Posted on 06/03/2007 1:45:32 PM PDT by gpapa
Life isn't a movie and terrorists can pick better targets than gas pipelines, which I guess is the reason why nobody has bothered with it yet.
a potential terrorist doesn’t need the media to tell him. He can see it with his own eyes. I have a vacation picture of myself posing next to the alaska pipeline. It mysifies me why nobody has it it yet. They wouldn’t even need a bomb. Several years ago a drunk hunter shot it full of holes and shut it down for two weeks.
An alarmist story. We have a gas pipeline that runs through our town. A few years ago some construction worker dug into it with his backhoe. Explosion and fire followed, but it wasn’t catastrophic. In fact it was less than 200 feet from the highway and travel as fine. I believe automatic safeguards shut the flow off within minutes.
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You are correct,,,any fuel pipeline gas/nat.gas etc. will shut itself down if there is a pressure drop,,,No it ain’t gunna blow miles of pipe and product out of the ground,,,
It can cause a fire where the break is till the fuel burns
off,,,FOX is still havin’ a quivering fit over this story...
you can see aerials here, pipeline routes, markings, its all here.
totally unprotected, but there really is now way to protect these lines 100% w/o taking the fight to the islamists.
http://cryptome.org/jfk-tanks/jfk-tanks.htm
http://cryptome.org/bkngas-eyeball.htm
‘Anybody who might suggest that “we’re better off fighting them here than there” is either a.) ignorant or b.) on the wrong side.’
The fallacy in these arguments, the way either form puts it, is the implicit assumption that “there” and “here” are mutually exclusive. Given the nature of the conflict, the fight is being waged in “all of the above” places, and this will be the case for as long as the struggle goes on, i.e., most likely for many decades to come.
The main constraint on suicide-homicide tactics is the low population of potential perpetrators who are both (1) fully committed to being jihadi suicides, and (2) intelligent, knowledgeable, and tightly wound enough to be able to identify, approach, and successfully hit a significant target.
Even with large pools of “enthusiastic recruits” allegedly developed in recent years, the proportion who can satisfy all of these requirements is quite small, and the number who have survived the attrition of our “roach hotels” in Iraq and Afghanistan is even smaller.
The various comments to the effect that our infrastructure remains very vulnerable to damage is quite correct, and it will remain so until a sequence of successful “hits” have persuaded risk managers that the benefit of further vulnerability reduction is worth the cost of achieving it.
Despite the recriminations that inevitably will follow successful attacks, I think this approach makes good sense. No society has infinite resources, and excessive consumption of resources on risk reduction can be as ruinous as high profile successful attacks. As enterprises increasingly arrange their activities to allow prompt recoveries from catastrophic resource interruptions, the attackers’ task will become increasingly difficult and costly, and thus less likely to succeed, or be attempted.
These ongoing “disaster recovery planning” activities are pervasive. My financial services company, after several years of effort, has tested contingency plans in place that would have us up and running with critical services in a couple of days at an alternate site even if our headquarters were completely destroyed with large loss of staff in the event.
These plans are not foolproof and a simultaneous attack that destroyed many facilities at once (e.g., a nearby nuke or dirty nuke) could make implementation impossible, but in the case of such an event, we would all have other priorities anyway. We are reasonably prepared for more likely, though still remotely probable events (e.g., natural disasters are still much more likely than a jihadi attack). Having made reasonable preparations for this, we get on with our normal work, and leave it to the potential attackers to try to figure out how to make their attacks severe enough to be worth the attempt. Regardless of media hype, and continuing vulnerability, I think the potential attackers have a much tougher problem to crack than they did a few years ago, and it will get ever tougher as time passes.
Definitely "Bad Touch." Hang 'em. ;-)
Under the circumstances, it's really quite impossible to get worked up over a journalist being able to touch a pipeline...
This newspaper article has an important point to tell. When you’re fighting a war, you must be fighting on the offense. There’s no way any culture or country can conceivably defend every target from enemy attack. The best available option is to take the battle to the enemy and attack them, preferably on his home turf and employing a focused, unrelenting strategy.
Too bad we’re f***ing up with that focused and unrelenting strategy part, what with the Democrats and the major media undermining the war at every turn. It’s also too bad that the guys supposedly fighting the war seem to be clueless about issues of propoganda, stirring speeches, educating the public, and undermining your opponents. I don’t really mind living in a place where the Copperheads or the Tories get to say their piece (or whatever they’ll be called by historians), but it does bother me that Bush and others seem to be powerless in the advance of the agenda of the New York Times.
You can’t guard every pipeline. A bullet cleanly placed in each person expressing the desire to destroy the United States and replace it with a caliphate seems a much better response.
Two words:
PATRIOT ACT
Gee. It was fairly secure during WWII, Korea, Vietnam...why is that?
Maybe...just maybe...the policy of not letting in our natural enemies and calling them 'immigrants' back then might have had something to do with that?
Immigration from the Third World has led to all of this, both legal and illegal. The people from hellhole countries are the ones who made them hellholes. Doesn't it sorta follow that they will do the same here?
Don't just end Third world immigration, reverse it. Cause a net outflow. Otherwise, we end up living in a police state, the only way to hold together a polyglot 'nation' that will never exist.
I’m reminded of that story a little over a year (or two?) ago, where a reporter gave this great speal abot how easy it was to get close to the cities water supplies, and how easy it would be to poison it.
Turn out the idiot found the waste-water facility storage.
LOL,,,Must’a been “up-wind”...;0)
I have supported this man steadfastly through two elections, and convinced friends and family to vote for him who would have otherwise voted for one of his opponents. My loyalty has been repaid with contempt, and I return contempt in like fashion.
I'm not as pissed off over our policy differences as I am in his latest speech, in which he seemed to imply that I'm a nativist, un-American bigot for daring to question his crappy immigration policy. I live in the Twin Cities metro area, and by default have many friends from all over the world, including Mexico. My best friend growing up was an immigrant from India. For him to question MY decency and imply that I'm a nativist xenophobe over my opposition to the crappy bill he's currently pimping is beneath contempt.
So I will quit calling him Shrub for you, whom I both respect, and to raise myself out of his gutter-level rhetoric, for which I have nothing but contempt. I apologize for for offending you by using a pejorative that was coined by a leftist.
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