Vandalism Yet Another Risk for Utility Emergency Planners

There is little doubt that when it comes to emergency preparedness in the utility industry, vandalism is probably not the first thing that comes to mind.  We generally first think about natural disasters like hurricanes, tornado patterns, and even earthquakes depending on where you’re located, and then, secondarily, manmade threats like system hacking and terrorism.

But unfortunately, based on recent events, it looks like vandalism should become a little more top of mind.

Vandalism Leads to Mass Gas Outage in Colorado

On 12/26/20, less than two weeks ago as of the date of this writing, Black Hills Energy in Colorado suffered the consequences of vandalism.  The perpetrators intentionally interrupted gas service at three locations, impacting about 3,500 households in Pitkin County and Aspen, Colorado.

The vandalism occurred on a Saturday night, and many of the impacted households did not have service resumed until the middle of the following week. Gas service restoration is a time consuming process because you have to first perform a full system shutdown, and then go to each service address to purge the line and safely relight all the gas appliances.

The vandalism occurred during cold, snowy weather, forcing Black Hills to provide approximately 4,000 space heaters to customers.  There is a criminal investigation underway but, as of the time of this writing, no suspects.  The only clue is that the words “Earth First” were written at one of the sites, similar to graffiti.

The moral of the story is that vandalism should be added to the disaster scenarios you plan for.  And now is the time to do it, because it sure seems like shenanigans like this are destined to increase going forward thanks to civil, political and social-economic strife that is becoming more prominent.

Bottom line – think about ways to mitigate the impact of vandalism on utility infrastructure, and incorporate these mitigation tactics into emergency plans ASAP.