By Chuck Warren
Three vandal attacks on electrical stations in Tacoma, Washington, left thousands without power on Christmas Day. The nationwide number of such attacks against power stations peaked at 97 last year. This year broke that record, entering triple digits. This has been a growing phenomenon. The most infamous case is the 2020 Christmas bombing of an AT&T power center in Nashville, TN.
It is time to accept this as a fully emerged trend that is going to get worse if not addressed through public policy. And we could tackle two problems at once: Protecting our power infrastructure while lifting veterans by offering these jobs to them, being already qualified for security jobs.
We do not know the cause of this problem. Are these, like school shootings, lone wolves inspired by each other, or is it organized? Steve Hayward, an environmental policy expert, suggests that the phenomenon has the smell of eco-terrorism, environmentalists who want to fight greenhouse gas emissions. It is plausible. Whether this or another underlying factor is causing it, just like school shootings, it requires fixing the root causes.
But in the meantime, while fixing the root causes, we should also make sure that people don’t face power outages. Nearly nine years ago, I detected and wrote about this emerging trend. “A well-planned and executed attack on several substations could easily cause rolling blackouts and leave millions of Americans without power for days, or perhaps far longer,” adding, “It is achievable, not to mention relatively inexpensive, to create a force of guards for America’s transmission substations comprised of unemployed veterans.”
As Politico reports, it is “extremists, vandals and cyber criminals increasingly take aim at the nation’s critical infrastructure.” U.S. military equips its personnel to defend the nation against violent attacks, both physical and cyber. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics data, there were 386,000 unemployed veterans looking for work, most of them already trained with necessary skills to defend power stations.
The problem could become a nightmare.
Imagine if anti-nuclear-power activists decide to sabotage and attack nuclear plants. Nuclear plants are among the safest establishments in the world. Even Vladimir Putin’s bombs haven’t succeeded in causing a nuclear disaster. But these plants are secure because they have always foreseen threats and pre-emptively safeguarded themselves against them. Now there is a new threat. It might be counterintuitive to cause a nuclear incident to warn people about how destructive they could be, but we are not talking about rational people.
Years in a row, thousands of Americans have spent cold Christmas Days without power. With this no longer an anecdote but a trend, it is a bi-partisan, governmental failure that it is not fixed yet.
For all the talks about sexy new grand ideas to fix our politics, good old good government is out of fashion nowadays. But it is not out of utility. Overhauling the nation’s healthcare or education policy might rally the base, but those always take a backseat to taking out the trash—and making sure that people have power.
This proposal shouldn’t be controversial. It is neither expensive nor ideological, but it is worth every penny. Moreover, it is an investment in economic sustainability. Repairing the damage caused by such attacks is expensive in itself, but the cost in diminishing economic output is far higher. And one should also consider how the disruption would affect lives at retirement facilities or hospitals—or newborn babies at home who cannot endure freezing weather or summer heat for too long. Sure, hospitals have emergency microgrids for exactly this situation, but the money spent on the emergency battery is money not spent on buying more and better equipment to save lives.
There is a fiction that veterans are broken. This stigma, with little evidence but anecdotes, has prevented many veterans from an easy transition back into civilian life. Former secretary of defense and Marine Corps general, James Mattis, says, “you hear a lot about how coming out of the military means that you’re somehow damaged good; I would reject that.” He adds, “the most important thing that we could do is to provide jobs for those who get out of the military.” This program isn’t a big government jobs program. It is creating jobs that are needed, which the federal government has a stake in, and giving them to those who are already qualified.
It also restores Americans’ trust that their government can still attend to their basic needs. Protecting the nation’s key infrastructure is not partisan, and it shouldn’t be. Both parties can easily agree on this proposal. And by doing so, they will serve their constituents.
Come on Congress, I don’t want to have write about this again in another nine years.
Guarding US power grid from destructive actors must involve, as primary labor, a community of users. The community, township, county, city, village, must be organized to secure vulnerable assets and become prepared for surviving prolonged loss there of. This is called Civil Defense, and exists in little more than name only. Think tornadoes, hurricanes floods, etc.
My daughter had a 48 hour blackout this summer - in a near suburb of the State Capitol. Remote working without internet was not an option and she took a her conventional vehicle to an infrequently attended , powered, corporate office.
CD must be broader than just the grid. Think municipal water/sewage, cell towers, food chains, petroleum storage/distribution, natural gas etc.
The energy and devotion that developed US must now be channeled into defense of the product. FAST! We all can’t move to Idaho. To quote someone: “I’d rather be three years early, that one day late.”
Clyde Esch