From SFist.com:

Around 1 a.m. on April 16th last year, a team of attackers cut phone lines and took out 17 power transformers at a PG&E substation south of San Jose, nearly causing a blackout throughout Silicon Valley. According to the former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, it was the “most significant incident of domestic terrorism” involving the nation’s power grid. No one has been charged or arrested in the attack.

The Wall Street Journal, broke news of the attack today, pieced together a timeline of events that unfolded in the middle of the night, just yards from Highway 101:

The attack began just before 1 a.m. on April 16 last year, when someone slipped into an underground vault not far from a busy freeway and cut telephone cables. Within half an hour, snipers opened fire on a nearby electrical substation. Shooting for 19 minutes, they surgically knocked out 17 giant transformers that funnel power to Silicon Valley. A minute before a police car arrived, the shooters disappeared into the night.

The team of gunmen knew what they were doing in the caper too: they targeted oil-filled cooling systems that bled out until the transformers overheated and crashed rather than shooting up the explosion-prone transformers themselves. The crash triggered an alarm at a PG&E control center 90 miles away, but police on the scene around 1:51 a.m. couldn’t get past a locked fence and assumed everything was fine.

And I would say: yes.  That is a terrorist event.  It was a purposeful event, an incident requiring skill and pre-planning and the proper equipment to order to execute it fully.  Its sophistication required professional application.  Attackers knew camera blind spots.

Nearly a year later and FBI officials in San Francisco tell the WSJ, the Bureau doesn’t think a terrorist organization was behind the attack, but they are “continuing to sift through the evidence.” PG&E’s official statement claimed it was the work of vandals, but made no mention of the nearly 100 fingerprint-free shell casings that were found at the scene. Former FERC chairmain Jon Wellinghoff, meanwhile, saw fit to go public with the details after military experts confirmed the scene looks like a professional job.

The snipers — plural — shot for roughly 20 minutes.  I repeat: this was no act of “vandalism.”  This certainly could be a sort of “dress rehearsal” for a similar event or series of future events.  52,000 gallons of oil leaked.  AK-47 shell casings were found.  Lights were utilized for coordination.  Rocks were left for points of assault.

From FoxNews.com:

According to a chronology assembled by the Journal based on state and federal filings by PG&E, the operation lasted 52 minutes. It began when communications cables in two vaults near the substation were cut. Then, unknown snipers fired over 100 shots from rifles aimed at the substation’s transformers, knocking out 17 of them. Utility workers needed 27 days to repair the damage, and officials only avoided a blackout in the area by rerouting power around the site and asking power plants in nearby Silicon Valley to produce more electricity.

An attack on a facility or facilities like this are serious because the equipment used in these stations is extremely expensive and highly customized.  Replacement of transformers or other technical pieces of equipment could take over a month and up to a year, depending upon the type of materiel affected.

This should be a major wake-up call, particularly considering al Qaeda made mention of the tact that it could terrorize the US by merely setting a series of forest fires.

Heads-up, America.

Final Note — HERE’S THE DISTURBING POINT:

Given the bias of the current Obama Administration, including Mr Obama himself and AG Eric Holder — both of them clear racists — the FBI has not trumpeted far and wide about an arrest or a series of arrests involving local and/or domestic Caucasoid terrorists.  Because, given said bias, had that been true you know those press conferences would have been released and heralded.

And just who does that leave?  I’m sure you can do the math on that one.

BZ