Extremists keep trying to sabotage the electrical grid. What would happen if they succeed?

Political extremists have attempted a number of attacks on electrical infrastructure and substations in recent years, with a goal of sowing chaos and civil conflict. 

The plots have repeatedly failed, however, and sociologists say that even if they do succeed, the kind of disasters they seek to create rarely result in members of the population turning on one another — though they could prove costly, and deadly. 

In July, two former Marines, both active in an online neo-Nazi community, were sentenced to prison for a plot in which they stole military equipment from Camp Lejeune as part of an intended attack on a power substation in the Pacific Northwest. Attorney General Merrick Garland said the plotters, Liam Collins and Paul Kryscuk, “conspired, prepared, and trained to attack America’s power grid in order to advance their violent white supremacist ideology.”

The year before, officials said they foiled another, similar plot, this one targeting the grid in Baltimore. The two alleged plotters, Sarah Beth Clendaniel and Brandon Russell, were described by the FBI as “racially- or ethnically-motivated extremists,” and officials said they targeted Baltimore in large part because of its status as a majority-Black city.

Many plots of this kind are specifically motivated by accelerationism, the belief that creating conflict and unrest will hasten a broader societal clash, said Molly Conger, a researcher based in Charlottesville, Va., who covered the Collins-Kryscuk plot on her podcast, “Weird Little Guys.”

“What they think will happen is that, if there’s a crisis, it will provide cover for violence, but it will also force normal people to engage in violence. And that’s not what will happen,” Conger said. 

Instead, she said, “All that will happen is old people who need their oxygen machines will die, and it will cost the energy company a billion dollars.”

Blackouts resulting from other causes, such as natural disasters, have resulted in a number of deaths and costly damage in recent years. Winter Storm Uri, for example, caused widespread outages in Texas for multiple days in 2021 that left many Texans to confront unbearably cold indoor temperatures and posed a particular threat to residents with electronically powered medical equipment. Nearly 250 people died because of the storm and the resulting outages, which also caused tens of billions of dollars in estimated damages.

If plots like the above had been enacted successfully, they could potentially have caused even more damage simply because they sought to inflict deliberate sabotage.

The theory that sowing this kind of chaos could make the population turn on each other has recurred often in American culture. 

Charles Manson, for instance, believed the murders committed by his followers would spur “Helter Skelter,” a race war from which they would emerge to take control. Neo-Nazi James Mason’s correspondence with Manson acolyte Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme inspired his book “Siege,” a central text of accelerationism on the far right.  

The idea has also been portrayed in fiction: In the classic “Twilight Zone” episode “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” a power failure in a quiet suburb sets neighbor against neighbor. In a twist ending, the situation is revealed to be the result of a plot by alien invaders.

However, experts say there’s evidence that even if extremists successfully caused widespread blackouts, they wouldn’t have the desired effect.

“It’s never going to start a race war, but for some reason, they really think it will,” Conger said.

On the contrary, people affected by disasters frequently cooperate and care for one another to make up for any gaps in institutional infrastructure created by the disaster, a phenomenon sociologists call “disaster solidarity.”

For example, in a study published in the journal Disasters, researchers found that in the months after Hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017, Puerto Ricans affected by the storms organized around ad hoc leaders to provide mutual aid and determine who needed what and how to distribute it. The researchers also observed what they called “counter-intuitive generosity” from those who had suffered losses themselves.

“There’s a fair amount of evidence that there’s an early period after a disaster when people are fairly cooperative,” lead author Robert Schrauf, a professor of applied linguistics at Pennsylvania State University, told The Hill. “They work together to recover [and] that generates a sense of euphoria, a brotherhood, ‘we’re all in this together,’ that sort of thing. It becomes its own social capital.”

Much of that cooperative spirit tends to fade with time and return to the status quo, Schrauf said, but in the case of the hurricanes, it lasted at least three months. Much of that, he added, can be attributed to the fact that residents of the island could not easily leave, giving them few options but to work toward common goals.

Plans like those of the extremists, he added, are also unlikely to work because disaster solidarity tends to involve forming a united front against outsiders, even seemingly benevolent ones like doctors who are new to the area.

Conger said that the people behind these plots are likely not considering the sociological history of disaster fallout. Instead, they’re motivated by an “almost religious” conviction: “They have faith in this idea of acceleration, like you might have faith in God.” 

Their racist beliefs, she added, also make them more likely to assume the worst of residents of low-income minority communities, a perception she said has been aided by mainstream media coverage of disasters like Hurricane Katrina.

“The actual evidence doesn’t bear that out, there was no widespread like uptick in violent criminal activity among the Black people of New Orleans after Katrina. That didn’t actually happen,” she said. “But at a societal level, the average person probably does believe that … the idea that [after a disaster] people are murdering and raping and stealing just because that’s what they always wanted to do, but now they have the opportunity to do it.”

Ultimately, Conger said, the threat isn’t that the people behind these plots will provoke the conflict they desire, it’s that they seek to take advantage of very real vulnerabilities in the grid.

“Supply chains are inelastic … there is no warehouse full of extra transformers. These things are made to order. They take a year to make,” she said. “And so if someone were to successfully take out a bunch of these large transformers, it could be catastrophic.”

“You only have to shoot up some of them, and this causes a cascading failure across the grid,” she added.