almost anybody. You could go up to Mike Tyson and ask for his autograph and then sucker punch him.
But what then? If the sucker punch doesn’t put your opponent down, all you’ve done is invited an ass whooping (and lost any element of surprise.) I’m not sure Bin Laden, KSM and the others actually anticipated that we’d put troops on the ground in Afghanistan and chase his merry band right out of there (and overthrow his hosts in the process.) In fact, I’m sure he expected that we WOULDN’T. He figured we’d do what we had always done: Posture, make veiled threats, fire a bunch of cruise missiles or guided bombs, and then walk away.
Hundreds of rounds? I thought sniper’s used limited capacity mags. We had power lines cut and a tower (maybe) two toppled near Little Rock. Turned out to be a disgruntled individual about something which was never clear. This case being in California, there is no telling. Dress rehearsal, don’t think so. With that much ammo used, they could have done the job. More likely a case of too much adult beverage.
Well, if it was the smelly hippies, then they had to have been somewhat knowledgeable in the operations end of it, since they cut the phone lines and actually knew where the cable was, etc. Personally, I don’t think the smelly hippies would have went after a substation, without actually accomplishing their mission, i.e. cutting power to people. If they did do it, they aren’t very good, because other than costing some time and money, no one downstream was affected, which would have been their goal. Even smelly hippies would have to say that it was a cocked up job.
Nope, I’m thinking poor plan and sniper, barring any new evidence to the contrary.
@20:
The attackers cut the phone lines, left behind shell casings with no fingerprints, knew just what part of the transformers to fire at, inflicted $15 million worth of damage, shut down the substation for 27 days, and got away scot free right before the cops arrived. What part of that indicates “poor plan and sniper” to you?
This is a more detailed account from the Wall Street Journal. Check out the timeline and tell me if you still have the opinion that these guys were amateurs.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304851104579359141941621778?mod=WSJ_hp_RightTopStories
No one was injured because they weren’t trying to injure anyone. No one lost power because it was only one substation and PG&E was able to route power around it to other stations. But imagine if this was repeated by 6-8 teams hitting an equivalent number of geographically dispersed substations simultaneously.
@21: I never said they were “amateurs”. I mentioned that I don’t believe they are the smelly hippies. Did you not see that? It’s not hard to not leave fingerprints on your spent shell casings; have you heard of gloves? Shooting up a substation without causing any issues downstream doesn’t seem like a very good plan, especially, since the penalty for getting caught would make your return on investment rather shaky, unless shooting up the power station was the only thing you wanted t accomplish, which doesn’t make sense unless you’re rockin’ the Red Ryder BB gun and Black Bart is lurking around by it.
As others have said; your scenario for a coordinated attack would take a whole lot of planning and I just don’t see that amount of effort being applied here, since it’s the type of attack that you only get one chance to pull off with complete surprise. IOW They failed.
@21 That linked article is behind a paywall.
Honestly looks more like a drunken redneck shooting.
I had to laugh when I saw a news clip that featured a voice-over and music more suited to a horror film, and the comments by a spokesperson on the “unprecedented and sophisticated attack” with “military weaponry”….
Surrrre.
Cause AR-15s = “Assault Weapon” and cutting phone lines and shooting shit in a remote location reek of “sophistication”.
Tell me you found some .50 cal anti-material rounds and then I might believe it was “military” firearms. Cause that’s what those are used for.
Shooting stuff with an AR-15 in a remote location?
Drunk hooligans.