Peace activist pleads guilty to damaging more than 20 power line towers in four states

Associated Press ^ | 11-19-03 | ANNA OBERTHUR

[Oldeconomybuyer]

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) -- A peace activist pleaded guilty Wednesday to tampering with high-voltage power line towers in what he has said was an effort to draw attention to lax security for the nation's energy infrastructure.

Michael Devlyn Poulin, 62, of Spokane, Wash., had admitted damaging or attempting to damage more than 20 towers last month in California, Idaho, Oregon and Washington. Bolts were loosened or removed from the legs of the steel towers.

[Phantom Lord]

He served eight years of a life sentence for attempted murder in the 1970s, the FBI said.

Problem #1

[dighton]

In an agreement with prosecutors, he entered his pleas before U.S. District Judge William Shubb in only two incidents near Anderson, Calif., and Klamath Falls, Ore. In return, prosecutors will recommend a sentence of 27 months, against a maximum of 10 years, and he will not be prosecuted in Idaho or Washington. No sentencing date was set.

Leniency in his case is absolutely nuts.

He served eight years of a life sentence for attempted murder in the 1970s, the FBI said.

[martin_fierro]

Hang him high.

[doug from upland]

Well, no more demonstrations for a few years.

[kentuckyusa]

How does an act like this make him a peace activist? Does peace activist now mean thug, hood, criminal, etc?

[finnman69]

A real peaceful guy. Riiiiiiiiggggggggggghhhhhhtt.

[Calpernia]

Power ping.

[Pro-Bush]

Won't see this story in the headlines...He wasn't a "right-winger".

[RightWhale]

How does an act like this make him a peace activist?

It's not a non-violent demonstration, so it is not an MLK style civil disobedience.

It's not a simple openly illegal civil diobedience, so it isn't a Gandhi act of civil disobedience.

It was a violent act of sabotage and may have endangered someone, so it was not an act of peace.

It appears the act doesn't meet any of the requirements, so it is an act of moral terrorism. Put him in the cage with the Alqaidas.

[Grampa Dave]

Poulin told The Associated Press in a telephone interview before his arrest that he considered his actions necessary to point out how the nation's power system is vulnerable to terrorists.

Poulin says he was preparing to turn himself in when he was arrested Nov. 2 by a California Highway Patrol officer. The officer recognized Poulin from his wanted poster when Poulin asked for directions to the FBI's Sacramento office.

Poulin has been a member of Peace and Justice Action League of Spokane and participated in several anti-war rallies this year.

He served eight years of a life sentence for attempted murder in the 1970s, the FBI said.


The first paragraph is what any criminal tries to say when they are busted. "Hey, I was selling drug because the Narcs asked me to go undercover!"

The rest is the reality behind this left wing Enviral Whack Lunatic.

[GSWarrior]

At what point does trying to draw attention to lax security measures become an actual act of terrorism?

[Free_at_last_-2001]

Bet he votes democrat!

[RightWhale]

A violent act does way more than draw attention, although it certainly does that, too.

[null and void]

No problem. underscoreJim says our grid is immune to a deliberate take down.

[null and void]

Hang him high.

Hang him?

Nope, make the punishment fit the crime.

Electrocute him...

[Calpernia]

I'm sorry. I know he is not popular with some freepers. But he does supply good info for his arguements/views. And when someone like me doesn't understand how the power stuff works, I really appreciate the links he provides for supplemental reading.

I promise N&V, I do cry for Krill ^-^

[_Jim]

our grid is immune to a deliberate take down.

Well, "Prove me wrong."

Whoops.

We don't want you doing that - someone will see you and turn you in like this character ...

WHAT I find surprising is, we've got people on this board that couldn't explain how the series circuit in a flashlight works YET they will contend THEY can see scenarios where 'the grid' could be taken down ...

NEITHER have these people done their homework and studied several of of the BIG historical blackouts we have had for ANY idea on the scope of just WHAT it takes to get a REALLY BIG blackout to occur ...

'The grid' JUST like other facets involving machinery/systems (like the phone system) in our lives have TWO things working constantly in their favor: 1) man in the loop overseeing operations and planning for outages and contingencies and 2) a lot of redundancy in most circumstances that allows the system to tolerate portions of 'the grid' to fail both in terms of generation and transmission -

- with this ONE caveat; that #1 works, and it didn't back on August 14th (FirstEnergy's control facility was 'hosed up' for some reason that day and the operators NEVER made any of the required 'right moves' - like load shedding GIVEN the generation available and the lines they had to work with. It also didn't help that deferred 'right of way' tree-trimming came back to haunt them that day and took important lines out of service) ...

[null and void]

Well, when I was studying EE I was told abruptly taking out (grounding) one phase *could* cause a 3ø generator to pound itself to pieces before it could be stopped. I didn't have the guts to try it.

I do know that a determined foe can figure out an unexpected weakness in any system and exploit it.

I do know that power grids can fail accidently, as has been demonstrated in a surprisingly large number of systems across the world in the past few months. Notably most of these outages affected countries that supported our efforts in Iraq. Perhaps this is only because everyone else doesn't have a grid to down?

I suspect a timed sequential takedown of key links could crowd load onto a known weak link that could then be cut, giving the operators a load sheding problem they may not have enough time to gracefully recover from. IIRC something like this happened accidently causing the '73 blackout.

The human in the loop is only as good as the information s/he has. Cutting communications, or more subtly, presenting normal expected data while the crisis builds renders this the weakest link - bu bye!

That the controls of a reactor are prePC does make the system more robust, but one does not need to take down any single generator to fragment the grid.

If people can design and build it, other people can figure it out and destroy it.

BTW, Do you know the differnce between a mechanical engineer and a civil engineer?

[pageonetoo]

"He served eight years of a life sentence for attempted murder in the 1970s, the FBI said."

Life? Sentence? 8 Years? Life? Sentence? 8 Years? Life? Sentence? 8 Years? Life? Sentence? 8 Years? Life? Sentence? 8 Years? Life? Sentence? 8 Years?

Whose life, a cats? A hamster? Michael has hope!

[pageonetoo]

Oh, yeah, I forgot he was...("Poulin has been a member of Peace and Justice Action League..") a peace activist!

[null and void]

8 years is about the average time served for murder.

[pageonetoo]

"8 years is about the average time served for murder. "

I remember when rape was a capitol crime... and now you get more time for having a "joint"!

[null and void]

Well DUH! Pot is eeeeeeeeevil!!!

[_Jim]

Do you know the differnce between a mechanical engineer and a civil engineer?

The latter builds targets, the former builds 'platforms and ordnance' that 'takes out' the latter's efforts ...

[meyer]

A peace activist pleaded guilty Wednesday to tampering with high-voltage power line towers in what he has said was an effort to draw attention to lax security for the nation's energy infrastructure.

Draw attention? No, he was just trying to wreak havoc on the western grid. What does he suggest - guards at every transmission tower?

[null and void]

Bingo! But I like the order in my tag line better because it puts the punch line last.

[meyer]

He served eight years of a life sentence for attempted murder in the 1970s, the FBI said.

Maybe he was trying to draw attention to the lack of security around individuals.

[null and void]

What does he suggest - guards at every transmission tower?

Before this is all done, we may have to.

[Oldeconomybuyer]

LOL

[meyer]

- with this ONE caveat; that #1 works, and it didn't back on August 14th (FirstEnergy's control facility was 'hosed up' for some reason that day and the operators NEVER made any of the required 'right moves' - like load shedding GIVEN the generation available and the lines they had to work with. It also didn't help that deferred 'right of way' tree-trimming came back to haunt them that day and took important lines out of service) ...

Actually, #1 and to a lessor extent, #2 both failed, but #2 was a direct result of #1.

[meyer]

Before this is all done, we may have to.

Unfortunately, that's a lot of real estate to cover.

[_Jim]

If people can design and build it, other people can figure it out and destroy it.

Today's large, interconnected, redundant, supervised systems ususally fail when a number of factors come together in/at the MOST unfortunate time; it takes/it took the involvement of human error in the BIGGEST events we've seen, sometimes spurred by an induced failure or two and three PLUS the failure to have certain 'backup' systems or procedures in place or 'practiced' by operations to REALLY screw up these LARGE systems; a few lines, a few dozen lines simply 'felled' by persons with devious intent very most likely WOULD NOT result in a widesprad blackout per se; localized outages (due to proper load shedding) due to both intended operator action and load shedding relays would save the system in islands (sine 'lines' also called 'tie lines') between systems would be 'missing' ...

It still looks to me like you're 'subsetting' (looking at isolated subsets on this issue) rather than getting a bigger, more realistic, picture. I moved on from simple 'boxes' (black box design) and onto 'systems' issues long ago; MANY concepts applicable to single 'black box' failure analysis need to be discarded in favor of 'models' that allow some measure of 'self-healing' and recovery or degraded operation when analyzing something as complicated, diverse, widespread and dynamic as 'the grid' ...

[Plutarch]

A peace activist....

Left wing sabotage = "Peace activist"

Right wing peaceful demonstration = "Extremists"

[McGavin999]

These people are just plain nuts.

[_Jim]

Actually, #1 and to a lessor extent, #2 both failed, but #2 was a direct result of #1.

What I was addressing was the general and desired case and certainly not what happened with First Energy!

The case you describe and I have described before (and fits the FE failure scenario) also fits a few scenarios which have occurred in the past - like the New York City Blackout in 1977.

[Calpernia]

Now see, "I" understand this. It is a lot different than reading these articles and drawing paranoid perceptions of the unknown.

Thank you!

[null and void]

Unfortunately, that's a lot of real estate to cover.

Depending on how you cover it. We're pretty good at remote sensing, and getting better at it by the day.

[Calpernia]

ROFL! That was great. And needs emphasis.

"Life? Sentence? 8 Years? Life? Sentence? 8 Years? Life? Sentence? 8 Years? Life? Sentence? 8 Years? Life? Sentence? 8 Years? Life? Sentence? 8 Years?

Whose life, a cats? A hamster? Michael has hope!"

[_Jim]

You're welcome ... here's a bit about the trees and why trees present(ed) a problem shown as in an inset in the US-Canada Joint Report on the blackout:

- - - - -

Why Did So Many Tree-to-Line Contacts Happen on August 14?

Tree-to-line contacts and resulting transmission
outages are not unusual in the summer across
much of North America. The phenomenon
occurs because of a combination of events occurring
particularly in late summer:

- Most tree growth occurs during the spring and
summer months, so the later in the summer
the taller the tree and the greater its potential
to contact a nearby transmission line.

- As temperatures increase, customers use more
air conditioning and load levels increase.
Higher load levels increase flows on the transmission
system, causing greater demands for
both active power (MW) and reactive power
(MVAr). Higher flow on a transmission line
causes the line to heat up, and the hot line sags
lower because the hot conductor metal
expands. Most emergency line ratings are set
to limit conductors? internal temperatures to
no more than 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees

- As temperatures increase, ambient air temperatures
provide less cooling for loaded transmission
lines.

- Wind flows cool transmission lines by increasing
the airflow of moving air across the line.
On August 14 wind speeds at the Ohio
Akron-Fulton airport averaged 5 knots at
around 14:00 EDT, but by 15:00 EDT wind
speeds had fallen to 2 knots (the wind speed
commonly assumed in conductor design) or
lower. With lower winds, the lines sagged further
and closer to any tree limbs near the lines.

This combination of events on August 14 across
much of Ohio and Indiana caused transmission
lines to heat and sag. If a tree had grown into a
power line?s designed clearance area, then a
tree/line contact was more likely, though not
inevitable. An outage on one line would increase
power flows on related lines, causing them to be
loaded higher, heat further, and sag lower.

[null and void]

Today's large, interconnected, redundant, supervised systems ususally fail when a number of factors come together in/at the MOST unfortunate time

This is precisely my point.

There are/were a LOT of ME engineering students. Most of them went home to run their own country's power systems. Some stayed here to run ours. In the past 30 years do you suppose maybe a dozen or so studied our systems with the intent of identifying weaknesses to exploit? (Hint: OBL studied civil engineering)

Do you recognize that with an army of a few score agents trained to induce each of "a number of factors" and syncronized by e-mail, a phone tree, key words in a personal ad, or even snail-mail to a "MOST unfortunate time" could cause an outage?

If it can happen by accident, why do you persist in asserting that it can't be done deliberately?

It reminds me of the US generals who insisted that the Japanese couldn't learn to fly because "Orientals have no sense of balance" This despite Japan having some of the worlds finest acrobats!

Will it take another Pearl Harbor for you to see the dark?

[Constitutional Patriot]

How did we get to the point that we are calling domestic terrorists (anti-capitalists) "peace activists"?!?!?

How much "peace" would this POS's tampering have achieved?

[_Jim]

OF interest to a number of people that day, including me, was why did the blackout/blackout boundry stop where it did - they give some answers in this part of the report - there is more detail in the report but this is a good start:




Why the Blackout Stopped Where It Did

Extreme system conditions can damage equipment
in several ways, from melting aluminum
conductors (excessive currents) to breaking turbine
blades on a generator (frequency excursions).

The power system is designed to ensure that
if conditions on the grid (excessive or inadequate
voltage, apparent impedance or frequency)
threaten the safe operation of the transmission
lines, transformers, or power plants, the threatened
equipment automatically separates from the
network to protect itself from physical damage.
Relays are the devices that effect this protection.

Generators are usually the most expensive units
on an electrical system, so system protection
schemes are designed to drop a power plant off the
system as a self-protective measure if grid conditions
become unacceptable. When unstable power
swings develop between a group of generators that
are losing synchronization (matching frequency)
with the rest of the system, the only way to stop
the oscillations is to stop the flows entirely by separating
all interconnections or ties between the
unstable generators and the remainder of the system.
The most common way to protect generators
from power oscillations is for the transmission
system to detect the power swings and trip at the
locations detecting the swings-ideally before the
swing reaches and harms the generator.

On August 14, the cascade became a race between
the power surges and the relays. The lines that
tripped first were generally the longer lines,
because the relay settings required to protect these
lines use a longer apparent impedance tripping
zone, which a power swing enters sooner, in comparison
to the shorter apparent impedance zone
targets set on shorter, networked lines. On August
14, relays on long lines such as the Homer
City-Watercure and the Homer City-Stolle Road
345-kV lines in Pennsylvania, that are not highly
integrated into the electrical network, tripped
quickly and split the grid between the sections
that blacked out and those that recovered without
further propagating the cascade. This same phenomenon
was seen in the Pacific Northwest blackouts
of 1996, when long lines tripped before more
networked, electrically supported lines.

Transmission line voltage divided by its current
flow is called "apparent impedance." Standard
transmission line protective relays continuously
measure apparent impedance. When apparent
impedance drops within the line's protective relay
set-points for a given period of time, the relays trip
the line. The vast majority of trip operations on
lines along the blackout boundaries between PJM
and New York (for instance) show high-speed
relay targets, which indicate that massive power
surges caused each line to trip. To the relays, this
massive power surge altered the voltages and currents
enough that they appeared to be faults. This
power surge was caused by power flowing to those
areas that were generation-deficient. These flows
occurred purely because of the physics of power
flows, with no regard to whether the power flow
had been scheduled, because power flows from
areas with excess generation into areas that are
generation-deficient.

Relative voltage levels across the northeast
affected which areas blacked out and which areas
stayed on-line. Within the Midwest, there were
relatively low reserves of reactive power, so as
voltage levels declined many generators in the
affected area were operating at maximum reactive
power output before the blackout. This left the
system little slack to deal with the low voltage conditions
by ramping up more generators to higher
reactive power output levels, so there was little
room to absorb any system "bumps" in voltage or
frequency. In contrast, in the northeast-particularly
PJM, New York, and ISO-New England-operators
were anticipating high power demands
on the afternoon of August 14, and had already set
up the system to maintain higher voltage levels
and therefore had more reactive reserves on-line
in anticipation of later afternoon needs. Thus,
when the voltage and frequency swings began,
these systems had reactive power already or
readily available to help buffer their areas against
a voltage collapse without widespread generation
trips.

[null and void]

An outage on one line would increase power flows on related lines, causing them to be loaded higher, heat further, and sag lower.

Yet deliberately downing lines wouldn't cause a problem?

I'm baffled.

[_Jim]

No, I don't think so ... somehow you're becoming infused with a paranoid thinking that dreams up these possibilities without any basis *save* the fact that a number of different non-european nationities work in these, and MANY, many other technical fields across the US ...

MOST of those that seem to 'stay here' and run 'ours' have gotten advanced degrees and are into the simulation and modelling 'hi-tech' and planning end of the game - NOT necessarily in the cold, day-to-day operations end of the biz ...

[_Jim]

Yet deliberately downing lines wouldn't cause a problem?

Attempting to convey ANY sort of larger picture to you is looking hopeless. Did you perhaps flunk out of an EE program?

[Calpernia]

I've seen this. I've followed you on all the power threads. That is why I started pinging you on these threads when I didn't see you.

[Calpernia]

>>>In the past 30 years do you suppose maybe a dozen or so studied our systems with the intent of identifying weaknesses to exploit?

I do know this is true of Nuke Plants. I'll see if I can find that site that I'm remembering.

[null and void]

Did you perhaps flunk out of an EE program?

Nope. 3.4 GPA in my major.

I studied the electronics end, rather than the electrical end. What little I managed to learn about big power is rather rusty.

You do understand that a 25¢ bullet can overcome a $50,000 education, don't you? What do you suppose a few handgrenades could do to an ISO control station, and it's staff?

We're dealing with people who think they are doing God's Work by hijacking passenger airplanes and flying them into buildings full of people. Having us freeze to death in the dark would suit them just fine!