America's Power Is
Under Threat
The Metcalf incident is a reminder of our
greatest vulnerability.
By Peggy Noonan in the
Wall Street Journal
Welcome to my
obsession. It is electricity. It makes everything run—the phone, the web, the
TV, the radio, all the ways we talk to each other and receive information. The
tools and lights in the operating room—electricity. All our computers in a
nation run by them, all our defense structures, installations and
communications. The pumps at the gas station, the factories in the food-supply
chain, the ATM, the device on which you stream your music—all electricity. The
premature infant's ventilator and the sound system at the rock concert—all our
essentials and most of our diversions are dependent in some way on this: You
plug the device into the wall and it gets electrical power and this makes your
life, and the nation's life, work. Without it, darkness descends.
Because this is so
obvious, we don't think about it unless there's a blackout somewhere, and then
we think about it for a minute and move on. We assume it will just be there,
like the sun.
But this societal and
structural dependence is something new in the long history of man.
No one who wishes
America ill has to blow up a bomb. That might cause severe damage and rattle
us. But if you're clever and you really wanted to half-kill America—to knock it
out for a few months or longer and force every one of our material and cultural
weaknesses to a crisis stage—you'd take out its electrical grid. The grid is
far-flung, interconnected, interdependent, vulnerable. So you'd zap it with an
electromagnetic pulse, which would scramble and fry power lines. Or you'd hack
the system in a broad, sustained attack, breaking into various parts, taking
them down, and watching them take other parts down.
Or you'd do what the
people at the center of a riveting front-page story in this newspaper appear to
have done. You'd attack it physically, with guns, in a coordinated attack.
The heretofore unknown
story happened last April 16. There was an armed assault on a power station in
California. Just after midnight some person or persons slipped into an
underground vault near Highway 101 just outside San Jose. He or they cut
telephone cables—apparently professional's
nearby Metcalf substation picked up a streak of light, apparently a signal from
a flashlight. Snipers then opened fire. The shooters appear to have been aiming
at the transformer's cooling systems, which were filled with oil. If that was
their target, they hit it. The system leaked 52,000 gallons; the transformer
overheated and began to crash. Then there was another flash of light, and the
shooting, which had gone on almost 20 minutes, stopped.
The assault knocked
out 17 giant transformers that feed electrical power to Silicon Valley. A
minute before the police arrived, "the shooters disappeared into the
night," in the words of reporter Rebecca Smith, who put the story together
through interviews, PG&E filings, documents and a police video.
No suspect in the case
has been identified.
John Wellinghoff, who
at the time was chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, told Ms.
Smith the attack "was the most significant incident of domestic terrorism
involving the grid that has ever occurred." If the attack were replicated
around the country, it could take down the entire electrical grid.
There was no big
blackout after the attack—officials rerouted power, and power plants in Silicon
Valley were asked to increase their output—but it took 27 days to get the
substation fully working again.
Mr. Mellinghoff said
he briefed Congress, the White House and federal agencies. But 10 months have
passed since the attack, and he fears another, larger one could be in the
planning stage.
Ms. Smith quotes an
FBI spokesman in San Francisco saying the bureau doesn't think a terrorist
organization launched the attack. Investigators, he said, "are continuing
to sort through the evidence." PG&E, in a news release, called it the
work of vandals.
If so, they were
extremely sophisticated and well-armed. More than 100 shell casings were later
found at the site. They were of the kind ejected by AK-47s. They were free of
fingerprints.
Mr. Wellinghoff later
toured the area with professionals from the U.S. Navy's Dahlgren Surface
Warfare Center in Virginia, which trains the SEALs. He said the military
experts told him it looked like a professional job. They noted small piles of
rocks that they said could have been left by an advance scout to alert the
attackers as to where to get the best shots.
Some in the industry
see it the way Mr. Wellinghoff does, including a former official of PG&E,
who told an industry security conference he feared the incident could be a
dress rehearsal: "This was an event that was well thought out, well
planned and they targeted certain components."
Rich Lordan, an
executive at the Electric Power Research Institute, said: "The depth and
breadth of the attack was unprecedented" in the United States. The
motivation, he said, "appears to be preparation for an act of war."
It's hard to look at
the facts and see the Metcalf incident as anything but a deliberate attack by a
coordinated, professional group with something deeper and more dangerous on
their minds than the joys of vandalism.
So, questions. Who is
looking for the shooters, and how hard? On whose list of daily action items is
it the top priority?
Those who worry about
the grid mostly worry about hackers, and understandably: The grid is under
regular hack attack. But the more immediate and larger threat may be physical
attacks. In any case, as Ms. Smith suggests, the Metcalf incident appears to
lift the discussion beyond the hypothetical.
Protection of the grid
on all levels and from all threats should be given much more urgent priority by
the federal government. If it ever goes down nationally, it will take time to
get it back up and operational, and in the time it could take—months,
weeks—many of our country's problems would present themselves in new and
grimmer ways. There would likely be broad unrest, much of it inevitable and
some of it opportunistic. What would happen in an environment like that, with
people without light, means of communication, and perhaps in time food? What
would happen to public safety? To civil liberties? Those questions sound
farfetched. They are not.
I end with an anecdote.
In 2006 I met with some congressional aides and staffers to talk, informally,
about what questions should be in the country's hierarchy of worries. They were
surprised when I told them a primary concern of mine was electricity, how
dependent we are on it, how vulnerable the whole system is. I asked if there
was any work being done to strengthen the grid. Blank faces, crickets. Then a
bright young woman said she thought there was something about electricity in
the appropriations bill a while back.
You always want to
think your government is on it. You want to think they see what you see. But
really, they're never on it. They always have to be pushed.
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