FOX news crew was just talking about this. They seemed to conclude it was far-fetched. It's not hard for me to believe however.
Prairie
That settles it. I guess the Islamofascists are all bedwetters.
Just wait until the enviromentalist get hold of them. Then they will be sorry.
Yeah, maybe, but wouldn't it make more sense for the terrorist to commit acts that would never be mistaken for a natural event? There is no ambiguity when a bomb takes out a building. Not so with a brush or forest fire.
The news media does NOT report these incidents since they would back the "theory" of terrorist attack on our soil!
http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/story/7657408p-8597551c.html More power towers are discovered vandalized
By Carrie Peyton Dahlberg -- Bee Staff Writer
Published 2:15 a.m. PDT Friday, October 24, 2003
As authorities issued an arrest warrant Thursday and the tally of vandalized electric towers grew to four, power experts said this is far from the first time that someone has tried to disable, dynamite or shoot at high-voltage towers.
Sometimes the sabotage has caused outages, and other times it has had no impact at all, even when transmission towers came tumbling down.
"More often than not there's no loss of customer load, no customer outages," said Dennis Eyre, chief executive officer of the Western Electricity Coordinating Council, which sets rules for how utilities operate on the Western power grid.
The reassurances haven't diminished the intensity of the hunt for Michael Devlyn Poulin, 62, whom the FBI named Thursday as its suspect in the attempted sabotage of high-voltage lines in Oregon and California.
"We're most anxious to locate and arrest him so that he's not able to continue attempting these types of activities," said FBI Special Agent Karen Ernst.
Meanwhile, federal power workers said Thursday that the sprawling federal Bonneville Power Authority discovered one tower with missing bolts in northern Oregon on Monday and another in central Oregon on Wednesday. The FBI suspects that Poulin, acting alone, tampered with those two towers, as well as another in Oregon and the one near Redding in Northern California where a culprit was seen, prompting the search.
There has been no indication of why Poulin, who has a background of political activism and an explosives conviction, might allegedly be targeting power lines.
He served time in Folsom Prison for injuring his girlfriend's father with an explosive device, according to a Bee account from 1979. State Department of Corrections records show Poulin served eight years, from 1971 to 1979, after being convicted in San Mateo County of using an explosive device that causes "death, mayhem or great bodily injury."
He later lived in the East Bay Area, where he was active in Palestinian issues, before he and his wife moved to Spokane, Wash., to be closer to their grandchildren, said Mary Moore, a friend, fellow activist and editor of the online Sonoma County Free Press.
Neither violence nor energy issues attracted him when she knew him best and he wrote for her publication, Moore recalled.
The FBI is asking people to call authorities if they spot Poulin or his truck, a gray 1997 Toyota T-100 pickup with a white shell attached and Washington state license plate A36457P.
The FBI does not believe there is any connection with an earlier, unsolved Oregon case of someone removing bolts from guy wires that held up a high-voltage tower near Bend a few days before New Year's in 1999. That tower fell, but power was rerouted, no blackouts occurred, and the tower was righted the next day, Bonneville officials said.
Bonneville helicopter crews have been using binoculars to patrol power lines and look for more missing bolts.
"Bringing down a transmission line, anyplace, can cause major outages. The system is designed to prevent that, but it can happen," said Bonneville spokesman Ed Mosey.
Bonneville was targeted by an extortionist in the 1970s who dynamited towers and demanded money, but even those assaults did not cause outages, he said.
Around the country, attackers have gone after high-voltage towers with welding torches and explosives, and undermined them by shearing off or removing bolts, often with minimal effect, grid experts said.
"There's some resilience built into the system," said Eyre.
That's partly because industry operating guidelines, set by the North American Electric Reliability Council, require that the grid be able to recover without a glitch from the single worst failure of a major power line or power plant, said Lou Leffler, the council's manager of critical infrastructure protection.
Eyre said he believed federal records were once kept on vandalism incidents, but Leffler and others were reluctant to give many specifics, for fear of encouraging copycat or escalating attacks.
News coverage from pre-9/11 days has been far more specific, noting 1980s episodes of lines to a nuclear plant being disabled in Arizona and of a Kentucky high-voltage tower dynamited during a mine strike. In the 1990s, bolt removals took down a small power line in New York state and a Pacific Gas and Electric Co. line near Santa Cruz, in incidents that caused outages, according to published accounts.
Experts say a person wishing to cause major blackouts by downing a tower would need a fairly thorough knowledge of the power grid's workings at that specific point in time.
"The conditions would have to be just right," said Ross McFate, director of line maintenance at the Western Area Power Administration. "Even then ... we have ways of switching things around and getting back up quick, so it's not a critical thing like railroads or taking out the Golden Gate Bridge."
About the Writer
The Bee's Carrie Peyton Dahlberg can be reached at (916) 321-1086 or
cpeytondahlberg@sacbee.com. http://www.spadata.com Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom of Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretence, raised in the United States.
-- Noah Webster
This would be so easy for the terrorists to do that I'd be surprised if they hadn't already tried it.
I've been concerned about this for some time. It's cheap, it's easy, and you can get all the info you need about areas with the worst drought conditions from online. You wouldn't need anything more sophisticated than a a car, a map, a few boxes of military trioxane bars and a finger to test the wind direction.
Uh, didn't the Al Qaeda propagandist warn muslims to be prepared to endure shortages and a blanket of smoke the Ramadan? Didn't they say the earth would burn beneath our feet. Seem's far fetched? NOT.
The reason the government discounts this is because of the anger and loss of confidence (economic dislocation) that would result should it be determined to be an act of war.
Immediately after 9/11, I, who live in So. Calif., said, if they want to demolish OUR economy, all they need do is start fires on a hot, dry day.
I live in San Diego County, and paced from the TV to the street yesterday, assessing the need to evacuate.
Many businesses will be closed today, and the air quality is BAD. The smell of smoke fills the air. It well could be another day of battling the fires, and resources get drained.
Very doubtful. A-rabs prefer their actions to be obvious and dramatic. Wildfires are a part of the West.
It was a white, Christian, Bush-supporting conservative. Maybe Steven Hatfill did it.