CARTHAGE, N.C. (WNCN) – It looks like Moore County in North Carolina is not alone.
Each day CBS 17 is learning more and more about the incident in which 45,000 customers lost power after gunfire attacks hit different Moore County electrical substations, knocking out power through Carthage, Southern Pines, Pinehurst and Aberdeen.
Tuesday night, CBS 17 learned North Carolina isn’t the only state to see intentional attacks against critical infrastructure.
NewsNation, one of CBS 17’s partners under its parent company Nexstar, obtained a recent federal law enforcement memo describing similar situations across the U.S.
The memo specifically names Oregon and Washington as experiencing “physical attacks on substations using handtools, arson, firearms and metal chains possibly in response to an online call for attacks on critical infrastructure.”
North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper called Saturday night’s outage a “criminal attack.”
Moore County Sheriff Ronnie Fields agreed, saying, “The individual that [did] the damage knew exactly what they were doing to cause the damage and cause the outage that they did.”
The federal memo also said, “In recent attacks, criminal actors bypassed security fences by cutting the fence links, lighting nearby fires, shooting equipment from a distance or throwing objects over the fence and on to equipment.”
The targeted attack has homeland security experts not ruling the actions out as domestic terrorism, too.
The attack also came just a few days after the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security issued a bulletin to law enforcement noting that “The United States remains in a heightened threat environment.”
The memo obtained by NewsNation further said “…to cause widespread power failures with the potential impact of social disruption and violent anti-government criminal activity…”.
NewsNation is expected to release more information after 11 p.m. eastern.
Michael Hyland contributed to this article.