Posted on 09/08/2011 10:30:28 PM PDT by americanophile
SAN DIEGO (AP) A major power outage knocked out electricity to up to 5 million people in California, Arizona and Mexico on Thursday, bringing San Diego and Tijuana to a standstill and leaving people sweltering in the late-summer heat in the surrounding desert.
Two nuclear reactors were offline after losing electricity, but officials said there was no danger to the public or workers.
San Diego bore the brunt of the blackout that started shortly before 4 p.m. PDT (7 p.m. EDT, 2300 GMT); most of the eighth-largest U.S. city was darkened. All outgoing flights from San Diego's Lindbergh Field were grounded and police stations were using generators to accept emergency calls across the area.
Parts of Orange County regained power Thursday evening, but officials said most people would remain in the dark through the night.
The outage was likely caused by an employee removing a piece of monitoring equipment that was causing problems at a power substation in southwest Arizona, officials said. The power loss should have been limited to the Yuma, Arizona, area. The power company, Arizona Public Service, was investigating why the outage wasn't contained.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
What would happen if our power grid was hit by terrorism? The failure would take longer to fix. Or, are we being given a cover story for what really happened . . .
“Life is good.”
Your description sounds wonderful. I’m glad you turned your lemons into lemonade. If everyone could do as you did the world would be a much happier place.
They should make a comedy movie about this = some stupid cable-guy dicking around and pulling the wrong lever”)))
“I noted that the outage knocked 2 nuke stations offline. I have to wonder why the nuke stations cannot continue to deliver power without outside power coming in? Can they not use some of their own generated power to maintain whatever equipment needs it (presumably transmission/transformer systems)?”
For safe shutdown/cool down, a nuke needs to have a reliable, independent source of electricity from the outside. IF that source is interrupted for any reason, by Federal regs, they need to declare an “unusual event” and commence a shutdown. They also have huge emergency diesel-powered generators available to them to ensure a source of power for shutdown/cool down should they loose that outside source. Some of these regs were the outcome of Three Mile Island. They take no chances with the nukes. Anything unusual for any duration, they’re probably coming down.
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