What happened with the substation attack in North Carolina?
practical.engineering
practical.engineering
There was another one elsewhere [Washington state [1]] and they found out the perps did it to facilitate knocking over some business of some sort. So, just because it quacks like a duck does not mean it either walks like a duck nor end ends up being a duck.
There have also been attacks in Utah by so called environmentalists[2] in an attempt to blunt or "protest" the use of fossil fuels in producing electricity.
But, you know, people like narratives which match their ideology a whole lot.
[1]https://www.cbsnews.com/news/matthew-greenwood-jeremy-crahan...
[2]https://stopfossilfuels.org/electric-grid/shooting-transform...
If I fancied myself to be an antigovernment militia leader who had read all the white supremacist literature from the last 40 years that repeatedly describes attacking critical infrastructure like pipelines, telecoms and electricity pylons and substations to create chaos and ignite the race war, I'd definitely teach my inexperienced acolytes to add a little petty theft to their sabotage to avoid a terrorism enhancement when they're caught probing the defenses and response times of utilities and law enforcement.
Headline: Man Steals Car
"Well, if I fancied myself a racewar enthusiast of course I would _say_ it was for money but it would obviously be in support of creating chaos and undermining the government institutions to allow for our brothers to rise against".
> white supremacist literature from the last 40 years that repeatedly describes attacking critical infrastructure like pipelines, telecoms and electricity pylons and substations to create chaos
I've seen such advocacy posted many times on 4chan. That doesn't prove much, but I think it validates that line of speculation.
It's pretty obvious when you compare the number of annual car thefts to the number of attacks on substations. This is an unusual event, it may have an unusual explanation.
The likelihood that a person would attack four substations to rob a business is extremely low, and it's therefore reasonable to assume that their stated motive was a lie.
The likelihood that a person would even attack one substation for the same aim is still low, in my opinion.
Also, if they had any basis whatsoever for a terrorism charge, I would have expected the DA to charge it. The media exposure and increase in profile would be irresistible, and charges can always be dropped later.
Hinged response: this was obviously done to rob a business
They were pretty bad at what they were doing.
If they took out the power on the base to disrupt operations then maybe but from my time at Ft Bragg all that would’ve caused is an inconvenience even if we were in the middle of an alert.
…now that I think about it I’m surprised they never cut the power on us when they did one of the alert readiness tests.
The far right literature e.g. The Turner Diaries, describes terror cells funding themselves through theft so theft/sabotage should be expected together with such groups.
"The Order" - a real life group modelled on The Turner Diaries robbed banks and armoured cars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Order_(white_supremacist_g...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/fbi-white-supremacists-i...
It turns out that the people who make those sorts of claims are really just anti-white.
If you're referring to my statement, I only said that many law enforcement agencies contain white supremacists, which includes anyone with a white supremacist viewpoint. They don't even need to identify as one openly or even in action. How many white supremacists are and are not anti-government is immaterial to the point.
The way you're using the definition "white supremacist" implicitly assumes that "white supremacy" as an ideology is inherently anti-government. We know that's never been the case, because all white supremacist states around the world have had strictly authoritarian governments. There's no way to enforce the supremacy of one group of people over another without coercive force. Either violence or authoritarian government are required for a white supremacist state.
As for whether US itself is a white supremacist state, on one hand you could say that it has allocated a massive amount of resources in systematically rounding up black men (1 in 3 will be arrested in their lifetimes) without addressing the factors used to justify that, and many states systematically disenfranchise their vote. And historically it was economically reliant on chattel slavery. Many southern states are effectively authoritarian governments at the state level due to district gerrymandering and black disenfranchisement, now no longer stoppable by the Voting Rights Act after a conservative supreme court decision a few years ago.
OTOH, federally, is democratically accountable to the people, making it a coalition of whites and non-whites. So you could still see white supremacist reactionaries taking anti-government standpoints for as long as this governing coalition includes non-white people.
>It turns out that the people who make those sorts of claims are really just anti-white.
Do you think it is somehow "anti-white" to point out ways in which white supremacy harms and oppresses non-white people when it is used at the level of state and federal governments?
> Do you think it is somehow "anti-white" to point out ways in which white supremacy harms and oppresses non-white people when it is used at the level of state and federal governments?
> "As for whether US itself is a white supremacist state, on one hand you could say that it has allocated a massive amount of resources in systematically rounding up black men (1 in 3 will be arrested in their lifetimes) without addressing the factors used to justify that, and many states systematically disenfranchise their vote."
You saw the same thing with groups like BLM. If you never looked at the data you would assume this is an issue that only or primarily affects black people. And yet, the majority of people killed by cops are white males. And although per capita black males are more likely to suffer that fate, white males are also over-represented as victims of police violence based on their demographic cohort. (black, Hispanic and white males are over-represented; Asian males and females of all races including black, are under-represented.
Using the police violence issue, the largest over-represented demographic cohort is actually males which make up 95% of the victims. And yet it's not presented as a male problem. It's presented as a black problem despite the data that shows black females are far less likely to be hurt or killed in police interactions than white males are.
This happens a lot when trying to take a complex issue and assume it's based on race.
https://www.sentencingproject.org/app/uploads/2022/08/The-Co...
Given that black people are not a large percentage of the population, this disparity is shocking and significant. If we deliberately choose not to point out these problems then it won't be possible to correct them at a social policy level. If we chose to focus only on "males" as the targeted demographic then we would overlook a lot of the systemic injustices and socio-economic circumstances that black males face exclusively, and which would require disproportionate attention to solve. It is neither right nor just that black men should bear such an unequal burden.
Moreover, pointing out injustice done to black americans does not "dismiss the millions of non-black victims". I don't see how you can come to that conclusion. There is more than enough room in the sphere of public debate to discuss all aspects of mass incarceration.
The argument you're making sounds almost exactly like "all houses matter".
https://twitter.com/_dpiddy/status/1266907284178759680/photo...
You can read The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander if you truly have a good faith desire to understand the racist legacy behind mass incarceration in the US.
Ultimately you need to recognize that race is a social construct, and white supremacy is a phenomenon of in-group vs out-group power dynamics. Right now the group that holds political and economic power in the US is called “white”, which is otherwise a biologically meaningless designation and more of a cultural and class based category that was invented about 100 years ago. The more similar a particular demographic group appears along the axes of skin color, class, and culture, the less racially stigmatized they’ll be, the more economic opportunities they’ll have, and the less they’ll need to resort to grey or black market activity in order to survive. There is also the long legacy of slavery, indentured servitude, and jim crow era oppression that has selectively deprived black people in the US of economic opportunities for generations.
If you want to draw conclusions on aggregate statistics of the actions of human beings, then you need to be willing to educate yourself as to the social, economic, and historical factors which influence their actions.
Racial differences in performance in something is not proof of discrimination. Unless you're ready to show me how the NBA systemically excludes non-black players.
It's also interesting that in this so-called system of white supremacy, that asians somehow lead in almost every metric related to income, education, crime etc.
BLACK AND WHITE: ACCESS TO CAPITAL AMONG MINORITY-OWNED STARTUPS https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28154/w281...
Job Applicants With ‘Black Names’ Still Less Likely to Get Interviews https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-29/job-appli...
As to your comment about asians, my last reply already explained in great detail why you can expect to see socio-economic differences in class.
And FYI that names study has been debunked a number of times. They didn't test stereotypically low class white names like Wilbur, Billy Bob, Roscoe, Harlan etc. for males or Crystal, Daisy, etc. for females.
There’s plenty of data on hiring discrimination for you:
https://hbr.org/2017/10/hiring-discrimination-against-black-...
I’ve literally had someone whose job it was to read resumes for their company straight up admit to me that they throw resumes with black-sounding names straight into the trash.
You still didn’t respond to my comment, which spelled out very clearly the role of racial discrimination in society that you seem to interested in denying. Instead, you change the topic from criminalization to college admissions. I wonder why.
So yes, there is an advantage when a company or a school specifically sets out to bring you in because you have the right skin color.
As far as racial discrimination in society (institutional racial preferences), my take on it is that race should never be used as a factor in hiring, sentencing, admissions etc. Individual racism is what it is. If I walk down the street and someone calls me a cracker or says they hate white people or whatever, that sucks and is unfortunate but ultimately you can't do anything about it because people will think how they think. It's the institutionalized racial preferences that do the most harm, and those need to change.
> I’ve literally had someone whose job it was to read resumes for their company straight up admit to me that they throw resumes with black-sounding names straight into the trash.
Which company? They’re in central Indiana. Not telling an unknown internet stranger who apparently argues in bad faith.
> Guess what millions of individual instances of racism amount to, when those instances involve people with power using it against those who lack it? It becomes systemic, institutionalized.
> Which company? They’re in central Indiana.
In case you couldn't guess, the point is to support systemically marginalized groups. white and asian people have not been subject to slavery, jim crow laws, sundown laws, redlining, voter disenfranchisement, targeted mass incarceration, etc.
I'll answer your question after you respond to literally any of the things I've said so far in my comments. And I've got some questions for you: Why should I believe that someone who claims that white supremacy doesn't even exist cares about EEOC complaints? Do you think that such disingenuous questions convey your points more effectively, or less? Is there a reason that each new reply shifts the rhetorical goalposts?
> In case you couldn't guess, the point is to support systemically marginalized groups. white and asian people have not been subject to slavery, jim crow laws, sundown laws, redlining, voter disenfranchisement, targeted mass incarceration, etc.
See this is the problem with supporting policies that favor people based on their race. It always ends badly and causes racial animosity.
The real problem is that you’re implicitly taking the position that aiding specific groups of people is a zero-sum game. Should the US government give reparations for what they did to Japanese americans during WWII? Absolutely. Should germany and other european countries give reparations for Jewish families as a result of the holocaust? Absolutely.
Do poor white americans from appalachia deserve economic aid from the government after such prolonged disinvestment? Of course.
And while it makes sense to offer these groups economic-based college admissions support, it doesn't make sense to do so purely on the basis of ethnicity/race, as those groups demonstrably don't face the same level of institutionalized discrimination as blacks. Though such measures would have been warranted for Jews and Asians for a good part of the 20th century.
But guess what—none of these remedies are in conflict with each other. At no point does actively correcting the massive generational wealth and education imbalance that black americans face, take away from correcting what any other group of minoritized people is owed.
I don't know how you read that and came to the conclusion that "attacks by so called environmentalists" when the article comes to the opposite conclusion.
We can see that.
https://archive.ph/hrZar "In 1995, Damron was an electrical engineering student at North Dakota State University when he cut through 19 underground phone cables to disable an alarm at Site on Sound in Fargo. He then stole $80,000 in equipment from the car-stereo business. FBI agents captured him in 1996 in an Iowa hotel room after a two-year manhunt"
https://apnews.com/article/587580cb8aa145afbf59e535b5214234 Over 24,000 people without phone service so he could rob a stereo store
For reference, Greenwood & Crahan's indictment: https://www.justice.gov/media/1266956/dl?inline
Here, we have an official report from the prosecutor stating that people attacked substations in furtherance of theft but a lot of people are trying to pin it as part of a larger conspiracy against the government.
Like we should tell conspiracy theorists, the burden is on you to cite the evidence confirming your alleged conspiracy. In absence of that evidence, is it not better to go with the word of the DA, whose job is literally to investigate and gather facts about cases like this?
Which one requires fewer assumptions? What are the assumptions anyway? That crazy people can buy guns in America?
Those three got the idea from the government itself.[2] Which, given the nature of our supply chains, are understandably aware of the vulnerability.
Some people see all narratives as an opportunity to whip up fear, when given the facts, they could more charitably be seen as an opportunity to whip up awareness. Regardless of your ideology, it might be prudent.
[1]: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/three-men-plead-guilty-conspi...
[2]: https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2014/04/f15/LPTStudy...
https://www.opb.org/article/2023/01/19/surge-in-oregon-washi...
(Shrug) Then maybe you should ask the FBI why they'd issue that warning.
They might have lacked the knowledge of "the grid" to make such an attack go beyond one county, but there was some degree of thought put into that attack.
It's easier to attack than defend.
Information about the larger structure of the grid, transmission direction, system redundancies/tolerances, failure cascades is a lot harder to come by. You could build up a picture by accumulating OSINT resources, mapping gaps, making physical observations etc., but synthesizing that into any sort of working model of the grid itself would require some pretty advanced engineering expertise and a lot of institutional knowledge even at the local level. Anyone with sufficient smarts, training, and know-how is a lot more likely to be invested in the integrity of the grid than its sabotage.
Also, in purely economic terms it's not efficient for an antagonist to max out resources on trying to land a decisive masterstroke. It takes a lot of time, money, and moving parts to pull off such an attack. An ongoing rash of cheap micro-attacks, even poorly correlated, drives up costs in ratchet fashion, without any threat being sufficiently expensive to bring about massive change (eg burying major parts of the transmission infrastructure, switching to a different architecture, radically different security posture). The strategic goal is to raise the cost of 'normal' above the market's willingness to bear, and then exploit social/political failure modes.
Shorted winding == complete replacement needed for high voltages, and a single bullet would be more than enought to break insulation on the winding many times.
"If the windings within the transformer itself were damaged, it would probably require replacement of the equipment. Transformers of this scale are rarely manufactured without an order, which means we don’t have a lot of spares sitting around, and the lead time can be months or years to get a new one delivered, let alone installed."
Interestingly, I'd wager that very little infrastructure in developed countries was designed with any thought of defending it from it's own citizens.
The electrical grid is largely ignored because it’s so big and distributed over such a large area it’s difficult for small groups to attack it successfully. So the focus is on limiting cascading failures. Shooting equipment only caused local damage and things got back to normal in a week.
It was unpleasant for those affected, but you can catch people conducting repeated attacks a lot easier than you can harden all this infrastructure.
Russia has been bombing Ukraine infra from Oct, used thousands of missiles and things are still running - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022%E2%80%932023_Russian_st....
running from the radiation released from the shelling of nuke plants, not running in the "performing normally" sense
"Radiation levels increased about 20-fold on Thursday"
https://web.archive.org/web/20220225165134/https://www.bbc.c...
65 microSv or 65 µSv is a really trivial amount. It should inspire a yawn not a yikes.
Seems it was not from the shelling.
We think you're missing the larger point
One fairly simple defense is to set up an opaque wall around it, so if they are outside the perimeter fence they cannot see the target.
2. Nothing discussed in the video is insider knowledge. Everything is public knowledge, and could have been learned with a library card and an internet connection.
(And that ignores that there are likely lots of other points of infrastructure that are similarly vulnerable.)
This is something on the national scale with lots of federal internal attention - reports likely even having hit the potus desk.
I doubt we’ll hear much about this again unless there’s an arrest.
If people really understood just how fragile the electric grid is they would soil themselves. If anything it's amazing that it works as well as it does - a real testament to all those that keep it up and operational. However, as you point out, continually running on the ragged edge is not a wise long term strategy.
I think we can rule out any kind of state actor, even if they were acting through a proxy. The risk/reward just isn't there, and this is not a hard attack to plan, so there's no point in carrying out a "test". If the goal were to send a message, well, this just isn't going to cut it. The US military will crush you regardless of the status of a power substation in North Carolina.
However, it could easily have been done by someone with a political agenda in favor of a state actor but not in any way endorsed by them, or by someone with a general political motive. Here's the catch with that: For such a person, there is no point to doing this unless you later claim responsibility and gain notoriety. If your goal is ideological, you'd use the chaos you created to try to spread your ideology. If your goal is to have your demands heard, well, you'd have to make those demands first. (Of course, it could be the attackers meant to do that but chickened out when they saw what an overwhelming response this provoked, or something).
It's possible somebody did it by accident or because they are mentally unstable and their dog told them to, etc. Can never discount that. However, I think the most likely explanation is actually that this is a criminal act that was done with some only proximately related goal in mind - blackmailing an energy executive? Stealing something of value from somewhere in the area of attack? Distract authorities while conducting some other illicit behavior somewhere - like a break-in to some other piece of infrastructure - for whatever reason?
Hopefully we find out someday. (And I mean, hopefully we stop this stuff from happening, but that is gonna take some doing.)
Like they crushed Iraq for 9/11?
Finding and crushing someone is easy, finding an actually guilty party that cannot be found is not so easy.
Who knows what this is, but some people can see the strategic significance of it.
The United States government exists within a democracy, and the general public certainly doesn't know what's going on, and much of what they think they know is incorrect.
Also, like I said before... ideologues take responsibility.
A similar question is: how are all the unjustly killed people (and their surviving family and friends) doing? And, how will Americans that may suffer blowback from this be doing if that should come to visit our shores (say, maybe by power stations being taken out with a simple rifle)?
Shipping all our manufacturing overseas was beyond stupid.
I guess to see how long it takes us to fix, but that just... doesn't seem worth it to me. If I were China, say, would I really be willing to attack the domestic United States just to see what the US would do? Don't I have the resources to know what the US would do without trying it?
https://www.fpri.org/article/2020/04/the-growing-threat-pose...
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/three-men-plead-guilty-conspi...
Three Men Plead Guilty to Conspiring to Provide Material Support to a Plot to Attack Power Grids in the United States
Domestic Terrorism Plot was in Furtherance of White Supremacist Ideology
Sure, we don’t know about this particular attack, but we know that white supremacist groups have already been committing such crimes and have had longstanding, well-documented and widely-publicized plans to do so.
I don't know what the limitations are, and maybe natural disasters will continue to dominate. But I wouldn't extrapolate just because it hadn't been the mechanism of choice so far.
There's what, 1000-10000x the number of law enforcement personal, national guard, and active military than electrical substations? If these attacks were to rapidly increase over a few days we'd just post guards with guns and cameras at every substation while we pour a thick and tall wall of concrete around all the sensitive bits.
Your build-a-wall plan is even less plausible. Assuming a half-acre per substation, that's over 6000 miles of walls. In non-flat areas, they might have to be quite tall. We're looking at billions of dollars here, but the hard part is likely the equipment and labor, and knock-on economic costs from supply chain disruption.
This kind of chaos and expense sounds like a terrorist's wildest dream, honestly, a cure worse than the disease.
It changes the math a ton. Shooting at an unmanned substation is one crime. Shooting in the general direction of the national guard is a completely different type of crime.
That said, I also think you're wrong in the case being discussed, a group launching a wave of disruption via shooting substations. People engaged in that sort of ideologically driven societal disruption are not going to be put off by exactly which class of felony they'll fall under, as they know they'll be going away for a long, long time regardless, via everything a federal prosecutor can think to charge them with to get the sentence up into the "until you are old" range. Which might not take a lot of work, as "conspiracy to attack energy facilities is punishable by up to 20 years in prison": https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdwa/pr/two-charged-attacks-fou...
Opportunities for teamwork are limited by the FBI's outstanding abilities to infiltrate social networks and entrap hotheads, keeping militant types in a constant state of paranoia and distrust. It's hard to accrue the necessary knowledge alone, harder to locate peers (though this varies with geography and economic power), and very hard to coordinate. Doing so online has obvious security difficulties, and professional criminal networks aren't easily accessible or sympathetic. The feds can't catch everyone, but they can drastically raise the cost of force multipliers.
In short, past rates are not a guarantee of future risks. I expect infrastructure attacks to be a growing problem.
Domestic terrorism or a "Die Hard" scenario is at the bottom of my list. It's a rural county - there's hardly any shock value to doing this (vs. a bigger city like Raleigh or Charlotte) that a terrorist would want.
This lead me to realize that I'm now habituated to an environment where telling the truth seems like a forbidden act.
These folks disagree: https://cybersquirrel1.com
For substations these are rare, for computers these are common.
https://www.opb.org/article/2023/01/19/surge-in-oregon-washi...
"As a string of attacks on electrical substations unfolded in Oregon and Washington in 2022, the FBI was warning utilities of white supremacists’ plots to take down the nation’s power grid"
"The individuals of concern believe that an attack on electrical infrastructure will contribute to their ideological goal of causing societal collapse and a subsequent race war in the United States,” according to an FBI memo obtained by OPB and KUOW.
—-
This has been going on for some time. This is not a bunch of environmentalists as some people have oddly assumed in this thread. This is part of a long pattern of right-wing political violence in the US that is occurring throughout the country, not just in North Carolina. Virtually every week, there’s an arrest of a right wing political group, candidate, or activist who is waging a campaign of violence against the American public. Blaming so-called "environmentalists" for what is clearly a repeated pattern of right wing political violence is about as tone deaf as you can get. Read the news.
Let's say that someone (perhaps DoE) identified that the power grid was at risk of attack. Convincing a bunch of people (politicians) to spend a chunk of change to secure it would be betweeen difficult and impossible. In order to further their cause, they can stage these trivial looking attacks to attract funding to grid security.
In computers, hiring pen testers is a common way to get security funded. An attack is a sure fire way to get something funded.
That's like shooting up a school to get more security around schools. Come on.
DOJ concluded that the Branch Davidian's started the fires.
Isn’t it a sad commentary on society that I am willing to believe the innocence of a bunch or wacko cultists than any claims of their guilt by the DoJ or FBI?
I'm not convinced of this. They play a lot of games, but ensuring that power is reliable and fairly price-stable is not just important to all of the peasant middle class voters, but also to their big corporate donors, the farming blocks, etc.
The annual TEN BILLION dollar TSA was created in response to a one-off foreign terror and they do their job horribly based on all the failed testing
What's being spent on the power grid security?
How many hours, forget days, are people willing to live without power?
Basically, the only reason Russia is able to continue their military adventure in Ukraine at all is because the US and NATO currently view directly destroying the Russian military forces there as an escalation that could eventually lead to a nuclear war. If instead Russia takes the first step and directly attacks a NATO country, it would considered a response rather than an escalation if the US/NATO then attacked Russian forces invading Ukraine. Russia knows they have zero chance of prevailing in this scenario, and presumably are smart enough not to invite it.
This seems like the kind of thing you could maybe do once, right as you invade, but not on an ongoing basis.
As far as I know, this is one of the first major armed conflicts where the power grid has been sucha focused target. It's beyond my imagining to think how Ukraine has been coping with this. The article points out how slow & plodding the supply chain is for this kind kf equipment. That's an awful fact of today's economy. America in particular I'd expect to be extra plodding in response.
Major hurricanes slam the south east regularly and damages power infrastructure, regularly. If it became a real problem, the government would be quite real in their response, and so would most of the people
The 60 Minutes' report mentioned the first known incident occurred in Morgan Hill, CA.
Same setup as Morgan Hill had: chain-linked fence instead of a high solid wall. I used to bicycle around that area when I was a kid.
Our infrastructure was built when America was a homogenous, high trust society. Those days are long gone. The only way to defend against this are concrete barriers surrounding each and every substation .
It is my further understanding that the nature of North Carolina law is such that this makes those who committed the crime guilty of either murder or manslaughter.
This is being taken very seriously because the power grid, as Grady points out, is incredibly vulnerable and out in the open. I don’t think it’s because there’s some conspiracy by Russia or whatever.
The United States is less stable than it was 30 years ago. The rot is starting in the periphery with the lack of opportunity or prosperity in rural America. That is the tinder that fuels modern nut job gun culture, q, militias and other fringe organizations that now have national prominence.
Undermining infrastructure is an early goal of insurgencies. I’m sure we’ll have active areas that are unsafe to travel for outsiders in the next 10-15 years outside of government control.
Probably because they were looking at the same public data that was shown in the video.
Despite the sidebar saying the map is visible to the public, the maps never load and I'm seeing access denied errors for map resources in the console.
There could be multiple explanations for the map to stop loading, but the error messages sure give me the impression that it was to restrict access to this information, and that makes me a little sad even though I can understand why it might be tempting to restrict given the circumstances.
Trying to load the page (https://atlas.eia.gov/apps/895faaf79d744f2ab3b72f8bd5778e68/...) from Australia just now, the user interface framework loads, but none of the maps/data/etc.
Tried with both Firefox and Chromium, so it's not a browser dependency problem.
I highly doubt the populous are going to rally behind their cause when their heat and lights are out. Even worse if there are people who depend of refrigeration for diabetes medication or oxygen generators, etc.
An acquaintance of mine worked in glass applications for electrical systems. Truly fascinating stuff; they combine the materials science of glass with the chemistry of the oil to make for very high-current fuses. The oil acts as a very good thermal conductor, but at too high a current, it expands and puts pressure against the glass insulator it's contained in. Once the pressure is high enough, the glass explodes and rapidly mechanically separates the conductors. Tolerances have to be extremely tight on both the glass thickness and the oil consistency to get the desired effect, and there's no way to test except destructively, so the process has to be extremely repeatable.
... but of course, oil-filled components are vulnerable to a few bullets.
The fins have a high surface area, and would surely flex outward enough to absorb any high frequency spike from a bullet.
Likely it's some security thing like some vault that needs constant power. You kill power in some massive way such that the backup generators will run out before everything comes online. Then Boom! pull off your elaborate heist to the tune of (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1lWoA2tgxQ) and walk away like nothing happened.
That being said, I'm sure there are plenty of crimes that would go easier with no power. Perhaps taking down cameras.
Same reason why people create doorknobs and car locks that depend on electricity. Also this: https://www.protoolreviews.com/lockdown-logic-vault-door-cre...
That being said I'm sure it's a bug. I'm sure whomever made this security thing accounted for power outages. But I'm sure some loop hole appears during that power outage that the builders didn't anticipate.
Also yes, obviously it's some security thing that has to do with power not necessarily a vault door. That was just an example.