On April 16, 2013, the PG&E Metcalf Power Substation came under attack. The station provides power to much of California’s Santa Clara Valley, a region home to institutions like Facebook and Stanford.
Around 1 AM, someone cut fiber optic cables near U.S. Route 101 just outside San Jose, and Metcalf Power Substation lost internet and phone service. Cables inside a vault near the station were also cut, and area customers lost power. A surveillance camera along a chain link fence outside Metcalf recorded a bright streak, likely from a waved flashlight, followed by the bright muzzle flash of rifles. The bullets tripped the motion sensor alarms back at PG&E when they cut through the fencing, and an engineer from a nearby power plant soon called the Santa Clara Sheriff’s Department to report gunfire. A few minutes later, a failure alarm came on at PG&E - the first bank of transformers had overheated and leaked 52,000 gallons of oil. A few minutes after that, surveillance cameras recorded another flashlight signal, and that was the end of the attack. Officers arrived at Metcalf right after, but all they found was quiet, and over a hundred spent 7.62x39mm shell casings. To this day, no one has been identified or charged in connection to what happened.
Whoever attacked Metcalf Power Substation that night knew what they were doing. Not a single fingerprint was found on the any of the shell casings. Stacks of rocks were found all over the surrounding area, which were likely used to gauge firing distance. The attackers knew where to dig to disable the fiberoptic cables, and they knew the location of every camera so as to avoid being caught on video. They also knew exactly where to attack the substation itself — the cooling fans, which were the weakest part of the transformers.
Following the attack, the federal government simulated an attack on the nation’s electrical grid, and the results were less than comforting. The simulation found that a group of unskilled actors — people less capable than those who attacked Metcalf — could take down most of the grid in a matter of minutes. The report received an exclamation point when Metcalf was hit again soon after its release, this time by thieves who entered the site undetected and stole copies of maintenance and exercise reports — surely trying to stay ahead of the game.
Since I was a kid, I’ve been fascinating by testing the limits of systems. How many blocks can you remove the stack before it comes down? How hard do I really need to work on my homework to get the desired grade? And even, during a brief childhood shoplifting phase, how can I make off with baseball cards so as to avoid store cameras and tag scanners? It had consequences during my maturation that I had to correct for — perhaps nurtured a laziness and tendency to underestimation that had to be corrected by hard learning, not to mention moral refinement when it comes to stealing. But it also gave me an appreciation for the fact that so much of the strength of our various systems relies on the shared belief in their strength. That if enough people really wanted to, and were prepared to take on risk and consequences, that most of the barriers standing between this side of civilization to the other can be jumped rather easily.
And so important systems like the power grid, built on the back of enormous investment and enormous belief, find their throats exposed if enough people in the right places at the right times decide they should no longer work. Usually enough barricades are put up to present a level of difficulty, things like the lock on your front door that will deter 99% of would-be intruders but not that one burgler who really wants to get inside your house. But sometimes even those barriers aren’t thrown up, or are left to decay by declining care and declining skill.
So who hit the Metcalf Power Substation? Chinese agents? Anti-government agitators? Neo-luddite anarchists? Former soldiers testing the staying power of their skills with a bit of mayhem? Online radicals who re-read Industrial Society and It’s Future enough to get their energy up? Procedurally, it could have been any of them., or none of them. And there’s the rub, I suppose.
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