IED Found At Dam Should Raise Serious Questions About Domestic Security Threats At Home

This story holds both local and national implications. It’s interesting to the locals because someone put a bomb in an important dam. At the national scale, it highlights our own domestic vulnerabilities.

The local story: a makeshift bomb was found in a dam…

Just the facts:

The Gulf Coast Regional Maritime Response and Render-Safe Team retrieved and detonated an improvised explosive device found underwater at the Converse Reservoir dam, the Mobile Area Water and Sewer System announced Tuesday.

The multi-agency effort included the Mobile County Sheriff’s Office, FBI Bomb Squad, Mobile Police Department Explosive Ordinance Detail, ALEA Bomb Squad and the Daphne Search and Rescue Team.

Divers surveying the dam for routine repair and maintenance located the grenade-type IED. MAWSS alerted the Mobile County Sheriff’s Office, which coordinated the multi-agency response for analysis, retrieval and safe demolition.

“Our top priority is keeping your drinking water safe,” said Bud McCrory, MAWSS director. “This is an unprecedented threat, and we are fortunate that this device was discovered before it could cause serious damage to our water supply or harm to individuals. We are grateful for the professionalism and competency of our law enforcement partners – as well as the quick thinking of our contractors and divers – in identifying this device and safely destroying it.”

That story concluded with a very alarming observation. Homeland security was alerted and called in because…

*wait for it*

…the federal government as designated both this dam and the reservoir as ‘critical federal infrastructure’.

I’m old enough to remember when the whole world freaked out when we were afraid computers couldn’t calculate for Y2K (kids can ask their chatbots, or their grandparents). Planes might fall out of the sky, or — somehow more insidious — out water systems could be contaminated and start killing people.

That was a computer glitch that never happened.

This is a makeshift bomb, right here in the real world. Right under our noses.
A threat none of us even knew to think about, let alone look for.

The national implications

We KNOW we have hostile nations ready to pull the trigger on threats to destroy our infrastructure and create catastrophic emergencies. From Katrina, to Superstorm Sandy, to Hurricane Helene, we know that flooding can create absolute havoc from which it takes a long time to recover.

It’s time we prioritize our vulnerabilities

In the Biden years, the people flooding over were heavily skewed to the ‘men of fighting age’ demographic. In light of the many known terrorists to have slipped into the country, on top of the countless getaways, or people  who came in under false pretences, the country is swarming with possible threats to the country.

From Cosplay commies echoing the ‘run with capitalist blood’ slogans they hear from their favorite Twitch streamers, to jaded nihilists wanting to burn it all down, and actual agents working in the employ of foreign governments (we’ve had off-the-books bio-labs, shadow ‘police’ departments for China, mayors admitting to being CCP spies), true-believer jihadis or murderous copycats co-opting their cause, and no end of foreign ‘tourists’ wandering into secure areas with dubious intent.

It doesn’t take much to create a little chaos. Or even a lot.

A single flame wiped out the Palisades. (And they were unprepared to fight it.) Despite what the Television might tell you, a surprising number of forest fires are traced back to arson.

A relative handful of snipers hit a substation in California, and almost succeeded in creating a significant power loss in the region.

In 1859, the Carrington Event wiped out telegraph lines and equipment, as it carried a surge from a solar flare. Should our modern power grid be overwhelmed by such a surge — naturally occurring, or orchestrated by an enemy — the loss of our power grid could functionally knock us out for a very long time.

We’ve seen how our own cyber attacks can paralyze our enemies, and we feel pretty good about that, until we remember that China (and probably other sophisticated international rivals) have been found to have infiltrated some of our most sensitive government and corporate systems. Some have been found to be laying essentially dormant and inactive for months or years, ready for a signal to activate.

We have foreign billionaires exploiting surrogate births and birthright citizenship in a long-game effort to infiltrate our political process.

Hostile nations have large ownership stakes not just in major companies, but more subtly, is meat processing, farmland, and upstream supply chain components for major industrial supplies.

And that’s not even opening the Pandora’s box of industrial espionage, IP theft or the quarter-million Chinese students studying in American universities in any given year.

We have a wide range of threats that we SHOULD be taking seriously.

Instead, Schumer has refused to fund Homeland Security because ICE is threatening Democrat dreams of permanent One-Party rule.

Dems has chosen demonizing Elected Americans who disagree with them on policy above DEFENDING the country from threats that actively mean us harm.

Hell of a choice to make when the rest of us are trying to commemorate 250 years of American greatness.