The power grid...again

[Condo Guard]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/attacks-pacific-north-west-power-060055776.html

I talked about the power grid's vulnerability in 2015. With all the nut jobs running around in this country, it is probably a combination of organized groups with an agenda and disgruntled vandals acting out. Maybe the electric companies will do something now...or not.

[Condo Guard]

https://www.yahoo.com/gma/2-power-su...203500942.html

One of the groups that you won't hear about because it isn't politically correct are the homeless drug addicts that infest the West Coast. We've had to substantially harden our building security over the past year because of two separate mentally ill addicts that come in and tamper with our equipment. Due to understaffed police and judges that won't commit or jail these criminals, they just keep coming back.

Not a big stretch to imagine that homeless losers with time on their hands would want to make everyone else suffer...

[Condo Guard]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/woman-charged-plotting-disable-baltimore-171953468.html

The guys arrested in WA may have been thieves looking for copper...or hillbilly terrorists. Take your pick.

[The Night Rider]

How come the only people trying to take down the power grid or radical white supremacists?

Probably the best security assignment I ever had was I spent six or seven years working for the City utility. I had this conversation with one of their employees one day when there was no one on site but us.

I think it was in June of 1995 there was a power outage that took out the entire Western United States. The utilities employee I was having the conversation with happened to be working for the utility where it started on the day it started.

I'm not going to go into all the details because I don't remember them but it started in Oregon. Somebody was trimming a tree and they cut a branch and it took out a power line. It happened to be at a peak load time and losing the power line created a surge that started a domino effect that started dropping generation units all over the West Coast.

The power grid throughout America is interlocked now. We generate electricity in Colorado and sell it to Texas. California generates electricity and sells the excess to Nevada. If a generation unit in Colorado goes down, Texas feels it.

One of the assignments the company I worked for had was once a week they had a roving guard who had to drive from Colorado Springs to the New Mexico border following a power line. It took three shifts. to actually do all the checks. Some of those lines are out in the middle of nowhere.

So the discussion that we (the Utilities employee and I) had was if you really wanted to take out the grid you're not going to do it shooting rifles at a substation. Even trying to blow up a substation isn't worth it because you're far more likely to electrocute yourself than you are to blow up the substation.

Long story short if you really wanted to take down the power grid you go out there in the middle of New Mexico or in the middle of Nevada and you start cutting down transmission towers and you overload the whole system.

When I see people starting to do that then I'll get worried