What elements of the nation’s power grid — comprised of power plants, transmission lines, substations, and distribution lines — are in your jurisdiction? Let me put it another way: do you have high-tension transmission lines running through the area? What about underground conduits carrying power from its source to and/or through your city? (Answer: yes, most likely, you do.)
You have plenty of stuff to keep you busy on patrol, so adding one more thing to the list may be pretty unappealing, but an incident in Arizona has reinvigorated discussion — at least among the people with whom I regularly speak — about the vulnerability of the United States electrical power grid.
You already know about the power plants and substations in your AOR, but how much thought have you given to those transmission lines?
In February of this year, an unknown number of subjects removed a number of bolts from the base of an electric tower’s support structure, “increasing the potential for collapse and electrical service interruption,” according to an open source U//FOUO document floating around among my email pen pals.
“The deliberate manner of the bolt removal, including probable acquisition of the requisite tools, indicates sabotage rather than vandalism,” said the report.
I’d actually consider this a probing event (recall that probes are number four on the list of eight pre-attack indicators).
The tools required to conduct such an operation are not too terribly difficult for some random teenage knucklehead to fashion in metal shop (or steal from a parked utility vehicle), so there remains the possibility that this event was an act of simple sabotage, but I see the glass half full (of problems) so I’ll assume the worst and call this a probe.
A source of mine who is dialed-in with the intelligence community told me recently that in those circles there is debate about whether this was vandalism, terrorism, or something in between.
The key is to know — in advance — where these locations are, and that you not allow these sites to fade into the background.
Another reason I wanted to get you thinking about our power grid today is that almost exactly a year ago (in April 2013) the PG&E Metcalf substation near San Jose (Calif.) was attacked by an unknown number of gunmen. The incident — which at the time garnered only a little media attention — was significant for several reasons.
Immediately, the attackers were successfully able to disable both landline and terrestrial cell phone lines for a protracted period of time, and knock out 911 service for at least a short time (reports on the duration of the 911 downtime are varied). The attackers were also able to put about 100 rifle rounds into 17 transformers — targeting oil-filled cooling systems, causing the cooling oil to leak, which subsequently led the overheated transformers to shut down. That last chain of events is no coincidence — actually, it’s a fairly sophisticated attack, in my opinion.
Thinking about the Metcalf attack from a more long long-term perspective, I can confidently say that this event will have been noted as a template for others with nefarious purposes. Those bad guys will not have missed the fact that it took a month to repair the damage. They will not have missed that the perpetrators remain at large to this very day.
Jon Wellinghoff — a now-retired George W. Bush appointee who was chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission at the time of the Metcalf incident — called it “the most significant incident of domestic terrorism involving the U.S. power grid that has ever occurred,” according to Fox News. .
You can’t be everywhere, and bad things tend to happen when you’re nowhere near the vicinity, but try to keep the vulnerability of the power grid (and other potential terrorist targets) in mind when you’re out on patrol.
Know where these places are. Make a drive-by part of your daily duty. And if you find an intruder or other violator, don’t fail to pass that information along (ping your Fusion Center, for example).
In addition to bearing in mind the abovementioned list of pre-attack indicators, I’ll encourage you to check out the bullet points below, which are copied and pasted verbatim from the U//FOUO PDF which has been hitting my inbox from various email sources. Potential indictors include:
• Photographing objects or facilities that would not normally be photographed
• Individuals or vehicles loitering in sensitive areas with no valid reason
• Having maps or blueprints of a site with no valid reason
• Unusual or prolonged interest in security, entry points, access controls, or perimeter barriers
• Persistent questioning of facility personnel through personal contact, telephone, mail, or email
• Observing security drills, exercises, and reactions to possible threats, such as unattended packages
• Staring at and then averting gaze away from personnel or vehicles operating in secured areas, or displaying other anxious behaviors, such as retracing steps
• Monitoring radio scanners and recording emergency response times
• Mapping routes, timing traffic lights, and monitoring traffic flow in or near sensitive facilities
• Unexplained fire alarms or 911 calls, which may be attempts to observe emergency response
• Discreetly using cameras, binoculars, or note-taking and sketching at sensitive sites
Stay safe. Stay vigilant!
