Excerpt
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): Now, just how vulnerable is the United States’ electrical power grid? It’s a question getting new attention, after The Wall Street Journal published a detailed account of an organized sniper attack on an electrical substation near San Jose, California, last April.
Shortly before 1:00 a.m., someone cut telephone cables near the substation. About a half-hour later, multiple gunmen quickly fired dozens of shots at 17 transformers inside the perimeter of the station. Fifteen minutes later, transformers began to fail.
But officials managed to avoid serious disruptions by rerouting power. The shooters escaped before police arrived, and they have not been caught. The chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission at the time of the attack, Jon Wellinghoff, has described it as the most serious domestic terror attack on the grid.
Yesterday, I recorded a two-part conversation about this incident, starting with Wellinghoff.
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