N.C. vandalism shows vulnerabilties of rural substations

Duke Energy personnel working to restore power at a crippled
substation in Carthage, N.C., on Sunday. (Photo by Reuters)

This weekend's electric-substation attack in Moore County, North Carolina, was extreme, "About 40,000 Duke Energy customers remained without power Sunday after at least two substations sustained damage attributed to firearms attacks on Saturday night. . . . and state investigators and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have been called in," reports Robert Walton of Energy Dive. It caused “a regional outage that may take several days to recover from.”

The outage emphasizes vulnerabilities in the rural substation system. Walton writes, "Transmission substations are not generally built in high population density areas." According to experts Walton spoke to, substation vandalism is common. But this attack was "planned, targeted attack involving multiple substations,” Walton says quoting an email from Kevin Perry, former director of critical infrastructure protection at Southwest Power Pool.

"Saturday’s North Carolina substation attack is reminiscent of an attack in 2013 when gunmen fired on Pacific Gas & Electric Co.’s Metcalf substation in California," Walton writes. "There is at least one major difference, however." In the California incident there was no outage "because there was sufficient redundancy with other substations in the area to allow the failed substation to be bypassed,” Perry told Walton. That substation served Silicon Valley and also involved cutting of fiber-optic cables in a vault; the case remains unsolved and no motive has been officially ascribed.

"The North American Electric Reliability Corp. [a nonprofit international authority] has critical infrastructure protection rules . . . meant to secure physical infrastructure," security consultant Tom Alrich told Walton in an email. In North Carolina, "It is not clear that the substations that were attacked fall under those rules."

To address substation sabotage, funding is needed, and plans to make attacks more difficult. Of the California incident, Perry said: "The attackers shot the transformers they could readily see and target. If you can disrupt the line of sight, perhaps by incorporating obscuring materials into the perimeter fencing, you can reduce the risk of catastrophic damage to the substation equipment." Perry also noted that barriers "disrupt airflow, which becomes a problem itself."

U.S. Rep. Richard Hudson, who represents Moore County, said Sunday that the attack's motive “remains unknown." But "online, there has been speculation that the attack was related to opposition to a local drag show" going on at the time of the attack, Walton reports. Charlotte Stories reports that police interviewed a local activist who said online that she knew why the power was out and posted a photo of the drag-show site, but she told the police that God was responsible for the outage. Officials said the substation damage appeared to be done by a knowledgeable person with intent. For local coverage of the show, a protest, the investigation and how residents are coping, from The Pilot of Southern Pines, click here. UPDATE: Here's its latest front page (download for clearer version):