December 5

 First Monday in December.  Chilly but not as cold as over the weekend. Supposed to be dry for the next couple of days and then some rain. No snow predicted for the next ten days or so.

As I read this story on CNN it struck a memory chord for me. I vaguely remembered a similar story from about ten years ago from California. I quickly found this account on Wikipedia of the California attack. Though the California company (PG&E) was able to quickly reroute power distribution to minimize disruptions for customers it did cost the company $15 million in direct costs to replace and repair equipment and another $100 million over three years to upgrade security. No one was ever arrested. The new incident was much more effective in terms of the numbers of people whose power has been interrupted because the company didn't have the option of rerouting power from nearby power stations. No estimates on the cost of the damage yet and no idea of who committed the crime. NBC posted a more extensive story with a couple of interesting points not carried by CNN. First, the conviction earlier this year of three men who pled guilty to terrorism charges for conspiring to take out power infrastructure. Second, that right wing extremists have long been interested in disrupting the electric grid. The California and North Carolina attacks were physical assaults but, in 2015, Ted Koppel wrote a book, Lights Out, which explored the real possibility that a cyber attack could do the same from a greater distance.