Kris Alexander at Danger Room has a short report and incisive analysis of these attacks, which PEMEX (Mexico’s oil exporting entity) claims will require hundreds of millions of dollars in repairs. PEMEX also claims – in my view, not plausibly – that it won’t cause disruptions in exports (and to United States imports).

Photo by Pablo Spencer of the Associated Press.

Flames were visible at least six miles away. Thousands of people were evacuated; two women died of heart attacks.

Mexican authorities told the Associated Press that a note from a leftist group was found next to at least one unexploded device.

From Kris Alexander’s piece in Wired.com’s Danger Room

:

Mexico supplies much of US oil and gas imports. Are higher gas prices on the way? Pemex, Mexico’s state-run oil company, claims that the attacks haven’t disrupted export supplies, but will cost hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. With the U.S. economy already on shaky ground because of the sub-prime loan crisis, another such attack that did actually disrupt export oil supplies could have a direct economic impact on the U.S.

Counter-terrorism expert John Robb sees both attacks as a particularily good systempunkt — a point where a series of attacks on key nodes will cause the collapse of the entire system, essentially effects-based operations on the cheap. A few hundred dollars spent on explosives causes millions in damage.

It’s not clear from the underlying Associated Press report, published on MSNBC, whether or not the pipelines are underground or aboveground. Our concern about that detail is that we’re still working up the learning curve in trying to understand the risk of petroleum pipelines. (The “editorial offices” of Popular Logistics are in a roughly .75 square mile area which contain four underground petroleum lines, about which we presently know far too little).