North Carolina power substation shot weeks after power grid attacks

Another power substation has been damaged by what appears to be gunshots.

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EnergyUnited Electric Membership Corporation, which operates the Pleasant Hill Substation in Thomasville, North Carolina, said that employees responded to an alarm early Tuesday and found the damage to a transformer.

“The damage was quickly assessed and contained to mitigate the impact to members in the Pleasant Hill area,” Energy United said in a news release.

Law enforcement was notified about the damage. Deputies with the Randolph County Sheriff’s Office confirmed they had received a vandalism call at the substation.

Customers did not experience an outage due to the issue, the company said.

The sheriff’s office said that the FBI and the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigations were also notified of the incident. The FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force is conducting a parallel investigation.

Investigators were able to collect evidence and information from the scene and surrounding areas, which led them to believe that the incident happened around 3 a.m. Tuesday, according to the sheriff’s office.

The incident happened more than a month after two substations in Moore County were attacked, WRAL reported. Those events left more than 40,000 homes and businesses without power for days.

Police have not made an arrest in those attacks, WTVD reported.

There have also been several other power equipment attacks in Washington, Oregon and Nevada recently.

Officials in those areas have been calling for more security around the electrical grid, but because of how expansive power systems are, it makes it difficult to protect the entire network, WTVD reported.

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