kaboom!, or had planes crash on them. In the past week, more accidents have occurred, the FBI
...Formerly one of the world's premier criminal investigation organizations, something for a nation to be proud of. Now it's a political arm of the Deep State oligarchy that is willing to trump up charges, suppress evidence, or take out insurance policies come election time...has issued a warning, possible motives have emerged, and one company offered a rather implausible explanation for the destruction of their facility. At this point, we still have more questions than answers.
Now the fact-checkers have come out in force, so we know there’s nothing to worry about. Right?
To be crystal clear: no pattern has yet emerged. The incidents still appear random. Nobody has produced a connection between all these incidents.
There are just a LOT of them, and they’re continuing.
The FBI has not made any mention of the fires, plane crashes, and explosions, but it has issued an alert about cyberattacks possibly timed to disrupt the grain harvest season:
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is informing Food and Agriculture (FA) sector partners that ransomware actors may be…. more likely to attack agricultural cooperatives during critical planting and harvest seasons, disrupting operations, causing financial loss, and negatively impacting the food supply chain. The FBI noted ransomware attacks during these seasons against six grain cooperatives during the fall 2021 harvest and two attacks in early 2022 that could impact the planting season by disrupting the supply of seeds and fertilizer.
It’s been a heckuva couple of weeks.
So is this a mere anomaly, or is something else going on?
According to the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), fire departments across the U.S. respond to a fire call once every 23 seconds. That’s an estimated total of 1,388,500 fires in 2020. In October 2021, the NFPA released a report showing shifting trends in fires in America over the past two years corresponding to the pandemic:
The National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) has released findings from its latest “Fire Loss in the U.S.” report, which shows that the total number of U.S. fires overall rose eight percent from 2019 to 2020. While some year-to-year fluctuation is normal, this increase reflects a far from typical year due to the pandemic.
“In 2020, more people were working and studying at home, commuting far less, and spending more time socializing outside,” said Lorraine Carli, vice president of Outreach and Advocacy at NFPA. “It appears that the fires followed these shifts.”
According to the report, which provides a broad overview of how, when, and where U.S. fires occur and their impact on life and property, residential structure fires rose five percent from 2019 to 2020, while non-residential structure fires fell eight percent. Highway vehicle fires fell nine percent; outside and other fires rose 17 percent. Civilian deaths and injuries fell six percent and eight percent, respectively.
“In 2020, more people were working and studying at home, commuting far less, and spending more time socializing outside,” said Lorraine Carli, vice president of Outreach and Advocacy at NFPA. “It appears that the fires followed these shifts.”
According to the report, which provides a broad overview of how, when, and where U.S. fires occur and their impact on life and property, residential structure fires rose five percent from 2019 to 2020, while non-residential structure fires fell eight percent. Highway vehicle fires fell nine percent; outside and other fires rose 17 percent. Civilian deaths and injuries fell six percent and eight percent, respectively.
What’s notable is the increase in residential fires and the decrease in commercial fires, as more workers stayed home during the pandemic. It follows, then, that as our economy is permitted to open back up by the public health officials who shut it down, certain forces are at play. More people are at more worksites, doing more things to cause fires there than they would have if they stayed home.
Other factors could also be at play, and nothing is conclusive. Despite rumors to the contrary, our economy and our supply chains have experienced widespread weaknesses for years. The economic pause, as it were, implemented by global public health agencies, caused much deeper fractures in supply chains as producers found it difficult to switch from wholesale to retail production and back again. Those broken supply chains, in turn, faced difficulty in meeting increased demand in some industries, while labor markets continue to struggle to find and pay enough workers. Could some of the fires be an easy way out for some facilities that have struggled and have lucrative insurance coverage? Could some of the incidents have resulted from year over year of deferred maintenance in industries with a thin profit margin?
Remember, on the other hand, those same public health officials who shut down our economy deemed workers at such facilities "essential," so no shutdown orders affected them. Plants didn’t simply lie around empty for two years, and personnel levels stayed mostly normal to handle maintenance issues that arose during that time. Lockdowns cannot explain the decrease in fires in 2019-20, nor the expected increase in 2022, because those lockdowns didn’t affect essential industries.
Is something more nefarious going on? Let’s remember back to May 2021 and what the Department of Energy calls the Colonial Pipeline Cyber Incident. The entire pipeline was shut down for a week, severely impacting the availability of airplane fuel and gasoline in several states in the Southeast. Colonial turned the pipeline back on, but only after paying Russian hackers $5 million in ransom.
Again, without jumping to conclusions, it seems many forces have begun to negatively affect our domestic food supply. This, on top of expected global food shortages as we progress through 2022. It would be wise to prepare accordingly.