subsea infrastructure vulnerability

[Oldgreybeard]

I would think forensics should be able to work out in a week or two whether it was an internal or external explosion which would narrow down the method of attack.

I would hope so, but that might not be easy. The pipelines were pressurised to over 100 bar when the explosions occurred, so it's quite possible that an external explosion (say detcord or similar wrapped around the pipe) might look like an internal one, as the pipe bursts. 1500psi is a fair old pressure, and still a differential pressure of close to 1400psi at the depth of the pipe (it's no deeper than 100m along most of its length). My guess is that this would be enough to splay the ends of the fractured pipe outwards and blow debris some distance, even from an external blast.

I had been wondering if these blasts were trials of a technique, given that there seem to have been four separate blast locations, two on each pipeline. Might sound a bit wacky, but neither of these pipelines was likely to be used for some time, if ever. As such, they could be viewed as candidates to test ways to blow up pipelines without the perpetrator being proven.

The method in this madness is that this then turns pipelines into covert weapon delivery systems. An "accidental" pipeline explosion within Ukraine, or even within Slovakia, Hungary or Poland, that couldn't be proved to have been caused by a particular state, could be another useful weapon to have.

[nowty]

There are 4 pipe lines, 2 for Nordstream 1, and 2 for Nordstream 2.

It seems that one pipe for Nordstream 2 is still intact, maybe with intent or maybe the last one did not go off and evidence is there to be found.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy ... 022-09-28/

[nowty]

Quite a balanced "whodunnit" youtube video another Camelotier sent me today.

As an aside, my Energy Trader friend, shocked me this weekend saying he and all his colleagues are convinced its America who's behind it.

There is a bit in the video (3:15 to 3:30) which puts credence to Joeboys's theory that it could be done very simply, so unless specific evidence comes to light, it could be one of those mystery's that never get solved.

[Mr Gus]

This is the biggest opportunity for america to break the back of a big foe of 70 odd years, too good to pass up & no u.s. deaths from feet on the ground.

How big a takedown of russia as a land is yet to be seen, the cost of rebuild absorbed by the common populace & older gen communist brainwashed types are plentiful, enough to cause trouble, ..personally they ought be paying recompense to all govts for the crazy prices we are all enduring, theyve set the worlds economy on fire.

[SafetyThird]

It wouldn't surprise me at all if there weren't quite a few fat envelopes being handed out when Germany, Italy and The Netherlands made the decision to become so heavily reliant on gas from a single source. Big business tends to operate like that anyway, and the oil and gas industries are, perhaps, more adept at "smoothing the course of negotiations" then many other industries.

I had to go and look at a job in Nigeria many years ago, inside a military compound in the north of the country. The British Embassy recommended a "facilitator" to look after the two of us and smooth the way. This "facilitator" normally worked for the oil industry there. He met us at the airport, with kalashinkov casually slung over his shoulder, and his first good deed was his colleague running down the road and bashing up the thief that had taken one of our bags, right outside the terminal.

Throughout our time there, everywhere we went (except the hotel and the embassy) our path was smoothed with brown paper wrapped "bricks". I assume these were bundles of US dollars. We couldn't even get into the military base where were were supposed to be working without a senior officer being paid off. Most terrifying place I've ever been, and I have absolutely no desire to return there. Pity, as the people we met away from officialdom were great.

Nigeria is an absolute trip, worked there for years, loved it. A proper, frontier, oilfield country.
A shame about the corruption, violence & pollution though. It was always an adrenaline blast to be there. I was fortunate to work all up and down the West Coast of Africa in my 30's. Nigeria was the stand out.

I did several years in west Africa during the mid 90's, mostly Nigeria along with Angola and the Congo. Yeah, it was certainly a trip and you develop and interestingly thick skin. Bribery, or Dash, is just part of the daily way of life as is dealing with people pointing loaded guns at your face. We used to have what was termed the '100 yard dash' at the airport getting out. you had to know who to 'dash' along the way to ensure you made it to your plane and not run out of suitable dash before you made it to the boarding ramp. Made it a bit of a game watching your colleagues and how each one dealt with the situation.

If you tell people the shit that happened to us, it just sounds too far fetched to be true but honestly, I couldn't have made up the sort of stuff that happened to us on every hitch out there. It takes a certain sort of person to manage that stuff and many would do one hitch and refuse to go back. It changes you and, while I wouldn't want to go through it again, I have some amazing, along with a few frankly terrifying ones, memories from my time out there that I genuinely treasure. It's like no-where else in the world.

Oh and the nights ashore in the dockside bars, frankly you could make several movies out of those experiences

[Oldgreybeard]

More on this here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-63297085

This still (taken from the video in the link above) shows an extremely clean cut around the pipeline:

Pipeline.jpg (42.57 KiB) Viewed 1167 times

I've seen cuts like that before, after pipes have been severed with det cord wrapped around them. There are also suggestions that Russia routinely fits remote destruction devices to major infrastructure projects. Demolition charges have apparently been found embedded in bridges at Russian borders, for example.

Looking at those images I strongly suspect that the pipe was ruptured by some sort of charge wrapped around it, possibly embedded within the concrete weight coat. This would be pretty easy to do during manufacture of the pipe sections and could well be undetectable when the pipeline is being laid. Very easy to use an inductive coupling system so that a sabotage team could just place a coupler over the location of the charge and initiate it, with some sort of timer.

[smegal]

Just to hit the point home. Damaged cable leaves Shetland cut off from mainland

Communications to Shetland have been completely shut down after a subsea cable was damaged.

Police have declared a major incident after the south subsea cable between the islands and the mainland was cut.

The force said phones, internet and computers were not usable and that officers were patrolling to try to reassure residents.

Repairs to another cable connecting Shetland and Faroe are ongoing after it was damaged last week.

BT Openreach has been contacted for a response.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland- ... d-63326102

[Oldgreybeard]

There was an episode of the TV series "Warship" a few months ago, filmed before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where they were tracking a Russian submarine that seemed intent on sabotaging an undersea cable up towards the Arctic. Seems that Russia have some specially adapted submarines designed to sabotage undersea cables.

[Stinsy]

It seems to be a very poorly designed system.

Surely the phones should work for calls from one property on the island to another? Surely there'd be a backup satellite/microwave connection even if this has much diminished capacity...

[Oldgreybeard]

It seems to be a very poorly designed system.

Surely the phones should work for calls from one property on the island to another? Surely there'd be a backup satellite/microwave connection even if this has much diminished capacity...

Sadly the system relies on comms being centrally handled, the phone masts don't have the capability to manage the network, they offload that to a main server somewhere else. In this case it seems that for some of the phone networks that have gone down those servers are on the mainland somewhere, may well not even be in the UK for some of the phone networks.

IIRC, there is a backup system that may allow 999 calls to work using a peer to peer system, something to do with an agreement that all networks will handle 999 calls irrespective of whether a handset has a SIM for that network.