RALEIGH— Duke Energy and Randolph Electric Membership Cooperative completed repairs on Wednesday, Dec. 7 on electric substation equipment damaged in shootings that made international news in Moore County.
Authorities have said the outages began shortly after 7 p.m. on Saturday, Dec. 3 after one or more people drove up to two substations, breached the gates and opened fire on them.
Police have not released a motive or said what kind of gun was used in the attack. But Moore County Sheriff Ronnie Fields told reporters Monday that whoever was responsible “knew exactly what they were doing to … cause the outage that they did.”
The FBI posted a notice Wednesday seeking information related to the investigation.
North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper announced that the state, county and Duke Energy were offering combined rewards of up to $75,000 total for information leading to an arrest and conviction in the attack.
“An attack on our critical infrastructure will not be tolerated,” Cooper said in a statement.
Meanwhile, the Moore County outage brought renewed attention to a substation that was vandalized last month in another county about 150 miles east. A substation near Maysville in Jones County was damaged by vandals Nov. 11, causing outages to 12,000 customers that lasted about two hours, according to the Carteret-Craven Electric Cooperative. The news was first reported statewide in the Dec. 7 edition of North State Journal.
The vandals damaged transformers and caused them to leak coolant oil, the cooperative said in a news release. It was not immediately clear how the damage was done or if there is a link to the Moore County outages.
