A 50-year-old Canadian man was sentenced to 25 years in federal prison for the destruction of two energy facilities in North Dakota and South Dakota in 2023 and 2022, respectively.
Cameron Monte Smith was in the U.S. illegally on May 13, 2023, when he fired rounds from a high-powered rifle into the Wheelock electric substation near Ray, North Dakota. The substation is operated by Basin Electric and Class C member Mountrail-Williams Electric Cooperative. A year prior, in July 2022, Smith fired shots at a transformer and pump station of the Keystone Pipeline near Carpenter, South Dakota.
Mountrail-Williams initially responded to the damage but soon informed law enforcement and management at Basin Electric. Daniel Graham, Basin Electric’s chief security and compliance officer, said while more bullets had hit Mountrail-Williams equipment, Basin Electric’s 115-/230-kilovolt (kV) transformer received the most damage. Derik Johnson, manager of Basin Electric’s Transmission Systems Maintenance (TSM), called it “major damage.” Bullets from Smith’s rifle hit the transformer’s radiators, causing oil leaks, and other ancillary equipment, Johnson said.
Smith’s actions resulted in the disruption of electrical services to hundreds of customers and caused $1.8 million in damages. They also had the potential to significantly impact the regional electric grid, which includes the bulk electric system around northwest North Dakota. Johnson said the damage caused Basin Electric to implement its incident response plan.
In assessing the damage and finding solutions to get power back to customers, Johnson said the TSM team had to “make some decisions quickly,” such as whether to repair the transformer on site or move a spare transformer to the location. “Unfortunately,” he said, “the timeline for repairs was too long and we pulled the trigger on moving a spare into place.”
Moving a power transformer is no easy task, as they can weigh more than 200,000 pounds; nor are they “one size fits all,” Johnson explained. In the end, “many different areas of Basin Electric worked together under a tight timeframe to get the spare transformer moved into place and connected.” The team replaced and re-energized the Wheelock transformer by July 2023.
Graham said while the unprovoked incident by Smith caused a heavy price tag, it also tested cooperative preparedness and coordination with other cooperatives and agencies, and helped strengthen grid resilience policies and planning.
“Individually, sites are fragile and cannot be sufficiently protected from a determined attacker. As a collective, we can be more than robust; we can be antifragile,” Graham said. Working together, including being prepared for the unexpected, allows “industry and law enforcement to better identify precursors and monitor communications to prevent incidents from happening.”
Smith pleaded guilty in September 2024 to damaging the structures. On March 10, he was sentenced in U.S. District Court to 25 years in federal prison, 12.5 years for each count, and ordered to pay more than $2 million in restitution. Smith will also receive three years of supervised probation once his sentence is complete.
The case was investigated by multiple agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; and Williams County Sheriff’s Office.
