The Hook reports that several structurally critical bolts were removed from a major 80ft+ electric tower over a Western Albemarle county neighborhood.
Three nuts were completely removed from one tower and eight nuts were loosened on a another, according to Albemarle detective Phil Giles. Although the two towers were damaged, Giles says they are “not in danger of fallingâ€â€“ that is, unless more nuts are removed.
What do you think? That’s pretty scary stuff if you ask me. Look for it on the evening news with TERRORISM ATTEMPT in the headline.
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Tagged as: Albemarle County, Central Virginia, Charlottesville, Crime, Police, Pranks, Questions
I’d have to say ’stupid kids’ at this point.
With any luck the next time they try it they will get fried.
There’s a healthy attitude… Let us wish harm on immature youth, for we were perfect as children and never vandalized anything. I think we should bobby trap the towers so the kids will light on fire before any bolts can be loosened.
we could even booby trap it if the bobby trapping doesn’t work.
I was a dumb kid once, but “climbing tower to loosen bolts in the middle of God knows where” for some reason never made my list of things to do.
Nuts? I’ll bet its those squirrels again.
Why do they hate our freedoms?
I always think its funny when the FBI starts looking for perpetrators and can’t find ‘em, then weeks later some kid comes forward and says “i did it, but i was just screwing around”.
haha love the puns guys
Why wasn’t this post headlined “DEEZ NUTZ”?
Loosening bolts with the hope that the tower might fall at some unspecified day in the future doesn’t sound like a kid prank to me. Kids want instant gratification. They want to see an explosion or reaction right away, not later when they’ll probably be in school or asleep and miss all the excitement.
Unless these are children terrorists. A deadly combination of american hatred and parental distain. It’s a tricky mind to try to understand.
Maybe they just needed the nuts … you know for some school project
we’ll see if that mindset holds up when some “immature youth” drops a 50 lbs. rock on your windshield from an overpass.
My somewhat facetious hypothesis: it’s the work of eco-terrorists protesting unclean power, or electrical towers covering the landscape, or wasteful use of electricity.
patience:
I guess it might not be too far fetched?
Keep in mind that an ELF ‘vigilante’ originating from Charlottesville was arrested just a year or so ago.
Apparently, there was also some suspected ELF involvement in the Hollymead/Target area development:
http://www.readthehook.com/Stories/2004/02/19/newsEcoterrorismElfquottar.html
err…. not involved in the development, but rather the vandalism of the development process.
It is interesting they removed structurally significant bolts. You may wish to file this under even Paranoids have enemies but this may have been a test to see how regularly such items are checked. Writing it off to “those meddling kids” seems a touch too easy since the action required tools to accomplish (or partially accomplish) their task.
Environmental terrorism, ecoterror, is real and the power lines have the beauty of a poorly protected, highly visable target that would have an impact on a significant number of people. Many of the ingedients for a strong terrorist play.
Quite healthy, thank you.
I’m just looking for some more Darwin Award nominees.
Donk, ELF’s methodology requires them to take credit for it as an “ELF” action and explain why it was done. There is requirement that no people or animals be harmed. At the time, i was confused at how their was someone sending anthrax to congress that they hadn’t caught, but somehow some kids commiting vandelism and acts of property damage were the FBI’s number one priority… It effectively served to water down the whole concept of the definition of terrorism.
It wasn’t long after that when all kinds of people were being called “Terrorists” including the ACLU. In fact, they CIA evidently compiled a massive file on a bunch of Quakers. What were they afraid of? Did they think they’d passively resist us to death? They even compiled a file on the “Radical Grannies”, who I’m sure were planning to kill us by slipping massive amounts of metamucil into the food supply.