The First Domino

In December 2022, attackers breached the gates of two Duke Energy substations in Moore County, North Carolina, and opened fire on the equipment inside. Roughly 45,000 customers lost power for days. Weeks earlier, intruders had cut the perimeter fence at a substation near Clackamas, Oregon.

Here's the part that matters: the fence was never the target. The grid is an interdependent network, and when one substation drops, its load is forced onto neighbours — the textbook setup for a cascading outage. A single breached perimeter can ripple outward into a regional blackout.

Which reframes what a fence is for. It isn't decoration; it's the first link in a chain, and a perimeter is only as strong as its weakest fixing. Gates, hinges and access panels that resist quick removal buy the minutes that stop a breach from becoming a cascade.