Across the United States some 55,000 electrical substations are humming right now, mostly transforming high voltage from big power lines into lower voltages for homes and businesses. Many of them are sitting ducks for saboteurs.
Workers work on equipment at the West End Substation, at 6910 NC Hwy 211 in West End, N.C., Monday, Dec. 5, 2022, where a serious attack on critical infrastructure has caused a power outage to many around Southern Pines, N.C.
“The electric grid is the Achilles heel of the United States,” says Mike Mabee, a self-described “grid-security gadfly” who pours over electric company data to highlight vulnerabilities. Substations are soft targets because the main components in them, huge voltage transformers, cool themselves with circulating oil. High-powered rifle rounds can easily pierce transformers, causing leaks that make them overheat and shut down. The bigger transformers are about the size of railroad boxcars.“We don’t make many of them in this country, and there are long backlogs in getting new ones,” says Morgan.
The saboteurs cut fiber optic lines to the substation and pumped more than 100 rounds through a chain link fence protecting the substation. They hit vulnerable parts of the transformers and fled seconds before police arrived. The bullet holes drained more than 50,000 gallons of cooling oil and knocked out 17 of 21 transformers. Wellinghoff says the attackers came close to taking Silicon Valley off the grid, in an outage that he says could have lasted several weeks.
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