Monday, February 22, 2021

Remnant: Second attack

Note from the Management. Sorry for the confusion. I am transitioning from one laptop to another because one of the Shift keys puked. the story-line got scrambled as a result. Your patience is appreciated.

Stephanie Stewart rode in the back of the beat-up work van. It has slowed to 20 miles per hour and Stephanie was spooling out the jelly-fish. Stephanie and Ted made countless test runs working out a system.

More than 20 miles per hour battered the balloons to the point failure was likely. Ted insisted on using 95 gallon garbage liners since they were harder to track than weather balloons. The cluster of three bags had a gross buoyancy of 1.5 pounds. There wasn’t much to work with.

GLF did what they could to minimize weight. They used clear 1.5 mil plastic bags. One thing that really torqued them off was that the government refused to credit them with the attacks. They counter-measured by adding literature in every balloon. Surely some of them would fall into the hands of folks who would post the truth on social media.

Another complication involved the balloons getting trapped in the backwash that followed the van. That was resolved with a drag-weight and a quick-release on a fifty-foot trip-line.

The countless practice runs were paying off as Stephanie filled and released the jelly-fish on time and at exactly the right locations.

In a few minutes the Susquehanna Nuclear Power plants were going to shut down with big booms and sparks and take 2600 MW of capacity off-line. If all went according to the time-table, Stephanie and Ted would have ditched the van and be traveling west on motorcycles.

The attacks were more heavily biased toward attacks on the electrical transmission line than gas lines.

GLF was scaling up the attacks on the powerlines because garbage bags, kite string and fine conductors were commodities that were easy to obtain without leaving a documentation trail. The high explosives needed to breach pipelines were a thousand times more tightly controlled.

GLF’s first attacks targeted regions that were easy to isolate.

GLF’s second series of attacks targeted net electricity-exporting states: Pennsylvania, Alabama, Illinois, West Virginia, Wyoming and Arizona. It should be no surprise that nuclear power plants were the first ones targeted.

They also targeted Interstate natural gas lines feeding out of the Marcellus Shale formations. They targeted lines from Canada. They targeted five lines entering Illinois where they crossed the Mississippi river, five in Indiana at the Ohio River. About the same number of pipelines were severed in eastern Kentucky at the Big Sandy River.

The previous attacks impacted 20 million in Michigan and New England and 40 million in California.

The second wave of attacks freshened up the denial-of-service for that sixty million people and added another one-hundred-fifty million citizens.

The biggest difference, though, was that now New York City was impacted. Suddenly, the News Media noticed.

Next

7 comments:

  1. Kind of a mixed message with this one, you jumped from one group to nationwide after saying explosives were hard to get, yet pipelines got blown.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Good point.

      I wish I had a crisp resolution.

      The bad-guys are likely to have some mix going forward. Wires are faster to repair but easier to sever. Gas lines are harder to sever but impact is more macro and they are slower to repair.

      Everybody is feeling their way forward and the players in the situation are co-evolving.

      Delete
  2. Flammable gasses (such as oxy/acetylene) and trash bags don't mix. The static will get ya, ask me how I know. Boys will be boys.

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  3. Could find its way into the story line. Would be spectacular in the back of a van.

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  4. Would Mylar ribbon be a useful conductor in place of string or perhaps spectra stainless steel wire infused thread? (They make cut proof gloves outta it.)
    Asking for a friend...

    ReplyDelete
  5. Took a day for "shiftless computer" to register. Shame.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Took a day for "shiftless computer" to register. Shame.

    ReplyDelete

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