
Unknown Assailants Fire On, Destroy Transformers at California Power Substation - joshwa
http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702304851104579359141941621778-lMyQjAxMTA0MDAwNDEwNDQyWj
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dredmorbius
Key takeaway: the replacement time for transformers is very nontrivial:

 _The country 's roughly 2,000 very large transformers are expensive to build,
often costing millions of dollars each, and hard to replace. Each is custom
made and weighs up to 500,000 pounds, and "I can only build 10 units a month,"
said Dennis Blake, general manager of Pennsylvania Transformer in Pittsburgh,
one of seven U.S. manufacturers. The utility industry keeps some spares on
hand._

Attacks at a number of sites could cripple electricity distribution
infrastructure across large areas of the US for months, and force utilities to
prioritize repairs among widely disparate locations: if Washington, NYC, San
Jose, and Minneapolis are all wiped out, are you going to protect the
government, banking and financial sector, high tech, or a large population who
will freeze or roast without power?

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lsaferite
At the risk of ending up on a list somewhere, taking out a few key employees
at the 7 places making replacements in conjunction with taking out key
transformers and you suddenly have a crisis on your hands. That worries me a
whole lot more than some idiot on a plane.

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dredmorbius
Suppose you've got an enemy who can slip sight-unseen through airport
security, pass through fences and walls as if they don't exist, infiltrate
homes and offices by way of schoolchildren, target its victims on transit and
in theaters, and kill between 2 and 30% of the population.

That's the scenario for a widespread pandemic disease outbreak on the scale of
the Spanish Flu. H5N1 mortality rate reported by WHO is 60% (though this could
be a result of only seeing more virulent cases -- it might be as low as 30% --
which is to say, vastly higher than any global pandemic of the past century:
[http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/overestimating_avian...](http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/overestimating_avian_flu/)).

Which raises the question: what is civilization's bus number? How many people
in critical positions could be taken, whether by terrorists (homegrown or
otherwise) or disease, without having strongly negative effects?

No need to limit your speculation to human agents.

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lsaferite
I was more addressing the country level directed attack with my post.

I try not to think about global pandemics, otherwise I'd have to live in the
middle of nowhere in a sealed structure to feel safe.

If we have an extinction level event, it'll likely be a global pandemic or
significant climate shift. In either case we are totally fscked.

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mjfl
This is kind of a big deal, if this becomes a trend...

