For 14 years, a crazy eco-terrorist group has attacked Berlin's energy infrastructure with impunity. Authorities have done nothing despite enormous damages and wide-scale disruption. What is going on?

The latest attack by the "Volcano Group" has caused one of the largest sustained blackouts in the history of the Federal Republic.

This picture depicts the Lichterfelde power plant in Berlin:

In the foreground, you’ll notice a suspension bridge carrying power cables across the waters of the Treptow canal. These cables bring power to hundreds of thousands of people in southwest Berlin.

Or at least, they used to.

Early Saturday morning, lunatic eco-terrorists from the so-called “Volcano Group” attacked these cables with pyrotechnic charges, cutting off power to 45,000 households and thousands of commercial customers in the Zehlendorf, Nikolassee, Lichterfelde and Wannsee neighbourhoods of Berlin. The attack came at the start of an arctic coldsnap and unusually low, freezing temperatures. Despite these dire conditions, authorities plead that they cannot fully restore power to many customers until Thursday – five days after the attack.

Blackouts like this represent much more than an inconvenience. So many systems depend upon electricity that the sudden loss of power can easily represent a life-threatening disaster, particularly when that loss happens in the middle of winter. Without electricity, most buildings cannot be heated, and in this case thousands of structures will suffer broken pipes, water damage and mould infestations. The added stress of the cold and disruptive emergency measures will surely kill some older and more vulnerable people, even if the press never associates their deaths with this sabotage. And to all of that comes the fact that, as people are abandoning their unheated homes for hotels, entire neighbourhoods have emptied out – opening opportunities for looters to attack in total darkness because there are no street lights.

This is a huge multifaceted disaster and there are a lot of angles this post could take. The late and slack-jawed political response, for example, has been a thing to behold. Then there are the weak and revealing attempts by certain elements of the punditocracy to blame this attack on Russia; the sparing, almost reluctant media coverage; and the strangely slow pace of repairs in light of the overwhelming urgency.

Here, however, I want to ask how this was allowed to happen in the first place. It looks for all the world like authorities have allowed the eco-terrorists responsible for this assault on Berlin’s power grid to operate with impunity for years and years. I want to ask how it is that our aggressive domestic intelligence agencies, which have resources to spy on tens of thousands of alleged “right-wing extremists,” have so little curiosity about the saboteurs of the Volcano Group and claim to know basically nothing about them despite the years of destruction they’ve wrought. I want to ask why, when authorities did stumble upon probable Volcano Group saboteurs a few years ago, Berlin judges were so quick to let them go.

All of this is very strange; all of it really gets the noggin joggin, as the kids say.