Snipers Coordinated An Attack On The Power Grid, But Why?

Last April, unknown attackers shot up 17 transformers at a California substation in what the then-chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Jon Wellinghoff called "the most significant incident of domestic terrorism involving the grid that has ever occurred" in this country.

Though news reports about the incident at the Metcalf transmission facility came out in April, The Wall Street Journal just pieced together the larger story of the attack together from regulatory filings and outside reporting.

Various power-grid facilities are vandalized or damaged regularly, but the details of this particular attack are startling.

Before the attackers opened fire on the transformers, fiber optic lines running nearby were cut.