Volume 10
Feb 2017 Edition
What if a Coordinated Attack Hit a Critical Infrastructure Facility Today
Guest Editorial By John J . Martin , Physicist , Cleveland Electric Laboratories the night .
Law enforcement officers arrived only a moment later , saw nothing suspicious , could not get past the locked fence , and left .
The attack caused leakage of 52,000 gallons of cooling oil and disabled 17 transformers ; a blackout in portions of Silicon Valley was narrowly averted through power re-routing and conservation .
Jon Wellinghoff , then chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission , visited the site afterward and brought along military experts .
What if a Well-Coordinated Attack Were to Occur on a Critical Infrastructure Facility Today ? What if we Could Identify the Exact Location of the Attack , in Less than Five Seconds ? ( Image Credit : WSJ )
The Metcalf Attack On 16 April 2013 , just before 1AM , intruders lifted the heavy cover of a telecom underground utility vault near the Metcalf power substation just south of San Jose , CA .
They concluded that it was a planned professional job , and Mr . Wellinghoff stated the attack was “ the most significant incident of domestic terrorism involving the grid that has ever occurred ” in the US . They cut fiber optic telecom cables in the vault , disrupting communications in the area ; a few minutes later , they entered a second vault nearby and severed more telecom cables .
Then , starting around 1:30 , they focused rifle fire on high voltage transformers inside the substation fence . The shooting lasted nearly twenty minutes , and then the saboteurs vanished into
( Hear from Jon Wellinghoff , and Mark Weatherford , former deputy undersecretary of the Department of Homeland Security , about future risks and protection directly , courtesy of Homeland Security Mgmt , PBS and YouTube )
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