Electrical Transmission Towers Sabotaged

Officials won't call it terrorism, but something is going on with electrical transmission towers in California, Oregon, Washington and Idaho.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports that the weekend collapse of two electric transmission towers was caused by someone purposely removing bolts that held the towers in place:

"It has clearly been determined that bolts have been tampered with. That is what caused these things to come down," Oak Creek Police Chief Tom Bauer said during a Sunday afternoon news conference near the site where the two towers fell, knocking out electricity to 17,000 customers, including Mitchell International Airport.

According to the Journal Sentinel:

As the 80-foot towers collapsed, they brought down at least one nearby power line, which was still draped across the tracks Sunday.

A southbound Canadian Pacific freight train stopped on the tracks about 75 yards north of the downed lines. It was still on the tracks Sunday.

FBI Special Agent Jeffrey Troy said his agency has issued a general warning to municipalities to watch for tampering with infrastructure and that FBI offices nationwide had been alerted.

Bauer and FBI Special Agent Jeffrey Troy declined to call the incident a terrorist act:

"It's too early to tell," Bauer said.

The Journal Sentinel reports that there have been similar incidents targeting electrical transmission towers:

In February, a 62-year-old Spokane, Wash., man was sentenced to 27 months in federal prison for removing bolts in legs of about 20 electrical transmission towers in California, Oregon, Washington and Idaho.

[. . .]

Troy said transmission towers had been targeted by other people in other regions as well.

[. . .]

Blankenheim [a spokeswoman for Waukesha-based American Transmission Co., which owns the towers] and Troy said bolts were removed from another tower in April 2003 in the Town of Lisbon. But Blankenheim said it was believed those were removed as part of a prank and not as an act of sabotage.

The FBI's "general warning" to municipalities to watch for tampering with infrastructure is pretty lame. Too much effort has been expended targeting electric transmission towers for this to just be a prank. We haven't heard the end of this.

Thanks to Sean Hackbarth at The American Mind for the tip. Sean posts that if this was a terrorist attack it could put fear into America's heartland, East Coast would no longer be the only successful targets.

Comments

[David Mobley]

Turns out there's a back story to this which I vaguely remembered (see my prev. comment); I now have the whole story up here: http://dmobley.blogspot.com/2004/10/transmission-tower-sabotage.html. They arrested some guy for sabotaging transmission transmission towers after a round of sabotage last October. They also issued some security warnings which must not have been followed, since the sabotage here was successful.

[David Mobley]

If I remember correctly, they caught some guy removing bolts from transmission towers something like a year ago. And suspicious activity like this had been seen even prior to that. Someone might get somewhere using Google on this one.
Unfortunately, in our open society, there are a LOT of things that can be attacked. Incidentally, I think this is one reason why Bush's point that the terrorists only have to be right once is a good one -- there's tons of ways they can attack us. So we need to get the terrorists before they can attack, not just try to defend possible targets. You can't guard every transmission tower in the U.S.