Why bother with trying to find a viaduct, that may or may not exist, when electrical substations, are all over the place and the only thing guarding them is perhaps a 6 ft chainlink fence only a few feet away from the transformers?
A few feet to a couple of yards of chain or metal cable at 3 am could paralyze an entire city and cause economic and social chaos ...... For less than $10 worth of equipment, one could cause; no street lights, stop lights, even burglar alarms, no power for pumps to move the water, and the like.
If several are hit at the same time around the town / city, it could knock out the grid for the entire city, and maybe beyond....think about the last New York power outage......not a pretty picture.
Greg H.
Yea, I've always thought the terrorists were kinda dumb for going after people at all. A thousand little hornet stings, screwing up everyday life, would be a lot more terroristic than some of the suicide things they do. Would be a lot safer for them too....he who fights and runs away....
On the note of the viaduct...we have some major water pipes in the NW that woudl be incredibly easy targets. 36"+ in diameter and going up and down steep hills (and exposed in places, not underground). Most are quite old and are tarred and wrapped wooden things. Without much nasty explosive, you could blow one at the bottom of a steep hill and the amount of water and the pressure do some real damage. A couple of years ago, one broke in just such a place...washed out a section of road, took a couple of days to replace..just a thorn in the side. With little coordination, you could really make things a pain for the public.
Hey...just remembered that Dubya's crew had hired the hollywood guys to th A very small container of Anaerobic bacteria could if added to a water supply not at the lake but at the pumping or testing station could do
nasty
things, as could thyphus etc .
IMO, Ian's scenario is the most likely to succeed of the ones mentioned. At the resevoir end, the volume of water as well as any testing done in treatment would make that the least likely. At the pump/treatment plant, security would be a big factor in whether or not that's the viable option. After it leaves the plant and is somewhere in the distribution system is where a saboteur would have privacy, time, and best chance of the agent being unnoticed, until too late.
I have to say I think it's probably most easy and effective to blow the main viaducts with explosives. Look what's been done with human and vehicle bombs, not to mention RPG's. A fairly well-planned operation could bring a city/cities down quick. Think how tough it was to get water to significant numbers of people in the wake of the hurricane. Try that on the LA area in the summertime.
What else can we come up with?
Capn