‘Sitting ducks’: Moore County attack leaves a community feeling vulnerable
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Moore County Power Outages
Thousands of people in Moore County, NC lost power for days in December 2022 after electrical substations were attacked. Here is the latest coverage from The News & Observer.
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When the lights went out in Moore County, no one knew what had happened or why.
There was no warning, no flicker — one minute the lights were on, and the next, everyone was plunged into darkness. Residents looked out their windows to see their entire street cloaked in shadows.
“It was like, all of a sudden, someone flipped a switch on all of the electricity,” Helen Probst Mills, who lives in Pinehurst, said.
It turned out not to be an accident. The vast majority of Moore County has been without power for days after someone shot up two electric substations Saturday night, resulting in severe damage.
There’s a certain level of vulnerability in knowing that life can be upended at any moment by someone determined enough to inflict mass harm or chaos. Officials say the attack was a targeted, intentional act committed by someone who “knew exactly what they were doing.” It affected 45,000 residences and businesses, a staggering number that still does not capture the sheer number of people impacted.
The county has declared a state of emergency and implemented a 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew, in part to keep people off of the roads since street lamps and traffic signals aren’t working. Duke Energy has said that for the majority of customers, the outages could last until Thursday.
An information blackout
The streets of downtown Southern Pines are quiet and empty, save for the occasional whir of a generator. But just down the road, dozens of people gathered Monday afternoon at Red’s Corner, a local food truck lot and beer garden.
People chatted over beers and warm meals, circling around electric fire pits and heat lamps for warmth. A local musician played 80s hits on his guitar. In line for the bar, voices overlapped: “Do y’all have power?” “Did you see we were on MSNBC this morning?”
Word-of-mouth has been the primary way for neighbors to find out what’s going on. Moore County residents aren’t just unplugged from electricity — they’re unplugged from information, too. There’s no internet, and spotty cell service makes it difficult to do more than call or text — if that — which has only added to the sense of fear and confusion.
Talk on social media immediately fueled speculation that the attack was connected to a drag show held Saturday night at the Sunrise Theater in Southern Pines. Far-right activists threatened show organizers in the days and weeks leading up to the event and staged a protest outside the theater, which was closely monitored by police Saturday.
Part of that speculation stems from statements made on Facebook by Emily Grace Rainey, a local right-wing activist who helped organize opposition to the drag show. Rainey posted Saturday night that “The power is out in Moore County and I know why.”
Moore County Sheriff Ronnie Fields said at a press conference Sunday that law enforcement has yet to find any connection to the drag show, and that after following up, law enforcement had determined that Rainey’s posts were “false.” Still, by the time police dispelled the claims made in Rainey’s Facebook posts, the rumors had taken on a life of their own.
“The lack of official communication has set the rumor mill on fire,” Mills told me. The Village of Pinehurst typically delivers emergency notifications to residents via robocall, Mills said, but the service did not appear to be working in the immediate aftermath of the attack.
Lindsay O’Reilly, who was attending the drag show when the power went out, said she was only able to find out what had happened from police who were stationed outside the theater for the show. At first, she thought the power outage was part of the act, but her concern grew once she realized it wasn’t.
It took a little while for officials to confirm that the substations had been intentionally “vandalized,” and even days later, residents still have trouble getting information. Press conferences held by the sheriff and other officials have been informative, but most people don’t have the bandwidth to stream them. Since the power went out, O’Reilly hasn’t even been able to receive text messages on her farm.
‘New level of threat’
The attack has left people in Moore County — which has a population of a little more than 100,000 people — scared and stunned. Residents described it as “infuriating” and “incredibly unsettling” and said the community was “on edge.”
“I mean, what if they had decided to target our water, or our gas?” someone asked. “Were we just sitting ducks?”
The fear of attacks on the U.S. power grid is not new, according to The Associated Press. A January report from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security warned that domestic extremists “have developed credible, specific plans to attack electricity infrastructure since at least 2020.”
Federal, state and local authorities — including the FBI — continue to investigate the attack as a criminal act, though no suspect or motive has been named yet. At a press conference Monday, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper declined to say whether the attack was being explored as an act of domestic terrorism, but said officials are “leaving no stone unturned” in their investigation.
“Protecting critical infrastructure like our power system must be a top priority,” Cooper told reporters. “This kind of attack raises a new level of threat.”
In order for an act to meet the FBI’s definition of terrorism, it must occur in pursuit of some ideological or political objective. And without knowing who did this or why, we can’t say for sure if that’s the case. But it certainly has instilled a sense of terror — and not just for the people who live there.
“It’s just a phenomenon we’re not accustomed to in this country, someone attacking our backbone infrastructure,” state Sen. Tom McInnis, whose district includes Moore County, told me. “The person who did this, I’m sure they’ve got some connections with the community. They’re punishing their own folks, innocent folks who don’t have a dog in the fight.”
Whatever the precise motive might be, the attack has unsettled a community that doesn’t understand why one of its members might attack everyone else this way. It’s also unsettled people near and far who wonder if this incident is not only an attack on infrastructure, but another attack on our way of life during an era in which so much seems under threat.
This story was originally published December 6, 2022 at 2:58 PM.
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