Published in the Feb. 19 – March 4, 2014 issue of Morgan Hill Life
By Marty Cheek
Marty Cheek
Last spring a few miles north of Morgan Hill at PG&E’s Metcalf transmission substation, America’s electric grid system came under attack. What happened April 16 shortly before 1 a.m. has been called by former Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Jon Wellinghoff “the most significant incident of domestic terrorism involving the grid that has ever occurred.”
The attack started shortly before 1 a.m. when someone slipped into an underground vault not far from U.S. 101 and cut telephone cables. About half an hour later, for 19 minutes an individual or perhaps a group of individuals opened fire with long-range gun using about 100 7.62 x 39 mm rounds, the type used in an AK-47, to target the oil-driven cooling systems for the Metcalf substation’s 17 large transformers. Luckily, none of the transformers exploded. But they were disabled. One minute before a police officer arrived to investigate, the perpetrator(s) faded into the night.
The damage in the attack forced PG&E employees to reroute electric power to another station to prevent a widespread blackout across Silicon Valley. They also asked regional power plants to produce more electricity. Utility company workers took 27 days to repair the damage done at Metcalf and bring the substation back into the grid.
Whoever was involved in the attack took care not to get caught. All the shell casings left at the scene of the crime were wiped clean of fingerprints. The Santa Clara County Sheriff Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation currently do not have any leads as to the identity of the culprit or culprits.
More than likely this incident was not simply a case of vandals who had downed a few too many beers and decided to take target practice on transformers. What happened at Metcalf was clearly a sophisticated well-planned attack using military-style weapons. Although the FBI does not believe that last April’s attack was the work of a terrorist organization, there are several scenarios on what happened that night. These range from a lone gunman to a coordinated team trying to take down the grid providing power to the Santa Clara Valley.
The investigation continues, and the attack was taken seriously enough that congressional representatives have been briefed about the incident.
The Metcalf substation incident should serve as a wake-up call for the public to realize how vulnerable our national grid is to attack by terrorists or individuals bent on bringing down America. If a rogue group launched a coordinated attack on 50 or 100 critical electric nodes across the United States, the potential damage would devastate the nation, bringing our society to a complete standstill. One report warned that if the terrorists attacked the right transformer equipment in a massively engineered attack, repairs might take as long as 18 months to complete. The main reason for this length of delay is that many components used in transformer equipment is sourced from other nations and can take a long length of time to build.
A grid attack might be far more ruinous to our nation than the terrorism attacks that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001. Our economy would quickly collapse as our financial institutions and industry would come to a screeching halt if power could not be brought back up in sufficient time. Social destabilization would result as people panicked and became desperate without the electric power our modern world has become so dependent on. The telecommunications system, water utilities, transportation systems and other critical industries would be drastically impacted by a long-term, nation-wide power outage. A civilization that relies so extensively on electric power could quickly topple into a primitive state without a continuous electric energy source provided by the grid. A recent report documented that if the electricity went out for a year, nine out of 10 Americans might die as a result.
No one denies our electric grid system suffers from a basic security vulnerability. Much of the system is outdated and exposed. Former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano recently described an attack on our infrastructure elements crippling our nation as a question of not “if” but “when.”
The government and the electric industry has been focused on cyberattacks on the systems and millions of dollars have been spent and federal standards have been enacted trying to strengthen the system against this weakness. But little has been done to protect the physical components of our grid. The Metcalf incident shows how easily transformers can be targeted. There are thousands of substation’s throughout the United States, and not all of them need to have their physical site security strengthened. We need only focus on the few dozen that are the most vulnerable.
