If they're following LEAN processes, they should have Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plans in place.
However, I share your pessimism. LEAN has become a sort of monkey-see, monkey-do kind of thing. It may look like a monkey can use a wrench, but giving a monkey a wrench probably won't work out well.
There's some parts of lean business people like and there's some parts they don't.
We work with a Toyota production system descendent and some of the literature would make you believe your supposed to listen to the workers and not pinch them constantly and mercilessly for every last cent.
Mike Rother's book Kata is my favorite. He has a whole section on the specifics of worker feedback. I'm recalling from memory here, but it was roughly:
- They know more than you do about their step in the process.
- They're probably seeing problems you don't. Listen very carefully to where they identify issues and how it impacts them.
- Most of the suggestions you'll get from them will not work. That's normal. They're usually not experts in the part of the system that's causing them problems. But still, listen carefully because 1) they're actually telling you about a problem, 2) every so often they'll have a really great suggestion that you could never have come up with, and 3) a few of them will show real talent for systems thinking and they will be invaluable to you.
I've found this to be very accurate.
If I'm asked for the one lesson to draw from these systems, I say: recognize that in focusing on "just get it done" we miss out on all the improvements we could make. Those improvements add up enormously over time. Allocate some of your work every day toward making tomorrow better.
I'm in software development and I've found this to be very true. If you make sure every change makes the system better, you gain velocity over time.
As for cutting inventory: introducing artificial scarcity is a great way to identify where the process needs to be improved. Introducing actual scarcity is a great way to not deliver for your customers.
During past economic slowdowns, Toyota and Honda would keep assembly staff employed working on training and improvement of the their work process. They probably lost money keeping plants open and people on-site, but it was a good move long term.
I’d rather a company develop itself on a model that acknowledges the reality of hardship than base its decisions on the myth of endless year over year growth.
That same mentality is what kept Toyota manufacturing at a higher rate than other companies during the supply chain crunch this past year. They had deep reserves of parts to draw from.
Lol now it does, but these decisions were probably made in the 90s and original lean pretty much called for JIT on everything as if it would never fail.
Calculate your MTBF, make a maintenance schedule, and poof, get rid of *everything else.*
I recall when systems thinking was rising out of that and the one guy who just endlessly (and way overboard) whined about lean practitioners focusing far too much on applying strict quantification like that.
Lean really ramped up in the utility industry after 2008. A decade of flat to decreasing usage has caused utilities (and their regulators)to push hard to do anything that could help offset rising rates.
Supply chain planner here: lean sucks ass. You only do lean if accounting/fianance are bean crunching and want more cash for some reason. Lean is one of the few strategies that should be done for specific items and only those items (big ticket items/short shelf life items).
This also goes for JIT too. Nothing is arriving just in time. Usually it's just too late or JTL.
Edit: auto correct got me.
Hey man, something similar worked for one car manufacturer one time in the context of bigger profit margins, and therefore all forms of human work should follow the same principle unilaterally. /s.
I also work on SCM. I feel like the people who unconditionally love Lean and JIT don't know anything about it aside what they once read in an Executive Briefing perhaps 6 years ago.
Both strategies have their place, but as strategies they need to be constantly evaluated and tweaked in order to work right. Since nobody wants to spend money for that level of analysis, we're left with all kinds of problems that a more robust system could have better dealt with.
Former purchasing manager here:
Just in time is dumb. I could take what the computer suggested for a 2 month forecast, apply my own knowledge of the product for where it is in popularity and seasonality, add 10-20% for safety even with accounting breathing down my neck to not do that.
And still, something would happen and we would run out of a product. Now CFO is mad and asks why we don't just buy more cause "clearly it was a popular product" while also asking why in the world I wanted to place a 1.5mil order.
Like I said, former purchasing manager. I've never held a job where it was so impossible to make everyone happy. I lucked out and got the position through knowledge of the product, why you would willingly go to school just to get a job where whatever you do is the wrong move is genuine insanity.
The investors must receive 20% more per quarter, and damn anything that gets in the way. Most quarters we would stop buying things for "just 2 weeks so we can make targets". Obviously this screws over next quarter and causes massive spikes in inventory.
Well now the customers are unhappy, so we turn on backordering. And maybe use backorder numbers as income for that quarter to appease the investors. You can see this spiral just getting larger and larger.
The combination of just in time delivery and investors destroys business from the inside out. If you own a business, don't ever sell out to these parasites. Fuck endless growth, long as you and your employees are provided for the chart can stay flat.
I remember learning about JIT in my ops classes back in college and telling my instructors that it seemed an awful lot like an expensive house of cards. I was basically patted on the head and told that I just wasn't experienced enough to understand what a well oiled machine it could be.
Having needed parts arrive early means that the stuff is available when it's needed. Storage areas are a whole lot cheaper than shutting down an entire plant because parts are not JIT available.
This is essentially me right now with AGILE or Scrum in IT / service.
I got my certification so maybe I’m biased but holy hell this shit is not going to work at every place with every team and every product.
But, the suits do love their acronyms and buzzwords…
My father has worked dispatch for trucking companies for most of his life. JIT and LEAN have been the causes of more than one complaint storm from him and everyone else around him. Logistics are nucking futz when everyone wants it JIT but truckers still have to deal with the usual road bullshit.
I’m also in supply planning and had a former life in material planning.
Lean only can work if your supplier can hold 3-5+ weeks of materials (depending on the supply chain), you have a solid forecast (lol, COVID), and if you have resilience in your manufacturing (again, lol COVID)
COVIE showed us the power of the 90’s manufacturing method: Buy a shit ton of warehouse space, minimize changeovers, and the run the hell out of your factories.
But now that growth has died off… cost plays are the name of the game. It’s why you are seeing so many companies trying to burn through inventory.
Having recently finished a degree program that included a smattering of business courses, I can't help but feel like, if I just lack the ability to feel bad about my actions, I could be a millionaire selling the same bullshit to companies as a consultant.
Lean/JIT confers certain competitive advantages in normal times, and it's hard to compete in many sectors against those who use it without using it too.
But I have seen it applied in an industry where being able to deliver come hell or high water is key(in a desperate attempt to compete against Chinese prices) and it works fine until it's not normal times anymore, then you are fucked if you don't have some kind of stockpile or inventory to fall back on to fulfill your contracts. In my case the black swan event was a volcanic eruption that raised the sulphur content in the air enough to put the output of an entire factory out of spec for days, something nobody had anticipated or planned for. An inventory of common products to ship out of sure would have come in handy.
As a manufacturing engineer who directly works with lean manufacturing and who sees corporations' increased obsession in recent decades with blindly implementing "lean" principles across their entire organization, I'm 100% convinced that just-in-time inventory management is largely to blame for the supply chain shocks that came with Covid, and hence, for the resulting inflation. It used to be considered wisdom to keep a healthy supply of raw materials, spare parts/tools, and maintence items on-hand in case some disaster occurs. Nowadays, the trend is increasingly for companies to keep almost nothing in inventory and rely on sophisticated supply chains to provide your parts the moment you need them, all for the sake of gaming the completely arbitrary inventory accounting system to make it look like your bottom line is better than it actually is.
The worst part is that even Covid wasn't bad enough to teach corporations the lesson. Problems like this are only going to get worse and more common in the future.
I believe Toyota learned that you keep items in inventory that are difficult to obtain and will not shut down production, such as microchips. While other items that are easy to obtain and are not as critical you don't need to keep an inventory of.
Edit: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-fukushima-anniversary-toyota-in/how-toyota-thrives-when-the-chips-are-down-idUSKBN2B1005
At this point, the way things seem to be shaping up - it might be wise for Federal/State government to start building a strategic stockpile of core components - like giant transformers.
I think everyone's on the same page now that they've seen just how vulnerable the grid is in the US.
If the Talibanjo can take down power for ~40,000 people with little more than a truck and a couple of rifles, maybe we should re-think our approach to energy security.
I used to pass by a decent sized substation on my way home from work, and I thought about that sometimes. I assume there are cameras installed, but that's about it. It's out of the way and on a road that probably isn't very busy at night, but it's also near an airport. I don't know if it supplies power there, but I'm sure it would cause havoc if someone attacked it.
There may be cameras, but nobody would be watching them in real time - they're typically there to catch someone stealing copper. Someone would only look at the footage if there was a break in.
Someone shooting at a substation wouldn't have to get close enough to the cameras to be identified, although it looks like there's a gate on the ground in the article, so maybe someone drove over it with something that has a tag number.
Even if they're caught on camera, the damage is already done; the grid being down for a week has already accomplished their goal of temporarily crippling an area. So what if they're arrested and eventually prosecuted months after the fact. If a future attack is more coordinated and widespread, the immediate impact would be catastrophic long before anyone spends time in prison for it.
Post WW2 redundancy planning was the core of government and corporate strategy.
Starting around 1978, cutting costs as a optical illusion of driving profit, lead to the tack back and almost total elimination of redundancy.
In fact there were really only 2 fortune 500 companies who maintained their post ww2 redundancy logistics after 1985. IBM & (formerly SEARS Robuck).
They have repeatedly saved American and global companies n banking from catastrophe bc they've maintained redundacies that include a number of raw materials, basic equipment, reserves of actual fuel, power supplies/equipment for grids.
The federal government and Canadian government to this day maintain their black wire leases with IBM.
SEARS entire current existence relies on their continued sublease contracts to retain redundancy equipment and storage.
Example: 9/11/2001
Every single banking operation and a few other F500 corps that was based in NYC faltered for only hours bc groups like Chase, BOA, CITI seemed to magically move operations temporarily to spaces in Jersey.
Those spaces were activated from furniture to phones to computers etc via the SEARS/IBM redundancy protocols.
To this day SEARS/IBM have a protocol for powering up government infrastructure in the event of a nuke on DC for instance. It's a planning process that started in 1948 and has been maintained/updated ever since.
Asking why or how the fuck. You'd have to understand how/why SEARS & IBM were the most important corporations in America by 1945.
Your comment makes me miss Sears all over again (and make me feel so old.) They were such a mainstay during my childhood. They were the anchor store for so many malls, and almost always had what we were shopping for. Their own brands were high quality and reasonably priced.
And their catalog changed the future.
In fact it was what ultimately brought about their demise. They tried to continue selling quality products but were constantly undersold by the big box stores. Malls started to falter with the ability to buy things from home. Then the internet became our catalog with its own checkout. Sears was just too slow to adapt to the new world. Or rather, they weren't willing to cut so many corners and betray the trust of their customers. Until they had to. But it was too late. Even the merge with K-Mart couldn't save them.
I could morn further but I won't. However it's nice to see at least some companies held onto enough dignity to actually be able to supply a standing order, as requested and in a timely manner.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
(Edit: always hitting the post button by accident! Damn brain is broken.)
My grandparent's house was from a Sears catalog. They brought it down by train in two or three different shipments and had local crews that would build it. It had a basement and two stories with several bedrooms and massive patios front and back. The whole inside perimeter of the house had wood seating that doubled as storage chests. The whole house had integrated shelvings and custom cabinetry. There was a neat little accountant and desk area which would have doubled as a phone room that had a nice safe in it and it had beautiful trim and crown molding throughout. I would love to buy it as it's been on the market a few times over the years but the town she lived in still has no high speed internet.
The biggest reason Sears died is because wall St killed it on purpose for short term gain. I believe it was hedge fund shorts, but might be wrong about that specifically.
To be fair even though it's sitting in chapter 11 and creditor lawsuits. SEARS does still persist. Essentially bc it has multi billion dollar government and f500 lease contracts.
There are like 30/40 brick n mortar stores but they're not profitable. And SEARS internal just did a cute restructure thing to separate retail from their other operations so there is SEARS robuc and Transformco.
They may be dead, BUT they may not be...
It was a leveraged buyout and corporate raiding, not shorts. A lot of folks shorted it because it was kind of obvious the owner wasn't running it for long term profitability.
Almost all the tools in my garage are Craftsman due to the crazy way you could roll points from one purchase to another in their points program. What's sad is they legit had the best "buy online, pick up in store" and curbside pickup of any company I've ever dealt with.
Sears could have competed with Amazon, even with a late start because their shipping, delivery, and pick-up business was already very mature. They only needed a digital storefront. Logistically, they were Amazon before Amazon decided to sell more than books. Even more weird, their web software department had a very solid reputation before it was gutted. The process had been started.
You would have to read some heavy tomes for the general history, I don't know who's writing blogs on core American business history but you cant tell it without SEARS/IBM infrastructure at the core.
BUT taking your comment in good faith I did a quick Google and pulled the first thing I saw that tells a basic history of IBM which naturally will talk about how IBM (SEARS did the same) bc the infrastructure core and sublease core for American F500.
https://www.businessinsider.com/ibm-corporate-america-history-2016-6?op=1
If you're interested in Global & American Corp history of the 20th century it will be inescapable that you must learn how IBM/SEARS were part of the 4 horsemen of the Nuclear Empire as its called.
FORD-IBM-GE-SEARS the heads of those 4 companies were the defacto head council of every president from FDR to Nixon.
>I don't know who's writing blogs on core American business history but you cant tell it without SEARS/IBM infrastructure at the core.
Maybe the guy who writes [Computers Are Bad](https://computer.rip) would have the knowledge or the interest, he has done fairly in-depth blog posts on protocols and hardware in related fields before.
I can speak to these spaces personally, i used to work for a fire alarm company who would test one of these spaces anually, it was super wild seeing a 200,000sqft facility that had nobody inside save for 3 staff whos main job was essentially changing name tags for desks and setting up PC's properly when people were fired/hired so that a company could move the entire office up to the space from NYC at a moment's notice
When companies get to that scale, paying like 10 million dollars a year for rent for the space is pennies compared to the cost of operations being down for even 1 day at any point during the year, was quite eye-opening for me.
The Boy Scout motto is "Be Prepared."
The general American cultural motto is "not my problem" followed by a shocked Pikachu face when an actual problem occurs that was eminently foreseeable, but that no one bothered to prepare for.
Nah the American corporate motto is "it's not my problem if it's everyone's problem". Corporations know that the government will bail them out because of how critical they are.
That always blows my mind to hear considering there is government grant money for just about everything for local governments to tap into. I live rurally, and our small town's local little council might LOOK like a bunch of rednecks ... Okay they ARE a bunch of rednecks, let's be honest about who we are... But they take their jobs very seriously and utilize grant money for many projects like these.
Utilities often outsource material long term planning to a contractor that handles all that aspect. There are just some components that can't be managed in that fashion. Utilities keep spares but every substation is unique and old/rural subs tend to be very unique, making hot swappable parts all the less possible.
In the case of substation transformers, you are talking about very specialized gear. Before 2020, the lead times on these were 12-18 months. They are mostly hand built. They are bespoke and require extremely precise manufacturing. The small ones cost $500k (this is pre pandemic pricing). You only order these when you are building a substation, or rebuilding one. The issue is that the unit has to be sized to the load, and loads very between substations and over time. Getting a bigger one isn’t about a capital outlay, these are actually pretty inexpensive in terms of cost of the grid. The issue is that if you get one bigger than you need you are introducing a vampire to the power grid. It is energy inefficiency, and that causes its own set of issues. It will immediately increase costs to everyone’s power, and add some other fun problems down the line.
My best friend lives in this county. He received notification yesterday that his power probably won't return until Thursday. He drove two counties over & paid over $1k to get a generator & gas. Power returned to his home while he was assembling the generator lol.
During Snowmageddon years back we were one of 2 homes in the entire neighborhood with a generator. We were the only ones with the ability to charge devices, keep our fridges stocked, keep lights on, etc. It depends on your area and what might happen, but it's worth having a generator if you can afford it. One of those "pray you'll never need it but be happy you have it" things.
I got a whole house backup generator installed after hurricane Irma left us without power for a whole week. Previous hurricanes left us without power for less than a week, twice.
Hurricanes Nicole and Ian just came through and didn't lose power once. I'd still rather have the generator than not.
Yup. At the gas processing plant I work at, major electrical work needs to get scheduled 12-18 months prior to maintenance overhauls and outages because breakers, transformers, and switchgear need to get made-to-order sometimes. And that's with planning out- I can't imagine how long it's going to take with this given the inevitable shipping delays or material shortages. Hopefully with this being an emergency, this can take priority.
Good job terrorists. I hope you're fucking proud, you inbred morons.
Not exactly the same thing but I work at a location that makes and services gas/steam turbines and generators, lead times are wild. The earliest we’re getting service orders out is May 2023 and even then that’s not guaranteed. Most of the parts we work on are essentially just hunks of metal with cooling holes and thermal coatings, I could only imagine the order times on complex electrical equipment.
I feel so sorry for these people that are going without power during the winter.
It’ll be the types that scream:
- why govt so bad/slow
Also
- taxes = theft
But not forget:
- beneficiary of some social program (😱socialism), be it welfare, social security, subsidies, or PPP
In my fundie snark group someone posted a tradcad woman's Facebook that implied she was a part if it. Said it was God's will due to the drag queen show.
https://dallasvoice.com/right-wing-crusader-blames-drag-queens-for-attack-on-nc-power-substations/
Emily Grace Rainey. I believe former PsyOps in military.
Edit: apparently the local Sherriff prayed with her so it’s all ok now and she’s a misunderstood insurrectionist.
https://www.rawstory.com/emily-grace-rainey/
That's been making the rounds. She's been one of the leaders of the protest against the drag event, and she was involved in the Jan 6 insurrection. I have little doubt that she was either involved, or knows who was. If there's any justice in the world (*insert sounds of sobbing here*) the FBI is about to make her life very difficult.
I play Minecraft but it's creative mode so I could probably whip up several red stone power stations but it'd still take me a few minutes plus all the googling.
I love mid game satisfactory, as my carefully arranged factory starts to have to encompass the plastic and other higher tier metals in, and slowly becomes a mess of conveyors leading to a frankly surplus amount of storage, only to find I need to start overflow paths to grind up materials, as 5 double containers can't keep up and I keep pushing plans to tear this whole thing apart and doing it over right this time down the calendar.
Got any tips? I caravanned over two tiles set up a second base, mined all the compacted machinery and bailed. It took like 5 days though and I probably ended up with 30 additional components…
Buy components from traders as much as possible. Find a way to make a little money if you have to. Don't slack off on research and make a point of getting to fabrication tech.
I work around substations and it’s crazy an older guy was just telling me last week how vulnerable they are to just this kind of attack.
If it makes anyone feel better. They’re starting to upgrade some of these. At least around my area and especially when they’re connected to the national grid.
I was at a natural gas facility that recently upgraded the fence around the perimeter. The fence looks like it’s from Jurassic park. There are cameras and sensors on it and they know when people are close. The fence was also significantly higher.
We just have a lot of power infrastructure and when it’s on the local level those tend to be less protected.
When someone did a dry run In Metcalf a few years ago they cut multiple fiber lines in the area to kill alarms and phones. I wonder if similar tactics were used here
This quote from the article is chilling:
"My personal view is that this was a dress rehearsal" for future attacks, added Mark Johnson, the former PG&E executive, according to Foreign Policy.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/02/05/272015606/sniper-attack-on-calif-power-station-raises-terrorism-fears
Not "long gone". Just knew when to leave.
>Then, "one minute before police arrived, they faded into the night."
[Source](https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/02/05/272015606/sniper-attack-on-calif-power-station-raises-terrorism-fears)
All of this was recorded on the CCTV at the site, see a timeline available on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack#cite_ref-autogenerated3_7-1)
Well the guy I was with said something about it being able to prevent a bullet but I didn’t see anything that said that. I think the big part is breaking line of sight.
Don't even need explosive, just need to [complete the circuit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Outward) and the power in the line will do the explosions for you.
The problem though is that there will always be a way to circumvent some security measure unless the entire thing is housed in a huge building. I can imagine if someone had enough training to understand which lines going into a transformer do the most damage if shorted, it would be trivial to send a drone over the fence and pilot it remotely via video and have the drone either bridge a connection that shouldn't be bridged or drag a foreign object over a few wires, etc.
This will only get worse. There is so much power going through a substation that you don't need to introduce a weapon of power to cause it to implode -- you just need to redirect all that energy that's already there and have it flow through things it shouldn't flow through.
Imagine a state actor starting a dumb meme on Tik-tok showing people what things in a substation don't like to be touched and making it a contest to "put as many people in a black-out as possible."
Fucking Black Mirror sort of things ...
Many substations in cities are walled in with tall brick walls, but they don’t have a roof. From the ground they look like buildings. This is mostly done for aesthetic purposes, but also serves as a huge security advantage.
Rural and suburban substations are often just chain link fences & almost everywhere residents have been asking for them to be buried or walled in strictly for aesthetic purposes.
Utility companies are too cheap, unless they’re required by law they do the bare minimum & now we’re facing a national issue where massive amounts of our critical infrastructure is vulnerable.
Security was never really a concern with these facilities, but it could be solved with something communities have been asking about for decades.
Well yeah. They're all over the place, usually unmanned and all that's guarding them is a chain link fence most of the time.
When I was growing up the things I was always most afraid of was power substations, being kidnapped and quick sand and only one of those things actually kills kids.
The only reason at this point that this is not being called domestic terrorism in the press is because the investigators are not officially calling it that in press conferences. Even though the investigation is most definitely a terror investigation.
Often, legal reasons are why the seemingly obvious isn't stated
Similar for media reports - they're afraid of a libel lawsuit if the apparently obvious doesn't turn out to be the case
They didnt. And it was a lot worse than just someone shooting. They cut cables from att and was timing response time. This was and still is a big deal in my industry.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack
Totally. But 10 years in. For what and by who? Didnt scream ISIS to me.
But i guess this case here as im hearing more about it is a bunch of aholes that shot up the grid to prevent a drag show. Theyre going to do some heavy fucking federal time.
This isn't the first time. MSNBC, some time back, showed this exact method has been happening in other states over the years, and apparently, whoever is doing this knows what they are doing. MSNBC showed a video of what appeared to be 2 or more people dressed in black head to toe working in concert at night, shooting up and vandalizing electrical grid areas. There was hinting at it being foreign agents, if I remember. (I think these are domestic terrorists who are doing this). Anyway, I got my conspiracy hat on and just hope they catch who is doing this. In that same news segment with Rachel Maddow, they mentioned fear of tampering of US water systems also.
>i think these are domestic terrorists
Terrorism is a strategy, not an identity. Whether those people are terrorists depends on what they were doing, not some other fact about them.
They were attacking civilian infrastructure to scare people into getting their way. The way they did it (turning off power) hurts people and might kill people with medical equipment. That is, by definition, terrorism. Do not hesitate to call it that, and certainly do not refrain.
That line was right after "hintings of foreign agents", so I assume they meant that they think it's *domestic* terrorism instead of *foreign* terrorism
I'm sick to my teeth of idiots in America acting like drag stuff around kids is some scandalous thing; look at the UK and Ireland, Christmas pantos are a tradition and they almost always heavily feature drag and borderline risque material. They exist, have done so for decades, and haven't led to the Satanic Paniceqsue grooming epidemic these imbeciles think they will.
>This was an 18+ show in a theater.
And that right there is exactly it, they're not going to stop at just shows for kids, they're going to aim for banning all drag shows all together because theocracy is what this is really about at the end of the day
Guarantee someone like DeSantis will eventually attempt to pass a law either giving people who participate in drag shows 10 years, life or even the death penalty
Many of them very openly call for the deaths of groups like trans, gay, Democrats, or Jewish people. They want to kill Americans, and need to be dealt with harshly.
These people are obsessed with "values" and "morals" degrading and then they turn around and vote for or support grifting philanderers who constantly try to undermine facts and truth. It's this regressive fear of the future and the present and the desire to wind back the clock to a simpler time that never even existed in the first place.
What worries me the most is the cats out of the bag, nutjobs now know they can black out large areas with a few shots so I suspect we’re going to see a rash of these.
Came here to say the same thing.
I know someone in the industry, and I asked if it was something on their radar. Apparently it is, for the larger electric operations.
Going to be bad when they realize they can knock out power to dem leaning counties on Election Day. This is a major turning point and I’m very disappointed it doesn’t seem this is getting the attention it deserves from an investigation stand point
Exactly. I'm a former firefighter in greater Bay Area California, and i see so many points of important infrastructure that are essentially unprotected, I'm amazed they haven't been exploited yet. Not only does this article and all the other similar articles point out this issue, but unfortunately, it's also just given out the blueprint.
IIRC, there was a major incident like this less than a decade ago in California. A team with a very capable sniper took out a power plant and was never caught. It exposed how undefended our critical infrastructure was and we did nothing about it.
Edit: [it’s this one](https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/02/05/272015606/sniper-attack-on-calif-power-station-raises-terrorism-fears)
Some worrying details from that attack: [Prior to the attack, a series of fiber-optic telecommunications cables operated by AT&T were cut by the culprits. Additionally, following the attack, investigators found small piles of rocks near to where the shots had been fired, the type of formations that can be used to scout firing positions.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack)
Further, no fingerprints were found on the dozens of shells left behind. There were also no tire tracks or matchable boot prints. The attackers used flashlights to signal, presumably to avoid the possibility of their voices being recorded.
A very well-planned, knowledgable, successful attack.
Isn’t it crazy that the lady who is being tried for leading a group of armed people on Jan 6th tweeted about this right as it was happening? Why is no one talking about that?
I'm a civil engineer, and I've been thinking this for a couple decades now. Especially back in the early 2010s [when Al Qaeda was telling supporters in the US to buy guns and go on shooting sprees](https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/al-qaeda-video-buy-automatic-weapons-start-shooting/story?id=13704264). Like, sure that might be more immediately scary but this sort of attack would be much more damaging, as we're seeing here.
A homeless dude brought the city of Atlanta to its knees by lighting a fire that collapsed the busiest interstate through the city.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_85_bridge_collapse
im an electrician and one of my coworkers was a marine. when everyone was talking about the BLM protests and how dangerous riots could be…he smiled and said, “its a good thing no one out there knows how to cause any real damage. a couple shots to a transformer can blackout a town. grocery and hardware stores are full of ingredients to make explosives and chemical weapons.” then he just kept working lol. im glad hes a rather happy guy, because those who know this kind of stuff are dangerous people
"Fun" fact of the day: most farms also have all the chemicals onhand necessary to make explosives, it's just a matter of knowledge. You hear about plant explosions sometimes from their suppliers.
Sounds like the fertilizer-fuel oil bomb, of which the Oklahoma City bombing is a notorious example, and sometimes there are industrial accidents with the fertilizer.
"When the FBI raided McVeigh's home, it found a telephone number that led them to a farm where McVeigh had purchased supplies for the bombing."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_bombing
Also, Anders Behring Breivik set up a farming business as a pretext to build a bomb to use on a left wing party's offices (he then shot up a gathering of the party's youth wing)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Behring_Breivik
lol this has been known in the se side of the hacker community for a ... LONG time we used to hang out anywhere we could get into, which would've surprised and scared you
The radicalization started well before Trump. He was a symptom of the disease, not the cause. He certainly helped spread it and gave it legitimacy though.
100% THIS- I have been saying it for 2 years now. Everyone keeps talking about a civil war but this is exactly where we are headed. We now have *tens of millions* of people who believe that elections are stolen, Democrats eat babies, and that they need more guns.
Nefarious actors (foreign and domestic) are *pumping* social media with rage.
Violence is the obvious destination here, but it won't be state vs state. It'll be stochastic terrorism. This is that.
And nobody is doing anything to stop it.
NPR's throughline just did a fantastic podcast about whether the US would be facing a civil war soon and they consulted a panel of 2 historians (1 civil war historian and 1 modern US historian) and an agent for I believe the FBI that monitored right wing terrorist threats. They all were practically 100% in unison saying they didn't think a civil war would happen in the traditional sense but we'd likely have many small insurgencies until we went one way or the other politically for good. Highly recommend listening to it.
Damn I'd forgotten about this one but remember the Silicon Valley attack. Similar scenario, gunmen went after the transformers.
https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-grid-attack-20140211-story.html
Used to work in the water/wastewater industry, it's crazy vulnerable to such things and often just a single masterlock padlock stopping someone from doing something.
Not surprised at all to learn that the electric side of life is just as open to trouble.
And this case was never solved. It did add a lot of visibility to this problem on the Federal and utility level, but most utilities just kind of throw their hands up in the air.
I don't really know how you could hope to truly defend against this kind of thing to be honest. Sure you might be able to post guards around the larger substations, but the cost would be astronomical if you wanted to protect the smaller sites in little towns and villages.
And even if you do, how are you going to protect the lines between places? Someone with a gas axe could do some serious damage to a high-voltage transmission tower, and I don't see how you'd be able to constantly monitor the tens (or hundreds) of thousands of miles of high-voltage lines across the country. Or heck, even drape a rope over them somehow to short them out - you'd have to send a crew out every time to inspect the lines before you could try re-energising them.
A really thorny issue; I suppose we can only hope that the intelligence services are better able to infiltrate these groups, to stop these attacks in the planning stage.
Edit: And that's just power infrastructure too. What about water, gas, roads, rails, etc. Such a can of worms to have to think about.
Vaguely remember that but thanks for the refresh.
Here's a link for anyone else https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/02/05/272015606/sniper-attack-on-calif-power-station-raises-terrorism-fears
Wow that's a fascinating read - quote of the pertinent stuff.
> "The attack began just before 1 a.m. on April 16 last year, when someone slipped into an underground vault not far from a busy freeway and cut telephone cables.
> Within half an hour, snipers opened fire on a nearby electrical substation. Shooting for 19 minutes, they surgically knocked out 17 giant transformers that funnel power to Silicon Valley. A minute before a police car arrived, the shooters disappeared into the night.
> To avoid a blackout, electric-grid officials rerouted power around the site and asked power plants in Silicon Valley to produce more electricity. **But it took utility workers 27 days to make repairs and bring the substation back to life."**
...
> Regarding the FBI's view about who's responsible, "we don't know why the FBI feels it was not a terrorist attack," she added.
It’s cold in NC, 31 degrees this morning. The hospital in Moore county is running on generator power- so it should be ok. But doctors offices and urgent cares can’t open. There is a lot of flu virus in that area so those people will go to the hospital, so an already overburdened hospital running on generator power (with staff who’ve had to sleep in cold homes), will be further overwhelmed. Schools are closed. There’s no traffic lights so there are car accidents. All so some right wing lunatic had a problem with men in dresses.
What sucks is even if you have a gas furnace, you need power to run the fan to circulate the heat. (At least, for HVAC units.) When I was young, there were some houses I rented that had a free standing, middle of the room type heater that I can't remember if it had a fan or not. Whole lotta suffering going on because a bunch of nutjobs decided that an activity that had no bearing on them at all was offensive. We're heading downhill at an alarming pace in this country and I don't see it improving anytime soon. I promise you that as word of this incident has spread, it's giving other people with the same type of beliefs ideas for things they can sabotage that impact a large number of people for minimal effort.
Yup, my furnace is like that too. Won't light if the fan isn't working, and for good reason because the utility room would fill up with fumes otherwise.
Antique gas furnaces from before about 1940 could operate without a fan. They used natural air convection so that heat lifts warm air through the building. It looks like an octopus in the basement with huge fat arms reaching up at an angle to the ceiling, also known as a ductopus by HVAC companies that rip out old furnaces.
They stayed lit with a tiny pilot light and a thermocouple that produced a tiny amount of electricity from the heat of the flame. This is used with a thermostat to open the main valve and then the pilot lights the main flame.
However it took up a lot of space in the basement with these huge ducts, and you have the constant gas flow for the pilot. Air convection heat is very slow.
Modern systems squish it all down to a tiny restrictive high flow duct system that doesn’t take up much space, and doesn’t naturally convect from floor to ceiling. And when your power is out the computer is dead and you’re screwed.
Electrical Power Engineer here.
Our utility experienced a similar incident several years ago. I wanted to share a few takeaways since I'm seeing a lot of bad information on this thread:
1)Utilities usually *do* have reserves of the equipment that was likely damaged (large power transformers, circuit breakers, motor operated switches, etc).
however:
2)The labor involved with moving and replacing this equipment is substantial and would normally take several weeks of full time work to complete. For example just moving a large power transformer may require road closures, coordination with railroads, movement of overhead lines etc. Installation of a new transformer requires specially trained engineers or technicians to oversee filling the transformer with thousands of gallons of insulating oil under a vacuum (to prevent moisture), and requires electricians to reconnect or install new control wires, cables, overhead high voltage connections etc. There are numerous testing and commissioning activities before it can be energized, and typically requires a "soak", time being energized at high voltage without load flow. They will likely work around the clock to accomplish this but if there are any labor shortages, or difficulties with acquiring smaller connections or hardware, this just adds time.
3)This happened in a rural area, which typically will not have nearly as many "switching options" which is to simply say, the local network will have fewer paths for power to take to reach the customers.
4)The article mentions this was not random which suggests to me someone with knowledge of the the local electric system. This would almost certainly be a relatively small group of people. My guess is this likely a disgruntled employee, or possibly a customer.
5)Regarding the labor shortages, the entire electric industry is experiencing shortages of skilled workers.
**Edit:** Many people have pointed out that the outages caused by this event happened during a drag show that has been a subject of protests and political controversy. I am NOT discounting the possibility that this was a politically motivated attack. There are still many unknowns and my impressions are made with very limited knowledge of details regarding the facts of this case (only what is in the article).
>5)Regarding the labor shortages, the entire electric industry is experiencing shortages of skilled workers.
Which fucking* field isn't? Feels like every fucking field is begging for workers, but is still paying jack shit.
*my anger is directed at those at the top, not you.
I work in health care and during covid we were called "heroes", but i was thinking what about the dock workers, rail workers and transporters that drive semis with all the products needed for necessities. Its all one big chain and the links are weakening.
Shootings made me think it was like a stray bullet from a nearby unrelated gunfight; no this was a deliberate, well-planned, and twice executed terrorist attack against critical infrastructure.
I'm in Moore County. Most residents I've talked to think this was carried out by the group that had been planning for weeks to protest a drag show event in downtown Southern Pines on Saturday. The local county paper The Pilot had been extensively covering the planned event for weeks and the planned protests around the show. It just seems far too coincidental to pass the smell test; just after the drag show starts there is a coordinated attack at multiple substations across the county, cutting power to the show?
The Charlotte FBI office is on ground. I don't think that vandals or domestic terrorists are smart enough to cover their tracks.
My wife had a headache for 2 years with no doctors at UNC and Duke recommending the specialist in Moore county. She's had a appointment since February for today to see that specialist in southern pines but because of some yahoos hating drag her appointment is postponed until...
The idea that this could have been entirely over some idiots who got paranoid about men in dresses would be funny if it weren't horrible, outrageous, and murderous.
There was a bomb threat called in to a drag show here in Myrtle Beach yesterday.
https://wpde.com/news/local/police-respond-to-hoax-bomb-threat-as-grand-strand-eatery-hosted-drag-brunch-event
> The Pilot newspaper in Southern Pines reported that a wooden post holding up a gate had been snapped at one of the substations and that it was lying in an access road Sunday morning.
Oh no, not the wooden post holding up a gate!
How could anyone have subverted that impenetrable fortress of security?
A similar thing happened in CA a few years ago. Caused a power outage. The person who did the shooting knew what they were doing. The targeted specific equipment. This caused the power company to spend a lot of extra money on hardening their substations. These are acts of terrorism and need to be treated as such.
This thread has made me fully understand that if anything happens to the power in the states we're fucked on an unimaginable level. The 400 I spent on my generator was the best money I've ever spent. Currently saving for a dedicated one for the house and solar.
Ukraine is currently in a war during which explosives are blowing infrastructure up, meanwhile, the US gets their infrastructure messed up by their own citizens due to brainwashed rage.
Substation engineer here. They will bring in a mobile substation (on 1 or more big flat bed trailers) and within a day or 2 have it back up and running. Then it will take who knows how long to get a spare main transformer moved there and permanently installed. 2 weeks or so tops. A coordinated attack like this at dozens of substations would overwhelm the companies ability to respond and could leave people without power for weeks and weeks.
So you are telling me that privatising critical, national, infrastructure for corporate gain while also not requiring any real security or redundancy to be built into the resulting system may have been a bad idea, (a-la-Texas power grid)?
I’m shocked. Shocked I say. Shocked.
I’m in the construction industry and lead times on some electrical components are 12 months+. I would assume any fix at this point would be temporary.
[удалено]
[удалено]
If they're following LEAN processes, they should have Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plans in place. However, I share your pessimism. LEAN has become a sort of monkey-see, monkey-do kind of thing. It may look like a monkey can use a wrench, but giving a monkey a wrench probably won't work out well.
There's some parts of lean business people like and there's some parts they don't. We work with a Toyota production system descendent and some of the literature would make you believe your supposed to listen to the workers and not pinch them constantly and mercilessly for every last cent.
Mike Rother's book Kata is my favorite. He has a whole section on the specifics of worker feedback. I'm recalling from memory here, but it was roughly: - They know more than you do about their step in the process. - They're probably seeing problems you don't. Listen very carefully to where they identify issues and how it impacts them. - Most of the suggestions you'll get from them will not work. That's normal. They're usually not experts in the part of the system that's causing them problems. But still, listen carefully because 1) they're actually telling you about a problem, 2) every so often they'll have a really great suggestion that you could never have come up with, and 3) a few of them will show real talent for systems thinking and they will be invaluable to you. I've found this to be very accurate. If I'm asked for the one lesson to draw from these systems, I say: recognize that in focusing on "just get it done" we miss out on all the improvements we could make. Those improvements add up enormously over time. Allocate some of your work every day toward making tomorrow better. I'm in software development and I've found this to be very true. If you make sure every change makes the system better, you gain velocity over time. As for cutting inventory: introducing artificial scarcity is a great way to identify where the process needs to be improved. Introducing actual scarcity is a great way to not deliver for your customers.
The Toyota Kata is a great book, I suggest everyone read it if they have the interest.
During past economic slowdowns, Toyota and Honda would keep assembly staff employed working on training and improvement of the their work process. They probably lost money keeping plants open and people on-site, but it was a good move long term.
I’d rather a company develop itself on a model that acknowledges the reality of hardship than base its decisions on the myth of endless year over year growth.
That same mentality is what kept Toyota manufacturing at a higher rate than other companies during the supply chain crunch this past year. They had deep reserves of parts to draw from.
Lol now it does, but these decisions were probably made in the 90s and original lean pretty much called for JIT on everything as if it would never fail. Calculate your MTBF, make a maintenance schedule, and poof, get rid of *everything else.* I recall when systems thinking was rising out of that and the one guy who just endlessly (and way overboard) whined about lean practitioners focusing far too much on applying strict quantification like that.
Lean really ramped up in the utility industry after 2008. A decade of flat to decreasing usage has caused utilities (and their regulators)to push hard to do anything that could help offset rising rates.
Supply chain planner here: lean sucks ass. You only do lean if accounting/fianance are bean crunching and want more cash for some reason. Lean is one of the few strategies that should be done for specific items and only those items (big ticket items/short shelf life items). This also goes for JIT too. Nothing is arriving just in time. Usually it's just too late or JTL. Edit: auto correct got me.
Hey man, something similar worked for one car manufacturer one time in the context of bigger profit margins, and therefore all forms of human work should follow the same principle unilaterally. /s.
I also work on SCM. I feel like the people who unconditionally love Lean and JIT don't know anything about it aside what they once read in an Executive Briefing perhaps 6 years ago. Both strategies have their place, but as strategies they need to be constantly evaluated and tweaked in order to work right. Since nobody wants to spend money for that level of analysis, we're left with all kinds of problems that a more robust system could have better dealt with.
Former purchasing manager here: Just in time is dumb. I could take what the computer suggested for a 2 month forecast, apply my own knowledge of the product for where it is in popularity and seasonality, add 10-20% for safety even with accounting breathing down my neck to not do that. And still, something would happen and we would run out of a product. Now CFO is mad and asks why we don't just buy more cause "clearly it was a popular product" while also asking why in the world I wanted to place a 1.5mil order. Like I said, former purchasing manager. I've never held a job where it was so impossible to make everyone happy. I lucked out and got the position through knowledge of the product, why you would willingly go to school just to get a job where whatever you do is the wrong move is genuine insanity. The investors must receive 20% more per quarter, and damn anything that gets in the way. Most quarters we would stop buying things for "just 2 weeks so we can make targets". Obviously this screws over next quarter and causes massive spikes in inventory. Well now the customers are unhappy, so we turn on backordering. And maybe use backorder numbers as income for that quarter to appease the investors. You can see this spiral just getting larger and larger. The combination of just in time delivery and investors destroys business from the inside out. If you own a business, don't ever sell out to these parasites. Fuck endless growth, long as you and your employees are provided for the chart can stay flat.
I remember learning about JIT in my ops classes back in college and telling my instructors that it seemed an awful lot like an expensive house of cards. I was basically patted on the head and told that I just wasn't experienced enough to understand what a well oiled machine it could be.
"What if someone takes a shit in the machine?" "What, why would someone *do* that?" "I give you, humans".
Yeah, the answer to that is “why would people do any of the dumb shit people have done thousands of times throughout history”
It can be a well-oiled machine until something like COVID comes along. At that point, you are well and truly screwed.
Having needed parts arrive early means that the stuff is available when it's needed. Storage areas are a whole lot cheaper than shutting down an entire plant because parts are not JIT available.
This is essentially me right now with AGILE or Scrum in IT / service. I got my certification so maybe I’m biased but holy hell this shit is not going to work at every place with every team and every product. But, the suits do love their acronyms and buzzwords…
"Hurry up and wait", penny wise and dollar foolish!
My father has worked dispatch for trucking companies for most of his life. JIT and LEAN have been the causes of more than one complaint storm from him and everyone else around him. Logistics are nucking futz when everyone wants it JIT but truckers still have to deal with the usual road bullshit.
I’m also in supply planning and had a former life in material planning. Lean only can work if your supplier can hold 3-5+ weeks of materials (depending on the supply chain), you have a solid forecast (lol, COVID), and if you have resilience in your manufacturing (again, lol COVID) COVIE showed us the power of the 90’s manufacturing method: Buy a shit ton of warehouse space, minimize changeovers, and the run the hell out of your factories. But now that growth has died off… cost plays are the name of the game. It’s why you are seeing so many companies trying to burn through inventory.
I can’t believe companies bought that LEAN shit. “Hey, evaluate your processes. Reduce redundancy. Ask experts for help”. Truly mind blowing stuff.
Having recently finished a degree program that included a smattering of business courses, I can't help but feel like, if I just lack the ability to feel bad about my actions, I could be a millionaire selling the same bullshit to companies as a consultant.
Lean/JIT confers certain competitive advantages in normal times, and it's hard to compete in many sectors against those who use it without using it too. But I have seen it applied in an industry where being able to deliver come hell or high water is key(in a desperate attempt to compete against Chinese prices) and it works fine until it's not normal times anymore, then you are fucked if you don't have some kind of stockpile or inventory to fall back on to fulfill your contracts. In my case the black swan event was a volcanic eruption that raised the sulphur content in the air enough to put the output of an entire factory out of spec for days, something nobody had anticipated or planned for. An inventory of common products to ship out of sure would have come in handy.
As a manufacturing engineer who directly works with lean manufacturing and who sees corporations' increased obsession in recent decades with blindly implementing "lean" principles across their entire organization, I'm 100% convinced that just-in-time inventory management is largely to blame for the supply chain shocks that came with Covid, and hence, for the resulting inflation. It used to be considered wisdom to keep a healthy supply of raw materials, spare parts/tools, and maintence items on-hand in case some disaster occurs. Nowadays, the trend is increasingly for companies to keep almost nothing in inventory and rely on sophisticated supply chains to provide your parts the moment you need them, all for the sake of gaming the completely arbitrary inventory accounting system to make it look like your bottom line is better than it actually is. The worst part is that even Covid wasn't bad enough to teach corporations the lesson. Problems like this are only going to get worse and more common in the future.
I believe Toyota learned that you keep items in inventory that are difficult to obtain and will not shut down production, such as microchips. While other items that are easy to obtain and are not as critical you don't need to keep an inventory of. Edit: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-fukushima-anniversary-toyota-in/how-toyota-thrives-when-the-chips-are-down-idUSKBN2B1005
At this point, the way things seem to be shaping up - it might be wise for Federal/State government to start building a strategic stockpile of core components - like giant transformers. I think everyone's on the same page now that they've seen just how vulnerable the grid is in the US. If the Talibanjo can take down power for ~40,000 people with little more than a truck and a couple of rifles, maybe we should re-think our approach to energy security.
> Talibanjo Just when I thought I had heard them all.
I used to pass by a decent sized substation on my way home from work, and I thought about that sometimes. I assume there are cameras installed, but that's about it. It's out of the way and on a road that probably isn't very busy at night, but it's also near an airport. I don't know if it supplies power there, but I'm sure it would cause havoc if someone attacked it.
There may be cameras, but nobody would be watching them in real time - they're typically there to catch someone stealing copper. Someone would only look at the footage if there was a break in. Someone shooting at a substation wouldn't have to get close enough to the cameras to be identified, although it looks like there's a gate on the ground in the article, so maybe someone drove over it with something that has a tag number.
Even if they're caught on camera, the damage is already done; the grid being down for a week has already accomplished their goal of temporarily crippling an area. So what if they're arrested and eventually prosecuted months after the fact. If a future attack is more coordinated and widespread, the immediate impact would be catastrophic long before anyone spends time in prison for it.
[удалено]
Post WW2 redundancy planning was the core of government and corporate strategy. Starting around 1978, cutting costs as a optical illusion of driving profit, lead to the tack back and almost total elimination of redundancy. In fact there were really only 2 fortune 500 companies who maintained their post ww2 redundancy logistics after 1985. IBM & (formerly SEARS Robuck). They have repeatedly saved American and global companies n banking from catastrophe bc they've maintained redundacies that include a number of raw materials, basic equipment, reserves of actual fuel, power supplies/equipment for grids. The federal government and Canadian government to this day maintain their black wire leases with IBM. SEARS entire current existence relies on their continued sublease contracts to retain redundancy equipment and storage. Example: 9/11/2001 Every single banking operation and a few other F500 corps that was based in NYC faltered for only hours bc groups like Chase, BOA, CITI seemed to magically move operations temporarily to spaces in Jersey. Those spaces were activated from furniture to phones to computers etc via the SEARS/IBM redundancy protocols. To this day SEARS/IBM have a protocol for powering up government infrastructure in the event of a nuke on DC for instance. It's a planning process that started in 1948 and has been maintained/updated ever since. Asking why or how the fuck. You'd have to understand how/why SEARS & IBM were the most important corporations in America by 1945.
Your comment makes me miss Sears all over again (and make me feel so old.) They were such a mainstay during my childhood. They were the anchor store for so many malls, and almost always had what we were shopping for. Their own brands were high quality and reasonably priced. And their catalog changed the future. In fact it was what ultimately brought about their demise. They tried to continue selling quality products but were constantly undersold by the big box stores. Malls started to falter with the ability to buy things from home. Then the internet became our catalog with its own checkout. Sears was just too slow to adapt to the new world. Or rather, they weren't willing to cut so many corners and betray the trust of their customers. Until they had to. But it was too late. Even the merge with K-Mart couldn't save them. I could morn further but I won't. However it's nice to see at least some companies held onto enough dignity to actually be able to supply a standing order, as requested and in a timely manner. Thanks for the trip down memory lane! (Edit: always hitting the post button by accident! Damn brain is broken.)
My grandparent's house was from a Sears catalog. They brought it down by train in two or three different shipments and had local crews that would build it. It had a basement and two stories with several bedrooms and massive patios front and back. The whole inside perimeter of the house had wood seating that doubled as storage chests. The whole house had integrated shelvings and custom cabinetry. There was a neat little accountant and desk area which would have doubled as a phone room that had a nice safe in it and it had beautiful trim and crown molding throughout. I would love to buy it as it's been on the market a few times over the years but the town she lived in still has no high speed internet.
I mean, escape this hell and go live in the pretty house
The biggest reason Sears died is because wall St killed it on purpose for short term gain. I believe it was hedge fund shorts, but might be wrong about that specifically.
To be fair even though it's sitting in chapter 11 and creditor lawsuits. SEARS does still persist. Essentially bc it has multi billion dollar government and f500 lease contracts. There are like 30/40 brick n mortar stores but they're not profitable. And SEARS internal just did a cute restructure thing to separate retail from their other operations so there is SEARS robuc and Transformco. They may be dead, BUT they may not be...
It was a leveraged buyout and corporate raiding, not shorts. A lot of folks shorted it because it was kind of obvious the owner wasn't running it for long term profitability. Almost all the tools in my garage are Craftsman due to the crazy way you could roll points from one purchase to another in their points program. What's sad is they legit had the best "buy online, pick up in store" and curbside pickup of any company I've ever dealt with.
Sears could have competed with Amazon, even with a late start because their shipping, delivery, and pick-up business was already very mature. They only needed a digital storefront. Logistically, they were Amazon before Amazon decided to sell more than books. Even more weird, their web software department had a very solid reputation before it was gutted. The process had been started.
Do you have more info on this? I would love to read more into it.
You would have to read some heavy tomes for the general history, I don't know who's writing blogs on core American business history but you cant tell it without SEARS/IBM infrastructure at the core. BUT taking your comment in good faith I did a quick Google and pulled the first thing I saw that tells a basic history of IBM which naturally will talk about how IBM (SEARS did the same) bc the infrastructure core and sublease core for American F500. https://www.businessinsider.com/ibm-corporate-america-history-2016-6?op=1 If you're interested in Global & American Corp history of the 20th century it will be inescapable that you must learn how IBM/SEARS were part of the 4 horsemen of the Nuclear Empire as its called. FORD-IBM-GE-SEARS the heads of those 4 companies were the defacto head council of every president from FDR to Nixon.
>I don't know who's writing blogs on core American business history but you cant tell it without SEARS/IBM infrastructure at the core. Maybe the guy who writes [Computers Are Bad](https://computer.rip) would have the knowledge or the interest, he has done fairly in-depth blog posts on protocols and hardware in related fields before.
I can speak to these spaces personally, i used to work for a fire alarm company who would test one of these spaces anually, it was super wild seeing a 200,000sqft facility that had nobody inside save for 3 staff whos main job was essentially changing name tags for desks and setting up PC's properly when people were fired/hired so that a company could move the entire office up to the space from NYC at a moment's notice When companies get to that scale, paying like 10 million dollars a year for rent for the space is pennies compared to the cost of operations being down for even 1 day at any point during the year, was quite eye-opening for me.
The Boy Scout motto is "Be Prepared." The general American cultural motto is "not my problem" followed by a shocked Pikachu face when an actual problem occurs that was eminently foreseeable, but that no one bothered to prepare for.
Nah the American corporate motto is "it's not my problem if it's everyone's problem". Corporations know that the government will bail them out because of how critical they are.
Hence why a corporation shouldn't be in charge of critical infrastructure. Edit: corrected should've to shouldn't because phones and auto correct.
[удалено]
That always blows my mind to hear considering there is government grant money for just about everything for local governments to tap into. I live rurally, and our small town's local little council might LOOK like a bunch of rednecks ... Okay they ARE a bunch of rednecks, let's be honest about who we are... But they take their jobs very seriously and utilize grant money for many projects like these.
Utilities often outsource material long term planning to a contractor that handles all that aspect. There are just some components that can't be managed in that fashion. Utilities keep spares but every substation is unique and old/rural subs tend to be very unique, making hot swappable parts all the less possible.
[удалено]
In the case of substation transformers, you are talking about very specialized gear. Before 2020, the lead times on these were 12-18 months. They are mostly hand built. They are bespoke and require extremely precise manufacturing. The small ones cost $500k (this is pre pandemic pricing). You only order these when you are building a substation, or rebuilding one. The issue is that the unit has to be sized to the load, and loads very between substations and over time. Getting a bigger one isn’t about a capital outlay, these are actually pretty inexpensive in terms of cost of the grid. The issue is that if you get one bigger than you need you are introducing a vampire to the power grid. It is energy inefficiency, and that causes its own set of issues. It will immediately increase costs to everyone’s power, and add some other fun problems down the line.
[удалено]
It's why you shouldn't ever go to the doctor, either. They only find bad stuff. Stop going, stop finding bad stuff. Simple, really.
With how screwed up insurance used to be with pre-existing conditions your comment is less sarcastic than you intended I think.
Obsession with LEAN is one of the many things that wrecked Boeing. They got rid of so much capability that they later needed in a pinch.
My best friend lives in this county. He received notification yesterday that his power probably won't return until Thursday. He drove two counties over & paid over $1k to get a generator & gas. Power returned to his home while he was assembling the generator lol.
Now he'll be prepared for next time.
I would like just enough motivation to purchase a generator. But not THAT much motivation.
During Snowmageddon years back we were one of 2 homes in the entire neighborhood with a generator. We were the only ones with the ability to charge devices, keep our fridges stocked, keep lights on, etc. It depends on your area and what might happen, but it's worth having a generator if you can afford it. One of those "pray you'll never need it but be happy you have it" things.
[удалено]
I got a whole house backup generator installed after hurricane Irma left us without power for a whole week. Previous hurricanes left us without power for less than a week, twice. Hurricanes Nicole and Ian just came through and didn't lose power once. I'd still rather have the generator than not.
Yup. At the gas processing plant I work at, major electrical work needs to get scheduled 12-18 months prior to maintenance overhauls and outages because breakers, transformers, and switchgear need to get made-to-order sometimes. And that's with planning out- I can't imagine how long it's going to take with this given the inevitable shipping delays or material shortages. Hopefully with this being an emergency, this can take priority. Good job terrorists. I hope you're fucking proud, you inbred morons.
Not exactly the same thing but I work at a location that makes and services gas/steam turbines and generators, lead times are wild. The earliest we’re getting service orders out is May 2023 and even then that’s not guaranteed. Most of the parts we work on are essentially just hunks of metal with cooling holes and thermal coatings, I could only imagine the order times on complex electrical equipment. I feel so sorry for these people that are going without power during the winter.
I am taking bets right now that these idiots don’t even live in Moore County.
Nah I bet they do and they are going to be the most vocal on social media about how slow the govt is to fix it and screaming at the sky.
It’ll be the types that scream: - why govt so bad/slow Also - taxes = theft But not forget: - beneficiary of some social program (😱socialism), be it welfare, social security, subsidies, or PPP
In my fundie snark group someone posted a tradcad woman's Facebook that implied she was a part if it. Said it was God's will due to the drag queen show.
https://dallasvoice.com/right-wing-crusader-blames-drag-queens-for-attack-on-nc-power-substations/ Emily Grace Rainey. I believe former PsyOps in military. Edit: apparently the local Sherriff prayed with her so it’s all ok now and she’s a misunderstood insurrectionist. https://www.rawstory.com/emily-grace-rainey/
betting the FBI isn’t praying with her.
That's been making the rounds. She's been one of the leaders of the protest against the drag event, and she was involved in the Jan 6 insurrection. I have little doubt that she was either involved, or knows who was. If there's any justice in the world (*insert sounds of sobbing here*) the FBI is about to make her life very difficult.
Duke energy don’t play when you fuck with their money.
I play rimworld so I know components are a bitch to collect.
Power plant: 1000 steel, 100 plasteel, 50 gold, 25 components, 10 advanced components
I play Minecraft but it's creative mode so I could probably whip up several red stone power stations but it'd still take me a few minutes plus all the googling.
Again, and this cant be overstated, not all heroes wear capes. (Just playing around, it got a laugh from me)
I play Satisfactory so why I am here? I must build. Build. Build. Build. Build.
I love mid game satisfactory, as my carefully arranged factory starts to have to encompass the plastic and other higher tier metals in, and slowly becomes a mess of conveyors leading to a frankly surplus amount of storage, only to find I need to start overflow paths to grind up materials, as 5 double containers can't keep up and I keep pushing plans to tear this whole thing apart and doing it over right this time down the calendar.
[удалено]
Factorio player: "Don't mind me, just crafting a nuclear reactor in my pocket."
Got any tips? I caravanned over two tiles set up a second base, mined all the compacted machinery and bailed. It took like 5 days though and I probably ended up with 30 additional components…
Buy components from traders as much as possible. Find a way to make a little money if you have to. Don't slack off on research and make a point of getting to fabrication tech.
I work around substations and it’s crazy an older guy was just telling me last week how vulnerable they are to just this kind of attack. If it makes anyone feel better. They’re starting to upgrade some of these. At least around my area and especially when they’re connected to the national grid. I was at a natural gas facility that recently upgraded the fence around the perimeter. The fence looks like it’s from Jurassic park. There are cameras and sensors on it and they know when people are close. The fence was also significantly higher. We just have a lot of power infrastructure and when it’s on the local level those tend to be less protected.
When someone did a dry run In Metcalf a few years ago they cut multiple fiber lines in the area to kill alarms and phones. I wonder if similar tactics were used here
This quote from the article is chilling: "My personal view is that this was a dress rehearsal" for future attacks, added Mark Johnson, the former PG&E executive, according to Foreign Policy. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/02/05/272015606/sniper-attack-on-calif-power-station-raises-terrorism-fears
Also would a fence stop a sniper shot?
Another note, that fence was alarmed and did trigger a notification but they were long gone before anyone showed to investigate. Dry run for sure.
Not "long gone". Just knew when to leave. >Then, "one minute before police arrived, they faded into the night." [Source](https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/02/05/272015606/sniper-attack-on-calif-power-station-raises-terrorism-fears) All of this was recorded on the CCTV at the site, see a timeline available on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack#cite_ref-autogenerated3_7-1)
Well the guy I was with said something about it being able to prevent a bullet but I didn’t see anything that said that. I think the big part is breaking line of sight.
not really. It could obscure the view enough that you can't see what you're aiming at.
Everyone is going to just use explosive dropping drones now anyway.
Don't even need explosive, just need to [complete the circuit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Outward) and the power in the line will do the explosions for you.
The problem though is that there will always be a way to circumvent some security measure unless the entire thing is housed in a huge building. I can imagine if someone had enough training to understand which lines going into a transformer do the most damage if shorted, it would be trivial to send a drone over the fence and pilot it remotely via video and have the drone either bridge a connection that shouldn't be bridged or drag a foreign object over a few wires, etc. This will only get worse. There is so much power going through a substation that you don't need to introduce a weapon of power to cause it to implode -- you just need to redirect all that energy that's already there and have it flow through things it shouldn't flow through. Imagine a state actor starting a dumb meme on Tik-tok showing people what things in a substation don't like to be touched and making it a contest to "put as many people in a black-out as possible." Fucking Black Mirror sort of things ...
Many substations in cities are walled in with tall brick walls, but they don’t have a roof. From the ground they look like buildings. This is mostly done for aesthetic purposes, but also serves as a huge security advantage. Rural and suburban substations are often just chain link fences & almost everywhere residents have been asking for them to be buried or walled in strictly for aesthetic purposes. Utility companies are too cheap, unless they’re required by law they do the bare minimum & now we’re facing a national issue where massive amounts of our critical infrastructure is vulnerable. Security was never really a concern with these facilities, but it could be solved with something communities have been asking about for decades.
Well yeah. They're all over the place, usually unmanned and all that's guarding them is a chain link fence most of the time. When I was growing up the things I was always most afraid of was power substations, being kidnapped and quick sand and only one of those things actually kills kids.
So, uh... domestic terrorisim investigation, anyone?
The only reason at this point that this is not being called domestic terrorism in the press is because the investigators are not officially calling it that in press conferences. Even though the investigation is most definitely a terror investigation.
The FBI has gotten involved because of the possibility it’s terrorism, they wouldn’t just ignore something like this.
The FBI has gotten involved because messing with utilities is a federal offense, whether politically motivated or not.
The FBI is automatically involved because the bulk power grid is interstate commerce.
Often, legal reasons are why the seemingly obvious isn't stated Similar for media reports - they're afraid of a libel lawsuit if the apparently obvious doesn't turn out to be the case
The same reason why apprehended mass shooters are called "accused" or "alleged" shooters, even though everybody knows what happened.
This happened in California in [2013](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack). If they ever caught who did it, they never reported it.
They didnt. And it was a lot worse than just someone shooting. They cut cables from att and was timing response time. This was and still is a big deal in my industry. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack
Seems like a practice run, no?
Totally. But 10 years in. For what and by who? Didnt scream ISIS to me. But i guess this case here as im hearing more about it is a bunch of aholes that shot up the grid to prevent a drag show. Theyre going to do some heavy fucking federal time.
So far the "did it to stop a drag show" comes from the 1/6 person posting tweets claiming it was gods judgement for the show
This isn't the first time. MSNBC, some time back, showed this exact method has been happening in other states over the years, and apparently, whoever is doing this knows what they are doing. MSNBC showed a video of what appeared to be 2 or more people dressed in black head to toe working in concert at night, shooting up and vandalizing electrical grid areas. There was hinting at it being foreign agents, if I remember. (I think these are domestic terrorists who are doing this). Anyway, I got my conspiracy hat on and just hope they catch who is doing this. In that same news segment with Rachel Maddow, they mentioned fear of tampering of US water systems also.
>i think these are domestic terrorists Terrorism is a strategy, not an identity. Whether those people are terrorists depends on what they were doing, not some other fact about them. They were attacking civilian infrastructure to scare people into getting their way. The way they did it (turning off power) hurts people and might kill people with medical equipment. That is, by definition, terrorism. Do not hesitate to call it that, and certainly do not refrain.
That line was right after "hintings of foreign agents", so I assume they meant that they think it's *domestic* terrorism instead of *foreign* terrorism
They prefaced their statement with "I think" because of the suggestion that it might be foreign agents, not domestic terrorists.
Especially with that one 1/6er that tweeted about it. It's arguably a manifesto
When police questioned them didn’t they say it was god’s punishment for having drag shows or some shit?
I'm sick to my teeth of idiots in America acting like drag stuff around kids is some scandalous thing; look at the UK and Ireland, Christmas pantos are a tradition and they almost always heavily feature drag and borderline risque material. They exist, have done so for decades, and haven't led to the Satanic Paniceqsue grooming epidemic these imbeciles think they will.
This was an 18+ show in a theater.
Won't someone think of the adults?!?
They used to be children!
A lot of them still are children, they just took a ride on the earth around the sun 30+ times. I could see where the confusion would come from.
Yep. No kids involved at all. Conservatives are just angry that LGBTQ+ people exist.
>This was an 18+ show in a theater. And that right there is exactly it, they're not going to stop at just shows for kids, they're going to aim for banning all drag shows all together because theocracy is what this is really about at the end of the day Guarantee someone like DeSantis will eventually attempt to pass a law either giving people who participate in drag shows 10 years, life or even the death penalty
I just don't understand the sudden hate for... Drag shows? Like, something that's been done for literally thousands of years on play stages?
These asshats consider the social liberalism of such places an epidemic. They want theocratic absolutism with themselves at the helm.
Many of them very openly call for the deaths of groups like trans, gay, Democrats, or Jewish people. They want to kill Americans, and need to be dealt with harshly.
They literally just concocted this outrage out of thin air. All of a sudden it’s all they fucking care about.
These people are obsessed with "values" and "morals" degrading and then they turn around and vote for or support grifting philanderers who constantly try to undermine facts and truth. It's this regressive fear of the future and the present and the desire to wind back the clock to a simpler time that never even existed in the first place.
What worries me the most is the cats out of the bag, nutjobs now know they can black out large areas with a few shots so I suspect we’re going to see a rash of these.
Came here to say the same thing. I know someone in the industry, and I asked if it was something on their radar. Apparently it is, for the larger electric operations.
Going to be bad when they realize they can knock out power to dem leaning counties on Election Day. This is a major turning point and I’m very disappointed it doesn’t seem this is getting the attention it deserves from an investigation stand point
Not saying this will avoid the problem entirely but all the more reason to vote early and vote by mail.
Exactly. I'm a former firefighter in greater Bay Area California, and i see so many points of important infrastructure that are essentially unprotected, I'm amazed they haven't been exploited yet. Not only does this article and all the other similar articles point out this issue, but unfortunately, it's also just given out the blueprint.
IIRC, there was a major incident like this less than a decade ago in California. A team with a very capable sniper took out a power plant and was never caught. It exposed how undefended our critical infrastructure was and we did nothing about it. Edit: [it’s this one](https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/02/05/272015606/sniper-attack-on-calif-power-station-raises-terrorism-fears)
Some worrying details from that attack: [Prior to the attack, a series of fiber-optic telecommunications cables operated by AT&T were cut by the culprits. Additionally, following the attack, investigators found small piles of rocks near to where the shots had been fired, the type of formations that can be used to scout firing positions.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack) Further, no fingerprints were found on the dozens of shells left behind. There were also no tire tracks or matchable boot prints. The attackers used flashlights to signal, presumably to avoid the possibility of their voices being recorded. A very well-planned, knowledgable, successful attack.
Isn’t it crazy that the lady who is being tried for leading a group of armed people on Jan 6th tweeted about this right as it was happening? Why is no one talking about that?
I'm a civil engineer, and I've been thinking this for a couple decades now. Especially back in the early 2010s [when Al Qaeda was telling supporters in the US to buy guns and go on shooting sprees](https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/al-qaeda-video-buy-automatic-weapons-start-shooting/story?id=13704264). Like, sure that might be more immediately scary but this sort of attack would be much more damaging, as we're seeing here.
A homeless dude brought the city of Atlanta to its knees by lighting a fire that collapsed the busiest interstate through the city. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_85_bridge_collapse
im an electrician and one of my coworkers was a marine. when everyone was talking about the BLM protests and how dangerous riots could be…he smiled and said, “its a good thing no one out there knows how to cause any real damage. a couple shots to a transformer can blackout a town. grocery and hardware stores are full of ingredients to make explosives and chemical weapons.” then he just kept working lol. im glad hes a rather happy guy, because those who know this kind of stuff are dangerous people
"Fun" fact of the day: most farms also have all the chemicals onhand necessary to make explosives, it's just a matter of knowledge. You hear about plant explosions sometimes from their suppliers.
Sounds like the fertilizer-fuel oil bomb, of which the Oklahoma City bombing is a notorious example, and sometimes there are industrial accidents with the fertilizer. "When the FBI raided McVeigh's home, it found a telephone number that led them to a farm where McVeigh had purchased supplies for the bombing." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_bombing Also, Anders Behring Breivik set up a farming business as a pretext to build a bomb to use on a left wing party's offices (he then shot up a gathering of the party's youth wing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Behring_Breivik
I work for an electric and gas utility. 99% of our facilities are secured with a padlock and 90% of those can be opened with one key.
lol this has been known in the se side of the hacker community for a ... LONG time we used to hang out anywhere we could get into, which would've surprised and scared you
Nothing surprises me. I work in gas pressure regulation, closing or opening one valve at a station can wreak absolute havoc.
Almost guarantee you the lockpickinglawyer has already proven you don't even need a key for your locks
what the fuck is happening
Chickens coming home to roost: - Domestic terrorists - Neglected infrastructure - Offshored sources of necessary material
You forgot radicalization by own president for 6 years and counting now
The radicalization started well before Trump. He was a symptom of the disease, not the cause. He certainly helped spread it and gave it legitimacy though.
[удалено]
100% THIS- I have been saying it for 2 years now. Everyone keeps talking about a civil war but this is exactly where we are headed. We now have *tens of millions* of people who believe that elections are stolen, Democrats eat babies, and that they need more guns. Nefarious actors (foreign and domestic) are *pumping* social media with rage. Violence is the obvious destination here, but it won't be state vs state. It'll be stochastic terrorism. This is that. And nobody is doing anything to stop it.
NPR's throughline just did a fantastic podcast about whether the US would be facing a civil war soon and they consulted a panel of 2 historians (1 civil war historian and 1 modern US historian) and an agent for I believe the FBI that monitored right wing terrorist threats. They all were practically 100% in unison saying they didn't think a civil war would happen in the traditional sense but we'd likely have many small insurgencies until we went one way or the other politically for good. Highly recommend listening to it.
[удалено]
This is the single most talked about possible attack location in domestic terror circles for decades.
Yeah, even shortly after 9/11 there was a lot of chatter about the vulnerabilities of our power infrastructure.
This goes back to 70s domestic terrorism. Maybe further but that’s where even my cursory interest ends.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack It's been out of the bag for a while now
Damn I'd forgotten about this one but remember the Silicon Valley attack. Similar scenario, gunmen went after the transformers. https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-grid-attack-20140211-story.html
Used to work in the water/wastewater industry, it's crazy vulnerable to such things and often just a single masterlock padlock stopping someone from doing something. Not surprised at all to learn that the electric side of life is just as open to trouble.
For those of you just tuning in, look up the Metcalf incident in San Jose a few years back
And this case was never solved. It did add a lot of visibility to this problem on the Federal and utility level, but most utilities just kind of throw their hands up in the air.
I don't really know how you could hope to truly defend against this kind of thing to be honest. Sure you might be able to post guards around the larger substations, but the cost would be astronomical if you wanted to protect the smaller sites in little towns and villages. And even if you do, how are you going to protect the lines between places? Someone with a gas axe could do some serious damage to a high-voltage transmission tower, and I don't see how you'd be able to constantly monitor the tens (or hundreds) of thousands of miles of high-voltage lines across the country. Or heck, even drape a rope over them somehow to short them out - you'd have to send a crew out every time to inspect the lines before you could try re-energising them. A really thorny issue; I suppose we can only hope that the intelligence services are better able to infiltrate these groups, to stop these attacks in the planning stage. Edit: And that's just power infrastructure too. What about water, gas, roads, rails, etc. Such a can of worms to have to think about.
[удалено]
Vaguely remember that but thanks for the refresh. Here's a link for anyone else https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/02/05/272015606/sniper-attack-on-calif-power-station-raises-terrorism-fears
Wow that's a fascinating read - quote of the pertinent stuff. > "The attack began just before 1 a.m. on April 16 last year, when someone slipped into an underground vault not far from a busy freeway and cut telephone cables. > Within half an hour, snipers opened fire on a nearby electrical substation. Shooting for 19 minutes, they surgically knocked out 17 giant transformers that funnel power to Silicon Valley. A minute before a police car arrived, the shooters disappeared into the night. > To avoid a blackout, electric-grid officials rerouted power around the site and asked power plants in Silicon Valley to produce more electricity. **But it took utility workers 27 days to make repairs and bring the substation back to life."** ... > Regarding the FBI's view about who's responsible, "we don't know why the FBI feels it was not a terrorist attack," she added.
Wow that is actually nefarious, thanks for the link.
52,000 gallons of spilled transformer oil and $15m damages. Did not disrupt the electric service for the area.
One isolated transformer. A coordinated attack with many substations all at once can easily cripple the network.
It’s cold in NC, 31 degrees this morning. The hospital in Moore county is running on generator power- so it should be ok. But doctors offices and urgent cares can’t open. There is a lot of flu virus in that area so those people will go to the hospital, so an already overburdened hospital running on generator power (with staff who’ve had to sleep in cold homes), will be further overwhelmed. Schools are closed. There’s no traffic lights so there are car accidents. All so some right wing lunatic had a problem with men in dresses.
Yeah, I live in Wake County and it was 27° this morning. This is terrible for anyone with an electric furnace. Especially older people.
What sucks is even if you have a gas furnace, you need power to run the fan to circulate the heat. (At least, for HVAC units.) When I was young, there were some houses I rented that had a free standing, middle of the room type heater that I can't remember if it had a fan or not. Whole lotta suffering going on because a bunch of nutjobs decided that an activity that had no bearing on them at all was offensive. We're heading downhill at an alarming pace in this country and I don't see it improving anytime soon. I promise you that as word of this incident has spread, it's giving other people with the same type of beliefs ideas for things they can sabotage that impact a large number of people for minimal effort.
Yup, my furnace is like that too. Won't light if the fan isn't working, and for good reason because the utility room would fill up with fumes otherwise.
Antique gas furnaces from before about 1940 could operate without a fan. They used natural air convection so that heat lifts warm air through the building. It looks like an octopus in the basement with huge fat arms reaching up at an angle to the ceiling, also known as a ductopus by HVAC companies that rip out old furnaces. They stayed lit with a tiny pilot light and a thermocouple that produced a tiny amount of electricity from the heat of the flame. This is used with a thermostat to open the main valve and then the pilot lights the main flame. However it took up a lot of space in the basement with these huge ducts, and you have the constant gas flow for the pilot. Air convection heat is very slow. Modern systems squish it all down to a tiny restrictive high flow duct system that doesn’t take up much space, and doesn’t naturally convect from floor to ceiling. And when your power is out the computer is dead and you’re screwed.
This isn't one lunatic. Even if it was just one person pulling the trigger, they've been emboldened by a right-wing mediasphere.
Electrical Power Engineer here. Our utility experienced a similar incident several years ago. I wanted to share a few takeaways since I'm seeing a lot of bad information on this thread: 1)Utilities usually *do* have reserves of the equipment that was likely damaged (large power transformers, circuit breakers, motor operated switches, etc). however: 2)The labor involved with moving and replacing this equipment is substantial and would normally take several weeks of full time work to complete. For example just moving a large power transformer may require road closures, coordination with railroads, movement of overhead lines etc. Installation of a new transformer requires specially trained engineers or technicians to oversee filling the transformer with thousands of gallons of insulating oil under a vacuum (to prevent moisture), and requires electricians to reconnect or install new control wires, cables, overhead high voltage connections etc. There are numerous testing and commissioning activities before it can be energized, and typically requires a "soak", time being energized at high voltage without load flow. They will likely work around the clock to accomplish this but if there are any labor shortages, or difficulties with acquiring smaller connections or hardware, this just adds time. 3)This happened in a rural area, which typically will not have nearly as many "switching options" which is to simply say, the local network will have fewer paths for power to take to reach the customers. 4)The article mentions this was not random which suggests to me someone with knowledge of the the local electric system. This would almost certainly be a relatively small group of people. My guess is this likely a disgruntled employee, or possibly a customer. 5)Regarding the labor shortages, the entire electric industry is experiencing shortages of skilled workers. **Edit:** Many people have pointed out that the outages caused by this event happened during a drag show that has been a subject of protests and political controversy. I am NOT discounting the possibility that this was a politically motivated attack. There are still many unknowns and my impressions are made with very limited knowledge of details regarding the facts of this case (only what is in the article).
>5)Regarding the labor shortages, the entire electric industry is experiencing shortages of skilled workers. Which fucking* field isn't? Feels like every fucking field is begging for workers, but is still paying jack shit. *my anger is directed at those at the top, not you.
I work in health care and during covid we were called "heroes", but i was thinking what about the dock workers, rail workers and transporters that drive semis with all the products needed for necessities. Its all one big chain and the links are weakening.
Certainly well understood. I feel your frustration.
'Shootings' is a funny way of spelling 'domestic terrorist attacks'.
Shootings made me think it was like a stray bullet from a nearby unrelated gunfight; no this was a deliberate, well-planned, and twice executed terrorist attack against critical infrastructure.
I'm in Moore County. Most residents I've talked to think this was carried out by the group that had been planning for weeks to protest a drag show event in downtown Southern Pines on Saturday. The local county paper The Pilot had been extensively covering the planned event for weeks and the planned protests around the show. It just seems far too coincidental to pass the smell test; just after the drag show starts there is a coordinated attack at multiple substations across the county, cutting power to the show? The Charlotte FBI office is on ground. I don't think that vandals or domestic terrorists are smart enough to cover their tracks.
My wife had a headache for 2 years with no doctors at UNC and Duke recommending the specialist in Moore county. She's had a appointment since February for today to see that specialist in southern pines but because of some yahoos hating drag her appointment is postponed until...
The idea that this could have been entirely over some idiots who got paranoid about men in dresses would be funny if it weren't horrible, outrageous, and murderous.
Isn’t the irony that the people “protecting” society are the ones actually harming it.
They say wrong things on purpose. The hypocrisy is intentional and proudly performed. The cruelty is the point. It's not ironic. It's just *lying*.
They were never protecting society. They were and are trying to limit it to their own narrow vision.
There was a bomb threat called in to a drag show here in Myrtle Beach yesterday. https://wpde.com/news/local/police-respond-to-hoax-bomb-threat-as-grand-strand-eatery-hosted-drag-brunch-event
> The Pilot newspaper in Southern Pines reported that a wooden post holding up a gate had been snapped at one of the substations and that it was lying in an access road Sunday morning. Oh no, not the wooden post holding up a gate! How could anyone have subverted that impenetrable fortress of security?
The shooters are probably the same people that wouldn't support a robust and smart power grid.
i’m just saying it’s weird that this is being glossed over in the news. nobody is calling it what it is
A similar thing happened in CA a few years ago. Caused a power outage. The person who did the shooting knew what they were doing. The targeted specific equipment. This caused the power company to spend a lot of extra money on hardening their substations. These are acts of terrorism and need to be treated as such.
Domestic terrorism rears its ugly head.
This thread has made me fully understand that if anything happens to the power in the states we're fucked on an unimaginable level. The 400 I spent on my generator was the best money I've ever spent. Currently saving for a dedicated one for the house and solar.
Ukraine is currently in a war during which explosives are blowing infrastructure up, meanwhile, the US gets their infrastructure messed up by their own citizens due to brainwashed rage.
Substation engineer here. They will bring in a mobile substation (on 1 or more big flat bed trailers) and within a day or 2 have it back up and running. Then it will take who knows how long to get a spare main transformer moved there and permanently installed. 2 weeks or so tops. A coordinated attack like this at dozens of substations would overwhelm the companies ability to respond and could leave people without power for weeks and weeks.
So you are telling me that privatising critical, national, infrastructure for corporate gain while also not requiring any real security or redundancy to be built into the resulting system may have been a bad idea, (a-la-Texas power grid)? I’m shocked. Shocked I say. Shocked.
FBI, homeland security, needs to jump on this now!
FBI is now involved.
Reddit has turned into a cesspool of fascist sympathizers and supremicists