Investigators recovered from both scenes where substations were damaged nearly two dozen shell casings from a high-powered rifle, law enforcement sources told CNN.
While no rifle has been recovered, the ballistics may still offer critical evidence. Bullets pulled from a transformer station and brass shell casings found a short distance away are being examined, according to the sources.
The casings can be entered into a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives database and matched to any other shell casings fired by the same gun at another crime scene, or to the gun itself if it’s found.
A resident who lives near the West End substation told CNN affiliate WRAL he heard around 20 gunshots in quick succession the night of the attack on the station. He said the power did not go out for about 30 minutes after that, the station reported.
Was there an attack in SC?
Duke Energy said it is also working closely with the FBI after reports of shots fired near the Wateree Hydro Station in Ridgeway, South Carolina, a spokesperson told CNN.
“There are no outages reported. There is no known property damage at this time,” Brooks, the Duke Energy spokesperson, said.
Ridgeway is about 146 miles from Moore County and 26 miles north of Columbia.
A “good” criminal will never allow their fingerprints to get on the brass in the first place. They will wear gloves when unpackaging the rounds and loading them into the magazine.
That’s kinda my point: few criminals are “good” enough to think that far ahead. If these guys were dumb enough to leave brass behind, it seems likely they were also dumb enough to leave prints on the brass.
The FBI has about 78M sets of prints on file, many of which are from current and former military personnel. According to the link, that resource was started back in 1924, so many of the prints they have may be from long-deceased individuals. Probably a bit of overlap between their civil and criminal print files, but just using their files, there is (at best) a 23% chance that any print they find will be in their file. The more prints they collect from different perps in this case (very likely more than one person was involved), the more likely that eventually one of them will be in the database and can be identified. If they gather prints from three different perps, then the probability of at least one of them being in the database is better than 50%.
I have a sneaking suspicion that we’ll eventually find out that this has been happening on a regular basis forever, and that we’re only now learning about it because it happened to have really severe consequences for once. Like how sometimes there are arson sprees targeting churches with predominantly black congregations…but sometimes there’s a panic about it and we learn there are just a hell of a lot of church fires.
.308 ? Hmm. Semi-auto .308s are a bit more rare than AR-15s. They should be able to identify the kind of rifle by analyzing the witness marks on the spent cartridges (e.g. FAL, AR-10). And people who own those kind of rifles tend not to be drunk’n idiots doing stupid things.
It would not surprise me if there is pressure being put on the media to not report (or under-report) these incidences, in an effort to prevent copycats. But now I’m wondering if this is an organized effort. They also tend to be taking place in more rural areas.
As it is currently, I doubt it is an organized effort. Too scattered. If you are going to strike infrastructure with serious intent, you wait until a crunch point (like a serious polar vortex or the like) and hit concentrated targets. This still sounds like yahoos doing copycat hits for the lulz and to stand up for whatever batshittery they believe in. Sonner or later someone will get caught, and when they are executed on live TV sentenced to multiple life terms without parole for domestic terrorism, it might give others pause.
If hitting a transformer with a bullet would knock it out, we would have blackouts throughout the country, particularly after Thanksgiving and before New Year’s Day (Deer Season for a lot of places). Perhaps you fully understand the level of idiocy you can reach when you have Bubba and Billy Bob out in the woods in the pre-dawn hours with high-powered rifles, particularly if they haven’t seen a deer in days. Even a college degree or two wouldn’t help.
People who work in electrical distribution tell me having a transformer shot at has a low, but not non-zero frequency of occurrence. It happens. It doesn’t cause week-long blackouts for tens of thousands. To knock out an entire 230KV substation (two, actually) so that repairs take days and days is not just hitting a transformer with a bullet.
You are saying that they are out there taking shots at the transformers that deliver power to the homes of themselves and their neighbors just for shits and giggles? All across the country?
Not sure how to parse that. The way I read it is that transformers don’t get shot often, but they do get shot occasionally. But nothing about how often getting shot damages it.
Once again, that’s the difference between a transformer on a pole serving a few houses and a substation serving a city.
Well, there were dozens of shell casings found, so it sounds like it wasn’t “a bullet” but dozens of bullets.
I’m not sure where you are going with this. If it wasn’t the bullets that damaged the transformers, what are you saying did?
Perhaps we do but it doesn’t make national news when 20 people along a dirt road in Iowa lose power in the middle of deer season. It gets fixed the next day a life moves on.
I haven’t read that much about this outage but everything seems, to me at least, consistent with the idea that some yahoos put a bunch of bullets into a transformer that eventually shut off. There was 30 minutes between the sound of gunfire and the power shutting off. That sounds like, perhaps, the shooters put a bunch of holes in some mild steel in a giant transformer. It lost oil slowly until it was operating out of parameters and shut off. No special knowledge or skill required.
Frustrated hunters? Drunk’n idiots taking pot shots? For what purpose? I’m just not seeing it. These look like focused and deliberate actions to my eyes.
It’s one thing for drunk’n hunters in a truck to shoot a stop sign with birdshot (a gun they have been hunting with). It’s another thing to shoot a substation with a high power rifle.
The Ohio incident last month is interesting. The substation is located at (40.267276, -82.717458), which is a very rural area. Presumably this is what happened: the perpetrator(s) drove their car to the station, parked, walked around to the east side of the substation, and started shooting into it. They then walked to the south side and shot into it. They got back in their car and left. They used a .308 rifle - presumably semi-auto - which is almost never used for hunting in Ohio. (You can’t use it for deer or turkey hunting. I suppose it could be used for coyote hunting, but very few people hunt coyotes in Ohio.) And as I mentioned previously, .308 semi-auto rifles are not all that common; they’re expensive to buy, expensive to feed, and considered somewhat elite in the gun community.
Several Duke Energy employees saw an individual pull up in a truck around 5:30 p.m. Wednesday and use a long gun to fire shots near the Wateree Hydro Station in Ridgeway, S.C., and then speed away.
While one or more of these attacks could be domestic terrorism, I strongly suspect that a number of the earlier ones are more along the lines of “yuk yuk, har har har” sort of public vandalism or “who does this hurt?” dangerous stupidity, that people tend to overlook. At least, until they get caught and find out that they’re liable for millions in damages.
Again, the limited information we have so far in this case doesn’t strongly suggest either way, but I generally find stupidity wins out over actual evil in such events. If I end up being wrong, and this was a targeted effort against the Drag event or similar motivation, so be it. Either way, I hope the perpetrator gets caught and hit for all the damages plus all appropriate other legal consequences.
Perhaps. But people who engage in “yuk yuk, har har har” vandalism tend to brag to their friends about what they’ve done, and they’re soon caught. If these cases go months and months without arrests, then it means the perpetrators were smart enough to keep their mouths shut, which lends credence to the hypothesis that they’re not run-of-the-mill vandals.
Outside of weather, suspected and confirmed physical attacks on electric grid infrastructure have been the largest cause of electrical disturbance events since 2014 when, in response to an attack in California the year before, private companies that run power stations were required to increase security standards, according to an NBC News analysis of public Department of Energy reports.
Nearly 600 electric emergency incidents and disturbances were caused by suspected and confirmed physical attacks and vandalism on the electric grid in those nine years, the reports show. There have been 106 attack or vandalism incidents from January through August 2022, which is the latest the Energy Department data tracks. Among the years reviewed by NBC News, 2022 is the first that reached triple digits and it only contains eight months of data.
Who is doing this? Is it coordinated, or low-level vandalism? How many arrests have been made?
The reward is nice but only a first step. Publicize that if anyone knows the perpetrators and fails to come forward, they can be prosecuted as accessories. I’d include gun store owners in this. The idea is to produce pressure on not only the bad guys but those who know or suspect. Next is throwing the full book at anyone convicted. If they can make it Federal, so much the better. And bust everyone involved.
Fingerprints on the fired cartridge case is a no. “Fingerprints are rarely recovered from fired cartridge casings due to the factors a casing sustains during the firing process. One factor affecting the likelihood of developing a fingerprint from a casing is the friction between the casing and the gun through the firing process. Friction occurs between the magazine and casing as the casing is loaded into the magazine. Friction also occurs when the casing enters the chamber before firing and when the casing is ejected from the chamber after firing. The casing is exposed to high temperatures and combustion gases during the firing process that can affect the oils and sweat from a fingerprint on a casing that would be used in development (Champod et al. 2005).”
? Hmm. Semi-auto .308s are a bit more rare than AR-15s. They should be able to identify the kind of rifle by analyzing the witness marks on the spent cartridges (e.g. FAL, AR-10). And people who own those kind of rifles tend not to be drunk’n idiots doing stupid things.
They also tend to be taking place in more rural areas.