Bullet holes riddle key California power substation causing heavy damage — 10,00

[Psalm 51:17]

Bullet holes riddle key California power substation causing heavy damage — 10,000 gallon oil spill — Statewide Emergency Alert to conserve energy — 911 calls not working nearby
4/16/13
http://enenews.com/heavy-damage-after-bullet-holes-riddle-california-power-substation-10000-gallon-oil-spill-statewide-emergency-alert-to-conserve-energy-911-calls-from-land-lines-not-working-nearby

CBS San Francisco: [...] Crews were working to clean up an oil spill caused by bullet holes at a PG&E transmission center just southeast of San Jose, a PG&E spokesman said. [...] “We are currently on site assessing the magnitude of the vandalism and the impact,” he said. [...]

KTVU: Vandalism to major power transformer triggers power alert [...] Utility officials issued an emergency flex power alert for the Silicon Valley Tuesday after vandals riddled a key PG&E substation with bullets. [...] PG&E was reporting heavy damage to transformers at the substation following gunshots heard during an apparent vandalism in the early morning hours. [...]

NBC Bay Area: Statewide Emergency Alert to Conserve Energy After PG&E Substation Vandalized [...] About 10,000 gallons of oil began leaking Tuesday morning from a transformer at a San Jose PG&E substation [...] As of 10 a.m., hazardous material crews were still cleaning up the mess, and deputies have not yet been able to get inside. [...] Two hours after the gunfire was reported, PG&E called the sheriff’s office to report that their security fence had been “breached” in the 100 block of Metcalf Road near U.S. Highway 101. About the same time, and not too far away, Gilroy and Morgan Hill police departments reported that 911 calls from land lines were not working Tuesday morning. Stenderup said it was too early in the investigation to tell if the events were related.

San Jose Mercury News: [...] There were multiple gunshots heard at the facility,” said PG&E spokesman Jason King. “We have crews on the scene and we are currently assessing the situation.” [...] PG&E reported that at least five transformers were damaged. [...]

[Mark]

In 19 Minutes, A Team Of Snipers Destroyed 17 Transformers At A Power Station In California

When a real terrorist attack happens, sometimes we don’t hear about it until months afterward (if we ever hear about it at all).  For example, did you know that a team of snipers shot up a power station in California?  The terrorists destroyed 17 transformers and did so much damage that the power station was shut down for a month.  And it only took them 19 minutes of shooting to do it.  Of course most Americans have absolutely no idea that this ever happened, because they get their news from the mainstream media.  The chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission at that time says that this was “the most significant incident of domestic terrorism involving the grid that has ever occurred”, and yet you won’t hear about it on the big news networks.  They are too busy covering the latest breaking news on the Justin Bieber scandal.

And maybe it is good thing that most people don’t know about this.  The truth is that we are a nation that is absolutely teeming with “soft targets”, and if people realized how vulnerable we truly are they might start freaking out.

If you have not heard about the attack on the Silicon Valley substation yet, you should look into it.  The following is an excerpt from a Business Insider article about the sniper assault…

    The Wall Street Journal’s Rebecca Smith reports that a former Federal Energy Regulatory Commission chairman is acknowledging for the first time that a group of snipers shot up a Silicon Valley substation for 19 minutes last year, knocking out 17 transformers before slipping away into the night.

    The attack was “the most significant incident of domestic terrorism involving the grid that has ever occurred” in the U.S., Jon Wellinghoff, who was chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission at the time, told Smith.

Evidence found at the scene included “more than 100 fingerprint-free shell casings“, and little piles of rocks “that appeared to have been left by an advance scout to tell the attackers where to get the best shots.”

So much damage was done to the substation that it was closed down for a month.

And what happens if they decide to attack a nuclear power facility next time and use even bigger weapons?

Could we have another Fukushima on our hands?

In a previous article, I discussed a very disturbing report that showed that our nuclear facilities are indeed extremely vulnerable…

    Commercial and research nuclear facilities across the U.S. are inadequately protected against the threat of terrorism, according to the results of new study released this week by the Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Project (NPPP) at the University of Texas at Austin’s LBJ School of Public Affairs. The two biggest terror threats facing these facilities, according to the report, are the theft of bomb grade nuclear materials and sabotage attacks aimed at causing a nuclear reactor meltdown.

    The study, entitled “Protecting U.S. Nuclear Facilities from Terrorist Attack: Re-assessing the Current ‘Design Basis Threat’ Approach,” found not one of the 104 commercial nuclear reactors in the U.S. is protected against a “maximum credible terrorist attack,” such as 9/11. In fact, nuclear facilities are not required to protect themselves against airplane attacks, assaults by large teams of terrorists or even high-power sniper rifles.

The truth is that we are far, far more vulnerable to terror attacks than most Americans would dare to imagine.

So why isn’t the federal government doing more to protect us?

Well, the reality is that their resources are already stretched pretty thin and they can’t even protect their own computers.  According to another report that was recently released, breaches of government computer networks go undetected 40 percent of the time…

    A new report by Sen. Tom Coburn (R., Okla.) details widespread cybersecurity breaches in the federal government, despite billions in spending to secure the nation’s most sensitive information.

    The report, released on Tuesday, found that approximately 40 percent of breaches go undetected, and highlighted “serious vulnerabilities in the government’s efforts to protect its own civilian computers and networks.”

    “In the past few years, we have seen significant breaches in cybersecurity which could affect critical U.S. infrastructure,” the report said. “Data on the nation’s weakest dams, including those which could kill Americans if they failed, were stolen by a malicious intruder. Nuclear plants’ confidential cybersecurity plans have been left unprotected. Blueprints for the technology undergirding the New York Stock Exchange were exposed to hackers.”

Are you starting to get the picture?

We are not nearly as “secure” as we like to think that we are.

In recent months, we have seen that our private financial information is not even secure at the largest retailers in the entire country.  By now you have probably already heard about the horrifying security breach that happened at Target during the holiday season…

    The holiday shopping season breach affected up to 110 million customers, including 40 million credit and debit cards and up to 70 million customers’ personal information.

    The discount retailer discovered the breach in mid-December, notified customers several days later, and launched an investigation with the help of a private security firm and law enforcement.

And experts tell us that because credit card companies are cutting corners by using outdated technology that is less expensive that these kinds of credit card hacks will continue to happen all over the country.

So what are you going to do when you wake up some day and none of your credit cards or debit cards will work because the entire system has been compromised by hackers?

What are you going to do when you wake up some day and you have no power for an extended period of time because a team of terrorists has destroyed the entire power grid in your area?

What are you going to do when you wake up some day and a wave of nuclear radiation is heading your way because terrorists have attacked a nuclear power facility close to where you live?

We are an extremely vulnerable nation that literally has thousands of big, fat juicy “soft targets” that could be attacked at any moment.

We have been very fortunate to live during an era when we have generally been safe from such attacks, but the world is rapidly changing before our very eyes.

So let us hope for the best, but let us also prepare for the worst.

http://thetruthwins.com/archives/in-19-minutes-a-team-of-snipers-destroyed-17-transformers-at-a-power-station-in-california

[Kilika]

...and yet you won’t hear about it on the big news networks...

Why should we? It's just more boring news about false flags.

I mean really? The catch words in that article are over the top. "Snipers"? And just who made that determination? Typically, a real sniper will police their brass, the idea is that they don't want to be detected, at all. Leave a calling card? I doubt it. Some might be arrogant enough to say, "That was me". Also, snipers usually don't work with anyone other than a spotter, but the article is worded to suggest there was some kind of "team" of snipers, standing there for a solid 19 minutes, firing away at 17 different targets, and got clean away before any cops showed up. Yeah, right! 

Call me skeptical, but I ain't buying this one as presented. Keep in mind who is making these allegations of terrorism, a former Bush appointee. Just sayin'.

I'd like to know more details, like what caliber round was used, and from what distance they claim. The transformers wouldn't be a hard target being rather large. They could be hit relatively easily from a mile or more with a Barrett 50 cal. But from any range, it would have to be a sizable caliber to do any damage to those things, which are all heavy steel.

The final red flag for me, is that when you click the links to read the whole article, it takes you to a sign in page for the Wall Street Journal. You must log in to read it! Sorry, I see it as a planted article by the WSJ for the purposes of drawing out new registered readers. So I kept poking around and found I think a different article from WSJ via another site after a search using "snipers shoot power transformers"...

http://news.yahoo.com/last-snipers-attacked-power-plant-california-052902700.html;_ylt=AwrSbmpZ7PNSwi4AKgxXNyoA;_ylu=X3oDMTEzOXI0M3BqBHNlYwNzcgRwb3MDMwRjb2xvA2dxMQR2dGlkA1FCQUNLMV8x

That article has a link to "The Wire" article...

http://www.thewire.com/national/2014/02/last-year-snipers-attacked-power-plant-california/357729/

And that article links to the WSJ article...

http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702304851104579359141941621778-lMyQjAxMTA0MDAwNDEwNDQyWj

SAN JOSE, Calif.—The attack began just before 1 a.m. on April 16 last year, when someone slipped into an underground vault not far from a busy freeway and cut telephone cables.

Within half an hour, snipers opened fire on a nearby electrical substation. Shooting for 19 minutes, they surgically knocked out 17 giant transformers that funnel power to Silicon Valley. A minute before a police car arrived, the shooters disappeared into the night.

To avoid a blackout, electric-grid officials rerouted power around the site and asked power plants in Silicon Valley to produce more electricity. But it took utility workers 27 days to make repairs and bring the substation back to life.

Nobody has been arrested or charged in the attack at PG&E Corp.'s PCG +0.41% Metcalf transmission substation. 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 assembled a chronology of the Metcalf attack from filings PG&E made to state and federal regulators; from other documents including a video released by the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Department; and from interviews, including with Mr. Wellinghoff.

The 64-year-old Nevadan, who was appointed to FERC in 2006 by President George W. Bush and stepped down in November, said he gave closed-door, high-level briefings to federal agencies, Congress and the White House last year. As months have passed without arrests, he said, he has grown increasingly concerned that an even larger attack could be in the works. He said he was going public about the incident out of concern that national security is at risk and critical electric-grid sites aren't adequately protected.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation doesn't think a terrorist organization caused the Metcalf attack, said a spokesman for the FBI in San Francisco. Investigators are "continuing to sift through the evidence," he said.

Some people in the utility industry share Mr. Wellinghoff's concerns, including a former official at PG&E, Metcalf's owner, who told an industry gathering in November he feared the incident could have been a dress rehearsal for a larger event.

"This wasn't an incident where Billy-Bob and Joe decided, after a few brewskis, to come in and shoot up a substation," Mark Johnson, retired vice president of transmission for PG&E, told the utility security conference, according to a video of his presentation. "This was an event that was well thought out, well planned and they targeted certain components." When reached, Mr. Johnson declined to comment further.

A spokesman for PG&E said the company takes all incidents seriously but declined to discuss the Metcalf event in detail for fear of giving information to potential copycats. "We won't speculate about the motives" of the attackers, added the spokesman, Brian Swanson. He said PG&E has increased security measures.

Utility executives and federal energy officials have long worried that the electric grid is vulnerable to sabotage. That is in part because the grid, which is really three systems serving different areas of the U.S., has failed when small problems such as trees hitting transmission lines created cascading blackouts. One in 2003 knocked out power to 50 million people in the Eastern U.S. and Canada for days.

Many of the system's most important components sit out in the open, often in remote locations, protected by little more than cameras and chain-link fences.

Transmission substations are critical links in the grid. They make it possible for electricity to move long distances, and serve as hubs for intersecting power lines.

Within a substation, transformers raise the voltage of electricity so it can travel hundreds of miles on high-voltage lines, or reduce voltages when electricity approaches its destination. The Metcalf substation functions as an off-ramp from power lines for electricity heading to homes and businesses in Silicon Valley.

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.

A 2009 Energy Department report said that "physical damage of certain system components (e.g. extra-high-voltage transformers) on a large scale…could result in prolonged outages, as procurement cycles for these components range from months to years."

Mr. Wellinghoff said a FERC analysis found that if a surprisingly small number of U.S. substations were knocked out at once, that could destabilize the system enough to cause a blackout that could encompass most of the U.S.

Not everyone is so pessimistic. Gerry Cauley, chief executive of the North America Electric Reliability Corp., a standards-setting group that reports to FERC, said he thinks the grid is more resilient than Mr. Wellinghoff fears.

"I don't want to downplay the scenario he describes," Mr. Cauley said. "I'll agree it's possible from a technical assessment." But he said that even if several substations went down, the vast majority of people would have their power back in a few hours.

The utility industry has been focused on Internet attacks, worrying that hackers could take down the grid by disabling communications and important pieces of equipment. Companies have reported 13 cyber incidents in the past three years, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of emergency reports utilities file with the federal government. There have been no reports of major outages linked to these events, although companies have generally declined to provide details.

"A lot of people in the electric industry have been distracted by cybersecurity threats," said Stephen Berberich, chief executive of the California Independent System Operator, which runs much of the high-voltage transmission system for the utilities. He said that physical attacks pose a "big, if not bigger" menace.

There were 274 significant instances of vandalism or deliberate damage in the three years, and more than 700 weather-related problems, according to the Journal's analysis.

Until the Metcalf incident, attacks on U.S. utility equipment were mostly linked to metal thieves, disgruntled employees or bored hunters, who sometimes took potshots at small transformers on utility poles to see what happens. (Answer: a small explosion followed by an outage.)

Last year, an Arkansas man was charged with multiple attacks on the power grid, including setting fire to a switching station. He has pleaded not guilty and is undergoing a psychiatric evaluation, according to federal court records.

Overseas, terrorist organizations were linked to 2,500 attacks on transmission lines or towers and at least 500 on substations from 1996 to 2006, according to a January report from the Electric Power Research Institute, an industry-funded research group, which cited State Department data.

An attack on a PG&E substation near San Jose, Calif., in April knocked out 17 transformers like this one. Talia Herman for The Wall Street Journal

To some, the Metcalf incident has lifted the discussion of serious U.S. grid attacks beyond the theoretical. "The breadth and depth of the attack was unprecedented" in the U.S., said Rich Lordan, senior technical executive for the Electric Power Research Institute. The motivation, he said, "appears to be preparation for an act of war."

The attack lasted slightly less than an hour, according to the chronology assembled by the Journal.

At 12:58 a.m., AT&T fiber-optic telecommunications cables were cut—in a way that made them hard to repair—in an underground vault near the substation, not far from U.S. Highway 101 just outside south San Jose. It would have taken more than one person to lift the metal vault cover, said people who visited the site.

Nine minutes later, some customers of Level 3 Communications, LVLT +5.50% an Internet service provider, lost service. Cables in its vault near the Metcalf substation were also cut.

At 1:31 a.m., a surveillance camera pointed along a chain-link fence around the substation recorded a streak of light that investigators from the Santa Clara County Sheriff's office think was a signal from a waved flashlight. It was followed by the muzzle flash of rifles and sparks from bullets hitting the fence.

The substation's cameras weren't aimed outside its perimeter, where the attackers were. They shooters appear to have aimed at the transformers' oil-filled cooling systems. These began to bleed oil, but didn't explode, as the transformers probably would have done if hit in other areas.

About six minutes after the shooting started, PG&E confirms, it got an alarm from motion sensors at the substation, possibly from bullets grazing the fence, which is shown on video.

Four minutes later, at 1:41 a.m., the sheriff's department received a 911 call about gunfire, sent by an engineer at a nearby power plant that still had phone service.

Riddled with bullet holes, the transformers leaked 52,000 gallons of oil, then overheated. The first bank of them crashed at 1:45 a.m., at which time PG&E's control center about 90 miles north received an equipment-failure alarm.

Five minutes later, another apparent flashlight signal, caught on film, marked the end of the attack. More than 100 shell casings of the sort ejected by AK-47s were later found at the site.

At 1:51 a.m., law-enforcement officers arrived, but found everything quiet. Unable to get past the locked fence and seeing nothing suspicious, they left.

A PG&E worker, awakened by the utility's control center at 2:03 a.m., arrived at 3:15 a.m. to survey the damage.

Grid officials routed some power around the substation to keep the system stable and asked customers in Silicon Valley to conserve electricity.

In a news release, PG&E said the substation had been hit by vandals. It has since confirmed 17 transformers were knocked out.

Mr. Wellinghoff, then chairman of FERC, said that after he heard about the scope of the attack, he flew to California, bringing with him experts from the U.S. Navy's Dahlgren Surface Warfare Center in Virginia, which trains Navy SEALs. After walking the site with PG&E officials and FBI agents, Mr. Wellinghoff said, the military experts told him it looked like a professional job.

In addition to fingerprint-free shell casings, they pointed out small piles of rocks, which they said could have been left by an advance scout to tell the attackers where to get the best shots.

"They said it was a targeting package just like they would put together for an attack," Mr. Wellinghoff said.

Mr. Wellinghoff, now a law partner at Stoel Rives LLP in San Francisco, said he arranged a series of meetings in the following weeks to let other federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, know what happened and to enlist their help. He held a closed-door meeting with utility executives in San Francisco in June and has distributed lists of things utilities should do to strengthen their defenses.

A spokesman for Homeland Security said it is up to utilities to protect the grid. The department's role in an emergency is to connect federal agencies and local police and facilitate information sharing, the spokesman said.

As word of the attack spread through the utility industry, some companies moved swiftly to review their security efforts. "We're looking at things differently now," said Michelle Campanella, an FBI veteran who is director of security for Consolidated Edison Inc. ED +0.56% in New York. For example, she said, Con Ed changed the angles of some of its 1,200 security cameras "so we don't have any blind spots."

Some of the legislators Mr. Wellinghoff briefed are calling for action. Rep. Henry Waxman (D., Calif.) mentioned the incident at a FERC oversight hearing in December, saying he was concerned that no one in government can order utilities to improve grid protections or to take charge in an emergency.

As for Mr. Wellinghoff, he said he has made something of a hobby of visiting big substations to look over defenses and see whether he is questioned by security details or local police. He said he typically finds easy access to fence lines that are often close to important equipment.

"What keeps me awake at night is a physical attack that could take down the grid," he said. "This is a huge problem."

—Tom McGinty contributed to this article.

Write to Rebecca Smith at rebecca.smith@wsj.com

That's all pretty sketchy, but this takes the cake...

More than 100 shell casings of the sort ejected by AK-47s were later found at the site

Now to what end did the author make that distinction? Are they taking "creative license" and adding some flair? Or is the intent to make the events appear to be one thing when it's another by using certain catch words, like "snipers", and "terrorism".

The fact is, the round that fits an AK, 7.62x39mm, also fits several other rifles in the world, both civilian and military grade.

[Kilika]

Looks like they are trying to use that incident as a tool...

http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/us/2014/02/06/tsr-dnt-simon-power-grid-sniper-attack.cnn.html

[Mark]

False Flag: New Details Emerge on Santa Clara County ‘Military-Style’ Power Grid Attack

As new information rolls in, it’s clear that this event in the Silicon Valley was a government-sanctioned operation…


Greg Fernandez
We Are Change

“This was an unprecedented and sophisticated attack on an electric grid substation using military-style weapons.”
– U.S. Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA)

A half hour before 150 rounds were fired into the PG&E substation in Coyote, California, in less than 20 minutes, an AT&T fiber optic cable was cut in an underground vault at the site causing a phone blackout at 12:58 a.m., according to what Sgt. Kurtis Stenderup, of the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office, told KTVU. That leaves a half hour gap between the phone blackout and the beginning of what former Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) chairman Jon Wellinghoff called a “well planned, coordinated and executed attack on a major piece of our electric grid infrastructure,” according to what he told CNN.

The FBI does not believe this was an attack by a terrorist organization, but they are still investigating what happened on April 16, 2013. San Francisco’s FBI spokesperson Peter Lee added “there is no nexus to terrorism at this time.” He called this a case of vandalism.

During the short attack on PG&E Corporation’s Metcalf transmission substation in Santa Clara County on April 16,2013, some 17 transformers were taken out by a sniper or a team of snipers beginning at 1:31 a.m.

By the time police arrived the attackers or vandals were long gone. Surveillance cameras caught little more than the hail of bullets that struck the gates of the substation. No arrests have been made so far. Authorities found over 100 fingerprint-free shell casing and small piles of rocks that may have been left by “an advance scout to tell the attackers where to get the best shots,” according to Rob Wile of Business Insider.com. The article by Wile is based on another article by The Wall Street Journal’s Rebecca Smith. You must subscribe to the Wall Street Journal to read her original article in full.

KTVU reported that the phone black out affected local businesses as well, “Teri Bradford owns the Coyote Bait and Tackle shop down the street. She says they had power but no phones and didn’t know what had happened.”

In what appears to be a test-run for a future terror attack, a power grid blackout was avoided by quick-thinking utility workers who rerouted power around the Metcalf substation. Other power plants in Silicon Valley also helped out by producing more electricity to compensate for the PG&E transformers. The Metcalf substation had no power for over a month after the attack.

After the “domestic terror attack” Chairman Wellinghoff requested the U.S. Navy investigate.

Jon Wellinghoff stepped down as FERC chairman in November 2013. Now working as an energy law attorney, Wellinghoff believes tighter security measures by a federal agency would help prevent such attacks in the future, but other utility officials disagree. PG&E spokesperson Brian Swanson let everyone know that in situations like this, PG&E has redundancies set up “to reroute power around damaged equipment and keep the lights on for our customers.”

“This isn’t about this substation or this organized attack. This is more about the larger issue of physical security of these high-voltage substations nationwide and the need to ensure that some defensive measures start to be put in place.” – Former Federal Energy Regulatory Commission chairman Jon Wellinghoff

Wellinghoff is calling for a national coordinated plan with a federal agency in charge to prevent such attacks in the future. He remains deeply concerned about the vulnerability of the nation’s electricity system.

U.S. Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA) also believes improved security measures need to be taken, and he said so during a U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing in December of 2013.

In 2010 The GRID Act passed in the U.S. House of Representatives, but was voted down in the U.S. Senate thereafter. The GRID Act was intended “to amend the Federal Power Act to protect the bulk-power system and electric infrastructure critical to the defense of the United States against cybersecurity and other threats and vulnerabilities.”

If passed back in 2010, here are just a few things the GRID Act would have allowed the FERC to execute at their discretion:

• Authorizes FERC to issue such rules or orders without prior notice or hearing if it determines that a rule or order must be issued immediately to protect critical electric infrastructure from a cyber security vulnerability.
• Directs FERC, before issuing a rule or order, to consult with specified entities and federal agencies regarding implementation of actions that will effectively address the identified cyber security vulnerabilities.
• Requires the rule or order issued to address a cyber security vulnerability to expire on the effective date of a certain standard developed to address the cyber security vulnerability.
• Empowers the Secretary of Energy to require, by order, with or without notice, persons subject to FERC jurisdiction to take such actions as the Secretary determines will best avert or mitigate an immediate cyber security threat.

Representative Waxman hopes to “fix the gap in regulatory authority” and empower the FERC to deal with such threats and vulnerabilities. Expect another version of the GRID Act to find its way into the congressional halls very soon.

The precision of the attack suggests the suspects could be active, or ex-military personnel – or professional mercenaries comprised of ex-special forces snipers. Was this an act of vandalism or domestic terrorism? Could it be a training exercise of some sort? What did the perpetrators gain by disabling the power plant’s transformers and fiber optic cable? Was it more than to observe the response time of local authorities? If this was a training exercise, what were they training for? More so, who are they?

Are they training for an attack in Santa Clara, California? Super Bowl 50 will be held at the new Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara in 2016. Before that happens, the stadium will host WWE WrestleMania 31 on March 29, 2015.

Or was the “vandalism” a training exercise for what happened in Arkansas months later where “multiple attacks on power lines & grid infrastructure led to millions of dollars in damage and brief power outages”?

http://21stcenturywire.com/2014/02/10/false-flag-new-details-emerge-on-santa-clara-county-military-style-power-grid-attack/

[Mark]

Report: U.S. Electric Grid ‘Inherently Vulnerable’ to Sabotage
Multiple unreported incidents raise security concerns

Electric grid compounds across the country have faced an uptick in unauthorized intrusions by unknown individuals, causing concern that the U.S. grid is “inherently vulnerable” to widespread sabotage, according to a recent oversight report issued by New Jersey’s Regional Operations Intelligence Center (ROIC), which monitors the threat level.

Following at least eight “reports of intrusions at electrical grid facilities in New Jersey” from October 2013 until January 2014, the ROIC’s Intelligence & Analysis Threat Unit issued a report warning that the U.S. electrical grid is “inherently vulnerable” to attacks that could wipe out power across large swaths of the country.

The ROIC report, released in late February, is marked as “unclassified” but designated “for official use only.” New Jersey State Police Spokesman Trooper Jeff Flynn confirmed that a report of this nature had been commissioned by ROIC when contacted by the Washington Free Beacon.

The multiple incidents of “sabotage” and crime outlined in the report “highlight the grid’s vulnerabilities to potential threats,” according to a copy of the report obtained by the Free Beacon.

U.S. officials and experts have increasingly warned over the years that the electrical grid could be a prime target for terrorists or others seeking to damage the country’s infrastructure and disrupt daily life.

The concern is that many of the incidents outlined in the ROIC report could be a sign that preparations are under away for a larger, coordinated attack on the grid.

Highly sensitive areas of the electrical grid were found to be lightly monitored, leaving them vulnerable to attack, according to the report.

“The electrical grid—a network of power generating plants, transmission lines, substations, and distribution lines—is inherently vulnerable,” the report said.

“Transmission substations are critical links in the electrical grid, making it possible for electricity to move long distances and serving as hubs for intersecting power lines,” according to the report. “Many of the grid’s important components sit out in the open, often in remote locations, protected by little more than cameras and chain-link fences.”

While the incidents are greatly concerning to security officials—and remain mostly unsolved—the ROIC “currently does not have enough information to classify the New Jersey incidents listed [in the report] as indicative of pre-operational activity or connect them to a pattern,” according to the report, which does not discount this possibility.

However, the incidents of grid tampering are not isolated to New Jersey.

An unidentified individual in Tucson, Ariz., in January, “removed multiple bolts from an electric tower’s support structure, increasing the potential for collapse and electrical service interruption.”

Authorities suspect that the goal was “sabotage rather than vandalism” due to the “deliberate manner of the bolt removal, including probable acquisition of the requisite tools,” the report said.

In April 2013, “unknown subject(s) fired multiple shots at an electrical transmission substation” in San Jose, Calif., “damaging several transformers,” the report notes.

Surveillance video of the incident shows sparks flying across the compound as bullets strike the substation.

“Authorities subsequently discovered intentionally cut fiber optic cables in a manhole,” according to the report. “No motive or suspects have been identified.”

Sabotage has also been reported in Jacksonville, Ark., where in August 2013, “an identified suspect … removed bolts from the base of a high-voltage transmission line tower and tried to bring down the 100-foot tower with a moving train,” according to the report

One month later, “the subject reportedly set a fire at a substation control house.”

In October of that year, “the subject cut into two electrical poles and used a tractor to pull them down, cutting power to thousands of customers,” according to the report.

While the incidents in San Jose received widespread media attention, several of the others did not.

New Jersey has experienced eight separate incidents of a similar nature since last year.

On Jan. 26, for instance, “employees found a hole, approximately three-foot high by two-foot wide, in the perimeter fence of an electric switching and substation in East Rutherford,” according to the report.

Several days before that incident, on Jan. 22, “an identified subject entered a Burlington generating station using false identification,” according to the report. “The subject claimed he had a gun (none found) and a bomb (package cleared).”

Other incidents include break-ins at certain electrical stations and the theft of various on-site materials.

The ROIC concluded that while “the incidents more likely involve vandalism and theft, rather than sabotage,” any type of “intrusion or damage to substations is a critical concern to the power supply and public safety.”

Counterterrorism expert Patrick Poole warned that these attacks could be a “test-run” for a larger act of sabotage.

“While some of these incidents involving substations can be attributed to metal scavenging, it’s planned attacks, much like the one in San Jose, that have officials worried the most and raises a number of questions,” Poole told the Free Beacon. “Why was this substation targeted? What were they trying to accomplish with this attack? Was this a test-run for something larger?”

“What the New Jersey ROIC report shows is that this fits into a larger pattern of incidents, which should be keeping someone at Homeland Security up at night,” Poole said. “The other big question is how many more of these incidents are going unreported?”

The ROIC report outlines several types of suspicious behavior that authorities should be on the lookout for.

These include the “photographing objects or facilities that would not normally be photographed,” instances of individuals “loitering in sensitive areas,” and other types of atypical behavior such as “unfamiliar or out of place persons posing as panhandlers, protesters, vendors, [or] news agents.”

Flynn told the Free Beacon that ROIC aims to analyze and codify various grid incidents across the country in order to “learn from those incidents and apply them to situations here in New Jersey.”

The goal is to reach “potential conclusions to solve potential problems we have in state,” Flynn said in response to questions about the report.

http://freebeacon.com/report-u-s-electric-grid-inherently-vulnerable-to-sabotage/

[Mark]

Government Agency: If 9 Substations Are Destroyed, The Power Grid Could Be Down For 18 Months

What would you do if the Internet or the power grid went down for over a year?  Our key infrastructure, including the Internet and the power grid, is far more vulnerable than most people would dare to imagine.  These days, most people simply take for granted that the lights will always be on and that the Internet will always function properly.  But what if all that changed someday in the blink of an eye?  According to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's latest report, all it would take to plunge the entire nation into darkness for more than a year would be to knock out a transformer manufacturer and just 9 of our 55,000 electrical substations on a really hot summer day.  The reality of the matter is that our power grid is in desperate need of updating, and there is very little or no physical security at most of these substations.  If terrorists, or saboteurs, or special operations forces wanted to take down our power grid, it would not be very difficult.  And as you will read about later in this article, the Internet is extremely vulnerable as well.

When I read the following statement from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's latest report, I was absolutely floored...

    "Destroy nine interconnection substations and a transformer manufacturer and the entire United States grid would be down for at least 18 months, probably longer."

Wow.

What would you do without power for 18 months?

FERC studied what it would take to collapse the entire electrical grid from coast to coast.  What they found was quite unsettling...

    In its modeling, FERC studied what would happen if various combinations of substations were crippled in the three electrical systems that serve the contiguous U.S. The agency concluded the systems could go dark if as few as nine locations were knocked out: four in the East, three in the West and two in Texas, people with knowledge of the analysis said.

    The actual number of locations that would have to be knocked out to spawn a massive blackout would vary depending on available generation resources, energy demand, which is highest on hot days, and other factors, experts said. Because it is difficult to build new transmission routes, existing big substations are becoming more crucial to handling electricity.

So what would life look like without any power for a long period of time?  The following list comes from one of my previous articles...

-There would be no heat for your home.

-Water would no longer be pumped into most homes.

-Your computer would not work.

-There would be no Internet.

-Your phones would not work.

-There would be no television.

-There would be no radio.

-ATM machines would be shut down.

-There would be no banking.

-Your debit cards and credit cards would not work.

-Without electricity, gas stations would not be functioning.

-Most people would be unable to do their jobs without electricity and employment would collapse.

-Commerce would be brought to a standstill.

-Hospitals would not be able to function.

-You would quickly start running out of medicine.

-All refrigeration would shut down and frozen foods in our homes and supermarkets would start to go bad.

If you want to get an idea of how quickly society would descend into chaos, just watch the documentary "American Blackout" some time.  It will chill you to your bones.

The truth is that we live in an unprecedented time.  We have become extremely dependent on technology, and that technology could be stripped away from us in an instant.

Right now, our power grid is exceedingly vulnerable, and all the experts know this, but very little is being done to actually protect it...

    "The power grid, built over many decades in a benign environment, now faces a range of threats it was never designed to survive," said Paul Stockton, a former assistant secretary of defense and president of risk-assessment firm Cloud Peak Analytics. "That's got to be the focus going forward."

If a group of agents working for a foreign government or a terrorist organization wanted to bring us to our knees, they could do it.

In fact, there have actually been recent attacks on some of our power stations.  Here is just one example…

    The Wall Street Journal’s Rebecca Smith reports that a former Federal Energy Regulatory Commission chairman is acknowledging for the first time that a group of snipers shot up a Silicon Valley substation for 19 minutes last year, knocking out 17 transformers before slipping away into the night.

    The attack was “the most significant incident of domestic terrorism involving the grid that has ever occurred” in the U.S., Jon Wellinghoff, who was chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission at the time, told Smith.

Have you heard about that attack before now?

Most Americans have not.

But it should have been big news.

At the scene, authorities found "more than 100 fingerprint-free shell casings", and little piles of rocks "that appeared to have been left by an advance scout to tell the attackers where to get the best shots."

So what happens someday when the bad guys decide to conduct a coordinated attack against our power grid with heavy weapons?

It could happen.

In addition, as I mentioned at the top of this article, the Internet is extremely vulnerable as well.

For example, did you know that authorities are so freaked out about the security of the Internet that they have given "the keys to the Internet" to a very small group of individuals that meet four times per year?

It's true.  The following is from a recent story posted by the Guardian...

    The keyholders have been meeting four times a year, twice on the east coast of the US and twice here on the west, since 2010. Gaining access to their inner sanctum isn't easy, but last month I was invited along to watch the ceremony and meet some of the keyholders – a select group of security experts from around the world. All have long backgrounds in internet security and work for various international institutions. They were chosen for their geographical spread as well as their experience – no one country is allowed to have too many keyholders. They travel to the ceremony at their own, or their employer's, expense.

    What these men and women control is the system at the heart of the web: the domain name system, or DNS. This is the internet's version of a telephone directory – a series of registers linking web addresses to a series of numbers, called IP addresses. Without these addresses, you would need to know a long sequence of numbers for every site you wanted to visit. To get to the Guardian, for instance, you'd have to enter "77.91.251.10" instead of theguardian.com.

If the system that controls those IP addresses gets hijacked or damaged, we would definitely need someone to press the "reset button" on the Internet.

Sadly, the hackers always seem to be several steps ahead of the authorities.  In fact, according to one recent report, breaches of U.S. government computer networks go undetected 40 percent of the time…

    A new report by Sen. Tom Coburn (R., Okla.) details widespread cybersecurity breaches in the federal government, despite billions in spending to secure the nation’s most sensitive information.

    The report, released on Tuesday, found that approximately 40 percent of breaches go undetected, and highlighted “serious vulnerabilities in the government’s efforts to protect its own civilian computers and networks.”

    “In the past few years, we have seen significant breaches in cybersecurity which could affect critical U.S. infrastructure,” the report said. “Data on the nation’s weakest dams, including those which could kill Americans if they failed, were stolen by a malicious intruder. Nuclear plants’ confidential cybersecurity plans have been left unprotected. Blueprints for the technology undergirding the New York Stock Exchange were exposed to hackers.”

Yikes.

And things are not much better when it comes to cybersecurity in the private sector either.  According to Symantec, there was a 42 percent increase in cyberattacks against businesses in the United States last year.  And according to a recent report in the Telegraph, our major banks are being hit with cyberattacks "every minute of every day"...

    Every minute, of every hour, of every day, a major financial institution is under attack.

    Threats range from teenagers in their bedrooms engaging in adolescent “hacktivism”, to sophisticated criminal gangs and state-sponsored terrorists attempting everything from extortion to industrial espionage. Though the details of these crimes remain scant, cyber security experts are clear that behind-the-scenes online attacks have already had far reaching consequences for banks and the financial markets.

For much more on all of this, please see my previous article entitled "Big Banks Are Being Hit With Cyberattacks 'Every Minute Of Every Day'".

Up until now, attacks on our infrastructure have not caused any significant interruptions in our lifestyles.

But at some point that will change.

Are you prepared for that to happen?

We live at a time when our world is becoming increasingly unstable.  In the years ahead it is quite likely that we will see massive economic problems, major natural disasters, serious terror attacks and war.  Any one of those could cause substantial disruptions in the way that we live.

At this point, even NASA is warning that "civilization could collapse"...

    A new study sponsored by Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution.

    Noting that warnings of 'collapse' are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that "the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history." Cases of severe civilisational disruption due to "precipitous collapse - often lasting centuries - have been quite common."

So let us hope for the best.

But let us also prepare for the worst.

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/government-agency-if-9-substations-are-destroyed-the-power-grid-could-be-down-for-18-months

[Mark]

‘Catastrophic’ Transformer Fire Closes Heathrow Airport, Global Travel Disrupted, Sabotage Question Immediately Raised

One of the world’s busiest airports is shut for an unprecedented full working day, disrupting air travel worldwide, after a major fire took out not only its power supply but backup systems as well.

Serious questions were immediately raised about the resilience of critical national infrastructure and the possibility of sabotage after London Heathrow was force to close by a major power cut. Airport management say it will remain closed until 2359 GMT (1959 Eastern) tonight.

One of the world’s busiest airports, Heathrow will typically handle over 1,300 flights in a day and analysis by Flightradar24 states “at least 1,351” flights to and from the airport will be impacted today. Yet the disruption will inevitably go far further and impact thousands more flights, as Heathrow is a major hub for refuelling flights and crew changeovers.

rest:https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2025/03/21/catastrophic-fire-closes-heathrow-global-disruption-sabotage-prospect/