As I write this, crews are working to restore power to about 40,000 customers in North Carolina after a substation was damaged, apparently by gunshots.
I did see that Moore County abuts Fort Bragg, which has plenty of problems of its own. I also hope that whoever did this gets caught quickly.
Are any Dopers affected by this?
Moved from the BBQ Pit to MPSIMS. I also added a Breaking News tag.
If there is some aspect of this that you would like to rant about in the Pit, feel free, but you will probably need to make the post a lot more Pit-worthy.
Sounds eerily similar to the Metcalf sniper attack of 2013.
I don’t have a citation, but it’s been well-documented elsewhere on this board that it was done by a right-wing militia that was attempting to shut down a drag show.
The rest of my opinion about that will have to go into the BBQ Pit (and how), but suspect and motive are relevant to this thread.
A lot of our infrastructure is poorly guarded/protected at best. Someone finally decided to take advantage of that. It’s a bit of a wonder it didn’t happen sooner.
How was such extensive damaged accomplished with gunfire? NPR quoted a representative of the power company that a lot of equipment must be replaced.
I read an article where local law enforcement was saying they did not know a cause yet and were not able to connect this to the drag show. Of course, it’s possible that they are incompetent, or not sharing this info for their own reasons, so if there are other reliable sources that DO say this was the cause, I’d love to see them.
Found it, from a local paper in Raleigh:
Perhaps the sheriff has partisanship clouding his judgement.
So, if this article can be trusted, the evidence against her is that she posted on FB “the power is out and I know why”. But, according to her and the police, she meant this in a “because God is punishing us for an immoral drag show” sense.
Whether this is true or not remains to be seen; we can hope that if she is lying and was simply able to fool the local police, that the FBI would sniff that out. But the alternative meaning doesn’t seem too farfetched - if a meteor struck the power station, her post would still make sense (well, coming from a deluded bigot like her).
Certainly another possibility, and one I only left out of my prior post in the interest of keeping MPSIMS less political. If that’s the case, one would hope that when the FBI finds out, both this lady and whoever helped her on the force will be caught.
I think the news of power grid attacks in Ukraine gave some bad people the idea in North Carolina.
I’m confidant the FBI will find the people responsible.
The FBI does tend to take domestic terrorism seriously.
The people responsible better hope the FBI finds them first. There’s 40,000 pissed off people in North Carolina.
The police are probably getting a lot of tips.
We have had enough warnings about the vulnerability of these things. We have done nothing.
The attack was timed to take place soon after the drag show started. This is a targeted hate crime. To their credit, they kept the show going on for 2 hours with people using flashlights. Hate will not win.
It has. An end-of-the-roader in Alaska ruptured the oil pipeline in 2001 by shooting at it.
The authorities probably don’t want to get too detailed about that lest there be copycats.
I doubt the housings were made of hardened armor plate.
(From 2012) .223 against 1/4 inch mild steel plate.
No armor piercing, just a sample of typical consumer grade ammo.