Guest post by Karl Denninger from his blog on market-ticker.org:
Municipality and county officials “have formed a plan for the night and the next few nights that we may be out of power. It’s a very serious situation,” Fields said. “So we’ve come to an agreement to best protect our citizens and to protect the businesses of our county, we’re going to implement a curfew tonight.”
The power outage in Moore County is being investigated as a “criminal occurrence” after crews found signs of potential vandalism at several locations, CNN previously reported.
Two substations taken out with (presumed) small-arms rifle fire (e.g. bog-standard hunting rifles) from what obviously were a very small group of people, perhaps one or two at each location pissed off about who-knows-what.
Question: Why couldn’t this be immediately fixed?
Answer: They don’t have spares for the parts that were damaged.
It’s a gun folks, not a large blast that destroyed the land around the area. Equipment was damaged. Ok, so replace it and turn the power back on.
That only works if you have the replacements, which they obviously do not. There is nowhere in this nation where you can’t drive a truck full of equipment across a single county in a couple of hours. Doing so requires you have the replacements.
Why do they not have the spares?
Because we sent our supply lines overseas, we made no provisions to have spares, and the regulators at the state and federal level sat on their hands and played with themselves instead of requiring that providers of critical services, such as electricity, had a sufficient stock of spares to cover both routine failures and those caused by weather or low-grade assaults perpetrated by small numbers of people.
This is the gross incompetence we have throughout our society. It is the manifestation of “oh nothing bad will ever happen so we don’t have to be prepared for it” that has shown up in all manner of other places, such as the cars that are completed except for chips in their engine computers without which they will not run, and thus they’re sitting in a field unsold.
Rather than insist that such critical items be produced here in the United States, including all precursor components over the last couple of decades we did nothing of the sort. We allowed the nickel to be “saved” and then pocketed by the shareholders, directors and officers while offshoring supply to China and other places which have no duty to US citizens.
We then went further in our official malfeasance and performed no audits or forced corrective action when the spares were not available and resupply looked possibly challenged, to the point that vehicles are stacked up and can’t be sold for want of a chip and now power is out in an entire county because the switchgear and transformers in two bog-standard substations that feed the area were damaged and the power company has no spares available to immediately replace them.
What you should learn from this is that this sort of disruption is tiny compared to what ever one hundred dedicated men, uncorrelated and thus unable to be interdicted in advance could do any time they decided to.
Further, while I’m sure they’ll find the parts somewhere in the US and restore power if the damage was to fifty counties instead of one the odds are high that said parts would not exist at all in the United States and might not be available in sufficient quantity to actually restore service to everyone for months or even longer.
“Oh, that could never happen”, says you?
We have a secure border and a group of a couple hundred gang-banger terrorists that want to screw America couldn’t get in along with all those “migrants” undetected and do this all over the place right?
What if you’re wrong?
Guest post by Karl Denninger from his blog on market-ticker.org:
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