United States: attacks on power plants cause trouble

Workers work to repair the Eastwood Generating Station in West End, North Carolina on Dec. 6, 2022. The infrastructure was vandalized.

AP - Travis Long

Text by: RFI Follow

1 min

In the United States, a series of attacks have targeted power plants in recent weeks, temporarily depriving thousands of homes of power.

Attacks that reveal the vulnerability of these strategic installations.

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With our correspondent in New York,

These attacks – around ten – took place in several states: Oregon, North Carolina and more recently in Washington State.

The FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) organizes the investigations.

So far, no suspects have been identified or arrested.

And the authorities say they are not yet able to know if these are coordinated attacks.

But these incidents raise fears of " 

 ", according to Roy Cooper, the governor of North Carolina.

Because electrical installations are, for the most part, very vulnerable.

They are simply protected by a wall, barriers or barbed wire that is fairly easy to circumvent.

The threat of far-right groups

In most cases of vandalism or attacks, perpetrators have been content to shoot transformers from afar.

Sometimes a single bottle thrown over the barriers is enough to cause damage.

The operators claim to have reinforced their security in recent years, but this remains insufficient.

Although there is no evidence that these recent attacks are linked, experts say they have been warning authorities for several years against the threat of far-right groups, whose discussion forums evoke this kind of scenario in order to create chaos.

In a recent report, the Department of Homeland Security confirms that this threat is real.

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• United States

• Crime

• Energies