Two attacks on electrical substations in North Carolina last Saturday proved — once again — that the country's power grid is susceptible to sabotage. 'The electric grid is the Achilles heel of the United States,' one expert says.
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, spring leaks, make them overheat and shut down. The bigger transformers are about the size of railroad boxcars. Carnegie Mellon University professor M.Granger Morgan says they aren't easy to replace.
In 2013 shooters attacked a substation just outside San Jose California. Early media reports called it vandalism, but Jon Wellinghoff, Chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission at the time, immediately recognized it as something more sinister. It was a stunning attack. Wellinghoff thought it would force a reckoning on the way the government regulates grid security. Currently, no one agency has that authority because the duties are split between federal and state regulators.
"And looking at them, most of them don't seem to be very well protected," Wellinghoff says."Many of them still have chain link fences, like the one in North Carolina."
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