A power grid attack has caused the first "homicide by power outage"

An article in today’s Washington Post led off with this sentence: “An elderly North Carolina woman’s death when her oxygen machine failed during a power outage has been ruled a homicide by the state medical examiner and blamed on what authorities said was intentional gunfire that hit power substations in her area.”

The “intentional gunfire” in question occurred during shooting attacks on two power distribution substations in Moore County, NC on December 3, 2022. They left over 40,000 people without power for multiple days (which itself was a problem, since there’s so much redundancy built into the power grid that any outage should be remediated within hours, not days. At least, that’s the idea…). I wrote about these attacks in this post on Dec. 5 and this one on Dec. 7 (a date that is remembered for the far more serious attack on Pearl Harbor). These attacks were imitated soon afterwards in Oregon and Washington state, although no outage was caused there.

In the second post, I included this sentence, “(The outage) certainly caused damage, and people were injured in car crashes…. We may hear later about people on oxygen at home, etc. that were victims as well.” I don’t claim prescience, but that seems to be exactly what happened in this case. An elderly woman’s oxygen compression machine, which helped her breathe at night, didn’t work because of the outage; she died as a result. I agree that’s murder, given that the outage was human-caused.

Of course, nobody has been charged with murder because the police have so far not found whoever shot up the substations – and of course, they may never find them. But at least this serves as a warning to whoever thinks that causing a power outage is a way to make a political point. This was the reigning theory in December for the attacks in all three states.

These attacks were coordinated. People get drunk and shoot up substations all the time, but they don’t make a point of shooting up multiple substations at once – and they don’t usually know exactly where to shoot in order to cause an outage. These people seemed to know that.

I think that this type of attack – a physical attack on distribution substations – is the most likely to cause an outage compared to any cyberattack, or even compared to a physical attack on generation or transmission substations (which are much better protected now, thanks to the Metcalf attack and the subsequent development and implementation of NERC CIP-014). Of course, an attack on distribution would almost by definition never cause a cascading outage like the August 2013 event (which wasn’t caused by a deliberate attack. Why bother to attack if carelessness and lax procedures can produce the same effect?).

In any case, I’m glad the medical examiner ruled the woman’s death a homicide. That alone may prevent some future attacks.

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